Although cloud technology has been around for a few years, it wasn’t fully developed and commercialized until recently. Three major competitors have emerged in the cloud market; Apple, Google, and Amazon. These three companies seem to be taking the cloud world by storm and are attracting new customers left and right. Cloud services allow users to upload files to the “cloud” to be stored instead of on their devices.

They can then access the files from their mobile devices or computers. Apple provides users with their “iCloud” service while Google provides users with “Google Play” and Amazon has their “Cloud Drive”.

Google Play Review:

My personal favorite player in the Cloud industry has to be Google’s new Google Play. It has worked flawlessly for me thus far and has great deals every day. Popular albums and books are extremely cheap when on sale.

So what are the most useful aspects of clouds? They for one save users large amounts of space on their devices, especially mobile devices where space can be scarce. Clouds can also provide wireless syncing of contacts, email, and multimedia which is very convenient and eliminates the need for clumsy sync cables. Clouds allow access to your content from anywhere.

This especially comes in handy when you are away or need a document for business. You can simply log on to the nearest computer and download whatever you need, instantly. Another question users may ask is regarding the cost of these cloud services. Apple doesn’t charge extra for their iCloud service but they do require that you have updated Apple devices in order to use the service.

Google Play is a completely free service and can be accessed from any device or computer. It even lets users let their friends listen to their music for free! Amazon’s Cloud Drive service is free for the first 5gb of storage used and can also be accessed from any computer. There are many questions associated with this new cloud technology but the biggest question is how high will you go with the innovative cloud services.

Picking up an article over at computer weekly we take a look at the European level policy on cloud computing and wonder what is being done to push this technology into wider use.

Speaking at the Davos Economic Forum meeting over in Switzerland, Neelie Kroes, the woman in charge of Europe’s digital agenda has been discussing the option of having everyone involved in cloud computing to join in a harmonious partnership to bring the benefit of this technology to more people, businesses and governments throughout Europe and quicker.

The calls were for European local authorities, industry in general, cloud buyers and suppliers to create the partnership to effectively orchestrate the mass migration from hardware based processing, backup and file storage to the cloud based option on the grounds of scale, security and efficiency.

Kroes said:

“Cloud Computing will change our economy. It can bring significant productivity benefits to all, right through to the smallest companies, and also to individuals. It promises scalable, secure services for greater efficiency, greater flexibility, and lower cost,” she said.

But with issues such as standards, agreed certification, data protection, wide ranging legal issues between member states, and data kept in the cloud and interoperability, the currently slow progress is seemingly hampered by these issues, but why the need to push this technology so quickly.

Is the cloud really all that beneficial?

Let us face it the cloud is potentially very dangerous to any business, as it leaves more and more control of your data and communication in the hands of other corporations and governments and will be a significant cost positive to implement, with negligible gains in the short term.

So what will Kroes do to overcome these shared feelings towards the cloud?

With the barriers in question a rather vague answer was offered:

“Where these barriers exist, I am determined to overcome them,”

With the EC’s new rules regarding data protection on the regulatory side making some small progress, she did stress that these moves forward would include provision for cloud based storage legal issues.

“In the first phase, the Partnership will come up with common requirements for Cloud procurement. For this it will look at standards; it will look at security; it will look at ensuring competition, not lock-in. In the second phase, the Partnership will deliver proof of concept solutions for the common requirements, and in the third phase, reference implementations will be built,”

€10 million initial investment from the European Cloud Partnership:

Exactly what the suggested €10 million investment from the European Cloud Partnership aims to achieve I am unsure but it sounds like a pathetic amount of money to achieve such widespread aims as she has suggested.

Looking at the plan it appears that aiming small is the agenda to start with a plan which appears to be one of bringing the initial idea of procuring cloud computing technology to local government level throughout the EU who are all open ears to anything that can save money, yes it would appear that the Bilderberg group sure now how to steer policy from the outside in in very intriguing ways.

Talking of the strategies for the next year and beyond, Kroes states:

“We are already talking to potential partners and working on setting up this European Cloud Partnership. No doubt the concept will evolve as more details are fixed. These will be set out, together with other elements, in the European Cloud Computing Strategy later this year. A strategy as a whole to ensure Europe becomes not just Cloud-friendly, but Cloud-active,”

Questions still remain:

Speaking around the business community I sense that many business owners are very skeptical on cloud computing for the simple fear that it removes some control (albeit in the disguise of safety) from the owners of software, applications and data into a managed and paid for service where you are in less control of that very supply line that you need to run an effective business.

As a business owner what do you think to adopting cloud computing?

There are obvious benefits in some areas, but there seem to be some questions still remaining on the full extent adoption that should be considered.

So if standards and other areas of legal greyness were ironed out and more transparent would this help you in your decision to go fully cloud or partially cloud based as a business?

Discussing the article on computer weekly one commentator going by the name of Hogspace states that:

What rubbish is this, I wonder who set the guy up to say this. No company of mine will be using storage that isn’t 100% owned and controlled by me, Internet/Intranet connected or not.

Not sure as he read the article fully though as he is a she!

When CNET decide your device is worthy of an award, you know your hard work has paid off. And with news that CNET believe the Nokia Lumia 900 was the best smartphone that graced the CES 2012 show in Las Vegas we hope that the Finnish guys are more than happy with the new title.

Good news for Nokia = Good news for Microsoft?

No news is good news when life is dealing you a shitty hand, but when you are looking to get back in the mix, you want to know what is being said about you.

News from CES that the Nokia Lumia 900 has gone down a treat will be welcome affirmations for both technology firms that their chosen paths should pay off in the long term.

With the Nokia Lumia 900 rumoured to be arriving on AT&T in March with a rumored 18th of March tipped by many, it will be nice to see this device added to the already popular but app lacking Nokia Lumia 800.

So it looks like they may have cracked the egg that will bring both giants back into the land of the waking, smartphone wise.

But, they still need a good application marketplace in order to ensure that more people choose Windows when given a choice of Android or iOS.

I must say that I for one believe that the sleek Nokia Lumia series will be a serous contender in 2012, I just wish they had a good application marketplace that could compete with Apple and Android on scale and functionality, but things change and with Nokia and Microsoft’s drive to encourage more developers I think this may well see some serious growth after gaining accolades such as this one from CNET.

Nokia Lumia 900 AT&T March Release Date:

The Nokia Lumia 900 phone runs Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5. It is the biggest and fastest smartphone yet. And it will become available exclusively through AT&T in March.

With the Nokia Lumia coming to AT&T exclusively are you interested in going from your iOS device or Android smartphone over to Windows and Nokia?

If so why?

This Wednesday saw the arrival of the much anticipated tablet and smartphone application version of Onlive.

If you have not heard of this technology and service before, and you like your games, then you are in for a treat.

Essentially, the app will allow you to stream high bandwidth (quality) games from their own cloud servers directly onto your device. Now there are a number of benefits to this, which I will come to soon.

What is Onlive?

Firstly let us take a look at Onlive and see how it works.

This free application will stream games via Wi-Fi and 4G LTE, which will enable full HD gaming via low latency cloud streaming anywhere where you can pick up a 4G or Wi-Fi connection.

So what games are currently available, and how have they been adapted for the touch screen devices we are seeing grow in popularity?

Current titles that have had the Onlive mobile device treatment include:

LEGO Harry Potter, L.A. Noire, LEGO Batman, as well as some 25 other titles, this is set to increase as more and more people trial the totally free application.

So let us get on to the benefits, apart from being able to play really cool games!

In their own words:

“OnLive harnesses the power of the cloud to instantly deliver high-end games on demand over the Internet with the simplicity of streaming video, OnLive’s breakthrough cloud gaming technology has enabled gamers on PCs, Macs and TVs to instantly jump into console-quality games on demand, without discs or lengthy downloads, regardless of the performance of their local device. With today’s launch, gamers can experience the same instant-play, top-tier games on tablets and smartphones, despite the fact that these games require vastly higher performance than is achievable on a mobile device.”

As you can see, some of the issues I have raised relating to Battery life on the iPhone 4S and other devices should hopefully see some improvements if high end gaming is what is killing your device, though right now it is unlikely you will be too far from a power source if you are needing to be hooked up to Wi-Fi to currently use Onlive, so this benefit is partially negligible till 4G LTE is more readily accessible, then this benefit should start to really shine through.

Another great part of having an account with OnLive is that you will be able to stop your game on one device and then carry on playing where you left off on another device, which will actually be quite a useful bonus in this world of plenty when it comes to mobile powered “smart” devices.

Wireless controller option:

Another option that is coming soon, will be the ability to hook up a wireless controller purpose built for OnLive and mobile devices which utilises the company’s “exclusive adaptive wireless technology” and will search for the optimum wireless connection for your smartphone, tablet, PC, Mac, TV, Blu-Ray player etc.

“As always, any game purchased on one OnLive app device (TV, PC, Mac, tablet or mobile device) can be played instantly on any other OnLive app device with full cloud save game data intact, allowing users to start play on one device, and continue playing on any other device, whenever and wherever they want, OnLive’s cross-platform capability extends to multi-player gaming, enabling, for example, a tablet gamer to play with TV, PC, Mac and smartphone gamers.”

Android application to be released first:

The first app to be released will be the Android Onlive app, with other app stores taking a little longer to clear up any legal issues and general partner relationships.

This application is however just what mobile apps are all about when marketed right.

A totally free method of gaining access to a new technology that enhances what is currently on offer, with the full functionality provided to you in many ways that suit each person.

Here is how the payment part will work:

There will be an option to rent titles for 3 days, 5 days or gain a “full pass” which essentially means you have bought the game, or a pretty reasonable subscription service which gives you access to a huge growing library of games for $9.99 a month.

So which Smartphones and Tablets support the new application?

This is a preliminary list of mobile devices which will support the application and allow you to utilise the full gaming features that Onlive offers:

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Tablets:

• Acer Iconia Tab A500
• ASUS Eee Pad Transformer
• HTC Flyer
• HTC Jetstream
• Motorola Xoom
• Samsung Galaxy Tab
• Sony Tablet S
• Toshiba Thrive

[/arrowlist]

[arrowlist]

Smartphones

• Motorola Droid 2
• Motorola Droid X2
• Motorola DROID BIONIC 4G
• Motorola DROID RAZR 4G
• Motorola Photon 4G
• HTC EVO
• HTC Nexus One
• HTC Rezound 4G
• HTC Sensation
• HTC Sensation XL
• Samsung Galaxy S II 4G

[/arrowlist]

Let us know your thoughts once you have played around with the app!

Apple’s much anticipated spotify rival has finally arrived two weeks after its scheduled date for US subscriber sot enjoy.

Unfortunately for UK music lovers it seems that Apple are no closer to a date for launch but it is likely to be fairly soon once legal agreements have been sorted between publisher and owners of content.

What is iTunes match?

With MP3’s being a pretty poor approximation of a high quality CD music track, progress was always going to move toward bringing the high fidelity of a CD to the compressed version that we all love due to its very small size.

What iTunes match will do is take your existing (and sometimes dubious) record collection and then do two things:

[arrowlist]

• 1 – Replace all your tracks with a cloud based high quality track to stream at your leisure from the iTunes cloud.
• 2 – Legitimise the tracks that you may or may not have bought through iTunes or from your own CD’s.

[/arrowlist]

How can you stream your content?

The iTunes match service will run on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, Mac and PC devices, so you will be able to stream or download the tracks in your collection without having to manually sync to iTunes.

iTunes match cost?

Coming in at $24.99 for a full year the service seems quite reasonably priced especially if you have literally tens of thousands of tracks. For this you will get your entire collection offered to you via a 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free format with vastly improved quality over compressed MP3’s

In the process your music collection will also be “legitimised” even if you perhaps were not the true owner all along, this no doubt is why the UK music industry is taking so long to agree to terms.

If your track can not be found in the 20 million library at iTunes, then the technology will simply upload your existing track and use that.

It is not fair to compare the service to spotify as the iTunes service means you have to actually own the music in the first place, and is about quality not quantity, but it is reasonably priced and for what it offers (easy access to your tunes in a much more improved quality) it seems to be quite a fair price.

Google music beset by slow uploads:

With Google offering something close to iTunes match we wonder if Apple will ensure that speeds are better when uploading tracks than the poorly received Google music technology which is currently free and in Beta.