Amazon yesterday released their Cloud Drive and while it's not apparently very different to Microsoft's Skydrive or Google Apps file storage, is nonetheless a major step in the direction of cloud-based excellence. For full disclosure, I'm the author of the book Google Apps Express, and I'm frequently seen on other media ranting on about how much I like the cloud, in between of bouts of being disappointed that this isn't all happening more quickly. … more
Once again Amazon blazes a new trails for digital content. First was the Kindle and books have never been the same since. Buying a new book is now just a few keystrokes away and mere seconds before it is in your hands. Now we have Amazon's Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. User's get 5 FREE gigabytes of content storage in the Cloud Drive, and MP3s purchased (or free) from Amazon do not count towards this limit. Buy an album (can go as low as $.69) and get 20 GB of storage in a year long trial. … more
With Amazon offering free cloud storage for any music purchased through Amazon as well as 5GB of storage for free, Amazon has the first compelling reason to switch from iTunes. However, from my limited testing, I was not able to stream music from the "cloud" to my iPhone directly. I imagine that it's only a (short) matter of time before that gets resolved.
Right now, Amazon's Cloud Player only supports MP3 and M4A (AAC) non-DRM music files under 100MB in size. That may change in the future however, and any file format can be stored n you Cloud Drive.