Kept Alive by the Drive...

I was rescued recently by the power of the cloud when a presentation I was about to use in front of a large conference audience of industry peers corrupted on my usb stick.

 Thankfully I had chucked the slideshow in to my Google Drive the night before and a quick hooking up of my phone to the venue's local wi-fi network and a share via e-mail saw the powerpoint restored on the organiser's laptop. Phew!

A very real world example of why keeping things in the cloud is such a good idea!

Chromebook tidal wave...

I am a major fan of the Google Chromebook - both the hardware and the wider concept of dirt-cheap, cloud based computing and once again the Mountain View powerhouse has broken another barrier with the unveiling of another new laptop from Acer - the C7 - and it is the first under the magical £200 barrier, albeit £199.00. It's not as good a spec as the Samsung variants but the price point will no doubt broaden the appeal further.

Google Music lands on UK shores...

At long last Google's Music service (or Play Music to give it its proper title) has landed in the UK. The service offers an iTunes competitor in terms of music purchasing but of much more interest to me at least is the upload/streaming facility.

The service offers the user the chance to upload up to 20,000 songs for storage in the cloud which can then be streamed anywhere through a variety of linked devices including a browser, Android mobile phone, tablet, pc etc. It's a terrific feature and one that has been long-awaited here in the UK.

The service works smoothly with a small piece of software downloading to your pc to scan your collection and either match a song with Google's own existing library or upload ones that do not. I have over 70 gig of music but am still well below the 20,000 song limit so the potential free storage is massive.

This then enabled me try it out today by hooking up my Nexus S to an external speaker and stream a number of songs over wi-fi from the cloud...brilliant! All my music wherever I am...as long as I have a data connection.

I have little doubt this service will become the principle route for my future music consumption...good job Google!