You almost can't be a major technology company these days without having a cloud  service. Now, new reports indicate that Samsung is getting ready to take that plunge.
According to the South Korea-based Maeil Business publication, Samsung will launch its S-Cloud service on May 3 at a London press event. That date has already been scheduled by the company for press to "come and meet the next Galaxy" smartphone, according to the invitation.
Five Gigabytes?
The event, called Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012, is expected to feature the launch of the Galaxy S III smartphone, and now it appears that the new device will be accompanied by a cloud service. Maeil Business bases its report on a purportedly leaked plan from the company.
The report on Maeil Business indicates that five gigabytes might be offered as an initial free offering, which would match the free storage amount that is expected to be available in the coming Google Drive cloud service. Some observers are suggesting that Samsung might allow unlimited storage for content purchased through its cloud, thus echoing Amazon and Apple in providing storage for media purchased through its channels.
Maeil said that S-Cloud will be available to a wide range of Samsung devices, and will offer access to TV shows, movies, and music on both a paid and a free basis. Samsung is said to have partnered with Microsoft in order to have the infrastructure for offering this service globally.
The report about Samsung's new service comes a few days after reports that Google will launch an online storage platform and service next week, called Google Drive or GDrive.
Other Cloud Services
Those reports were based on allegedly leaked documents, including a screenshot from Lucidchart, a maker of online diagramming tools that is expected to be one of many Google partners in the effort. Other screen shots appear to be explanations from Google about steps to edit documents in the cloud service.
Similar online storage models have emerged from three other large companies. Apple's iCloud, Amazon's Cloud Drive, and Microsoft's SkyDrive are also competing in this space.
Box.net, an independent storage service that currently offers 5 GB free, has begun targeting business markets with its OneCloud service. OneCloud offers applications targeted at enterprises, designed to allow content creating and sharing through mobile devices.
There is also jockeying taking place among device manufacturers to offer online storage service options as an added value, including HTC and Asus for some of their products.
Additionally, cloud computing and hosting vendor Rackspace, which helped to create the open-source cloud operating system OpenStack and the OpenStack Foundation, announced this week that it is now expanding its use of the open source software . Rackspace described this move as part of a "massive, technological shift" that heralds the "open era of the cloud," and this could help facilitate many more cloud-based services.
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