Beats Music Is Yet Another Entrant into the Cloud Music Market

I suppose it was probably inevitable that the ubiquitous Beats By Dr. Dre brand would eventually get into the lucrative but supersaturated Cloud Music market, but my reaction nonetheless was both "really?!" and "really?".  Putting aside personal feelings on what the brand has done within the last 10 years to both ignite and destroy the popular audio accessories craze - is Beats Music, as the service is called, a new, creative twist on an existing concept, or just an also-ran hoping to cash in on a brand name?

Beats' foray began when it acquired the already extant service MOG in 2012, which should've tipped most anyone off that this service would be in the works.  Currently, Beats Music has a catalogue of 20 million songs from all major record companies, which is right up there with all the other major services.  What really seems to separate it from the competition is its emphasis on human-based song recommendations.  While Beats still uses computer algorithms (like the others) to source recommendations, it also combines this with human curation and playlists from real music professionals.  Although Google Play Music also offers hand-curated radio stations from "experts," the process seems to be more integrated with Beats.  A second important difference is what Beats calls "The Sentence."  The Sentence allows a user to fill in four gaps in a sentence which effectively describes your current activity, mood, and desired music genre, and Beats Music will return suggestions.  While Sony's Music Unlimited also lets you choose music based on your mood, Beats' take seems to be more original and in-depth.  I can't personally say how well it works, but it's a very interesting concept.  Not only that, but the artist recommendations that Beats makes will automatically prioritize that artist's most important albums, maximizing the chances of you fully appreciating that artist.

I haven't seen anything official, but unofficial reports suggest music streams at (or at least up to) 320 kbps MP3, which places it at or near the top of the heap in terms of sound quality.  The service will be accessible via Web interface, iPhone, Android, and Windows apps.  Again, I haven't used the service yet, but all appearances suggest that the apps' UI is beautiful and functional.  Which brings us to the cons - firstly, you only get a 7-day trial, compared to the standard 14- or even 30-day trial periods the others offer.  This is a very brief time to decide whether you want to keep a service that is subscription only with no free version.  Pricing is a familiar $10/month, and while you can pay annually, there is no discount for doing so, unlike with XBox Music.  Additionally, your subscription only grants you access on a mere three devices, whereas my Google Play Music All Access pass grants me access on ten.

Interestingly, things become far more appealing if you happen to be an AT&T wireless subscriber.  If you are, you get up to 90 days free (likely that won't last forever), and although the same $10/month subscription applies, you could choose a family plan instead which allows access for up to 5 people on ten devices.  I would have to imagine that the generous 90-day trial period will eventually disappear while the family plan will roll out to everybody else.  It's also worth pointing out that there's no integration with your existing music library as far as I can tell.  You'll have to decide for yourself how important that is to you.

Beats Music is an intriguing offering, and the company has put forth some genuinely creative music discovery tools.  Couple that with a beautiful UI, good music streaming quality, and attractive pricing for AT&T subscribers, and you have a compelling offer.  However, I don't see anything groundbreaking here, and I'm not sure that Beats will be able to pull away significant amounts of customers from other services.  Still, it's worth at least a 7-day look if you haven't already subscribed to a competitor.

A Breakdown of Cloud Music Services

Finally, for your viewing pleasure, following is a link to a comparison table of several of the services I've covered in previous posts.  I couldn't get the table to properly fit in a post, so I had to host it in Google Drive.  Please note the information in the table is current to the best of my knowledge at the time of this writing, so be sure to double-check before you sign up for anything.  I should also note again that there are literally tons of other services out there, so this is not meant to be in any way a comprehensive list.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Zi9sAFGeOIhRlCxE4P1MM246s0YRVlc6Q8jCgXpesyw/edit?usp=sharing

iTunes Radio is Here & XBox Music Comes to Other Platforms

Once again, I've managed to neglect my blog in its infancy.  Not a good way to gain traction!  Rather than rambling about how busy my life is, I'll just delve right in where I left off with a quick follow-up announcement.  Soon, I plan to make an easy reference table comparing the different services I've covered.

As previously referenced, Apple followed through with its release of the not-so-creatively named iTunes Radio (colloquially dubbed iRadio), which was officially announced at this year's WWDC.  Surprisingly, though, the final product turns out to be more of a direct competitor to Pandora, rather than taking on Spotify.

The jist of Radio is that it will be a free, ad-supported Internet radio service where users can create a radio station (i.e. automatic playlist) based on an artist, album, or song.  You'll be able to skip tracks (unclear what the skip limit will be) and like or dislike songs, so as to improve stations to your taste.  You'll be able to buy a song or album directly from iTunes if you come across one you like.  If this sounds familiar to Pandora or even the free version of XBox Music, it is.  The biggest difference is that while Pandora boasts probably the best song selection engine, the Music Genome Project, Apple's library is vastly superior (less than a million songs versus around 35 million).  Subscribers to iTunes Match ($25/year) will get ad-free listening.  Finally, the service will feature social integration a la Twitter's #music (showing trending songs, etc.).

Basically, iTunes Radio looks like Pandora on steroids, but doesn't really offer anything new.  Unlike XBox Music's premium service (or Spotify premium, Google Music, et al.), there is no on-demand streaming or downloading to local storage.  It simply fills a gap in the same way the free version of XBox Music does for Windows 8 and Windows Phone users.  iTunes Radio will have decent success if only because of the pre-installed, huge base of iOS users, and because Apple has a knack for making its products so easy they're impossible to not use.  The biggest reason Radio will exist is because it provides great incentive to get users to purchase songs from iTunes that they find on Radio.  The genius of Apple...

UPDATE:  iTunes radio has officially debuted with the release of iOS 7.

In other news, Microsoft finally opened up XBox Music to Android and iOS, and made the service available on the Web.  That means you can download the app for iPhone or your Android phone or tablet and use the service, provided that you pay for an XBox Music pass.  That's great news because the service is a solid offering and gives even more choice to Apple and Android users.  However, there are a few key missing features - namely, that the iOS and Android apps currently don't offer offline listening and Smart DJ (Microsoft's version of streaming radio / smart playlists) is missing, whereas both these features are fully functional on the Windows Phone app.  Oh, and there's no iPad app yet.  It's bewildering why these features weren't included from launch.  I understand Microsoft will be adding these features back in soon, but until it does, I can't whole-heartedly recommend the product over other choices just yet.  That said, Google should take note and make haste in opening up Google Play All Access to iOS (which they've promised to do) and possibly Windows Phone.

Music and the Cloud, Pt. 2

Sorry it's been forever since my last post!  Lots of personal stuff going on, but definitely time to pick things back up.  In this post, we'll take a look at a newer form of digital music delivery - subscription, and what better time than hot on the heels of Google's introduction of their new service at the I/O conference.  Whereas most everybody's familiar with buying digital music on iTunes, Amazon, or a number of any other digital storefronts, a new model has emerged that now makes "owning" music all but unnecessary.  As services like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and numerous other competitors began to develop functional, cloud-based storage lockers for your music, subscription-based and Internet radio services also started to become more viable and popular.  There are too many services available to keep up with, and more on the way, so let's just take a look at a few of the more noteworthy services.

Pandora
Pandora - the service that literally opened the box.  Pandora is was the first major Internet radio service which was able to generate significant consumer awareness and obtain a large user base.  Most people know what Internet radio is because of Pandora.  As opposed to a live stream of a real, existing radio station, Pandora creates a "station" for you to listen to from selections in a certain music genre based on your selection of an artist.  You can can "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" the selection Pandora makes for you, and this helps Pandora fine-tune its subsequent recommendations.  Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate its selections based on a list of characteristics in a song.

Pandora's core service is free, but as such, it's not a play-on-demand service.  Instead, your listening is limited to the stations you create and the selections Pandora makes for you.  You currently can skip to the next song on a station 72 times in a 24-hour period, and listing is further limited to 40 hours/month on mobile devices.  And sound quality isn't great compared to other services (128 kbps MP3).  There are also occasional ads, but you can disable them by upgrading to Pandora One, which costs $36/year or $3.99/month.  Pandora One also slightly increases sound quality to 192 kbps, but only for listening on a PC through a web browser or the desktop app.  Finally, Pandora's library only contains around a million songs.  All this means Pandora likely won't your be primary listening source, as it doesn't involve any music ownership or on-demand streaming, and sound quality is generally inferior.  But it's great as a passive entertainment source, like FM or satellite radio but more personal.  Pandora also boasts the largest variety of platforms on which it's available, including all the major mobile platforms.

Spotify
While it was available in Europe for a few years before finally making its way to the US in 2011, Spotify is probably the most recognized streaming service available today and the standard by which others are judged.  At a glance, Spotify is an on-demand streaming service with three tiers to the service.  Tier one is free, ad-supported streaming radio through a desktop app.  The second, "Unlimited" tier is $4.99/month and provides for listening through a computer with no ads and unlimited skips.  The "Premium" tier is $9.99/month, and unlocks on-demand listening, as well as unlimited streaming from mobile apps and a multitude of other devices, along with the ability to download music for offline listening.  You can also add on various 3rd party apps to the desktop client that provide additional functionality, and these are generally quite good.  Spotify streams music in the Ogg Vorbis format, and each service tier offers streaming at a higher quality - 96 kbps, 160 kbps, and 320 kbps.

Spotify's catalog includes about 20 million songs, making it one of the more robust.  Playlists are a major part of the Spotify experience, with the ability to share them and edit shared playlists together with other users.  With Spotify's radio system, available to all three tiers, you can create a "station" based on a song, artist, or album, and you have the ability to hit a thumbs or or down on a track to help improve song recommendations.  Finally, Spotify provides pretty tight social network integration with Facebook and Twitter (and Twitter #music), if you're into that sort of thing.  All in all, Spotify is an extremely robust streaming music service with multiple options.  Ultimately, however, if you like the service, you'll only get the most out of it if you cave and sign up for the Premium service by parting with Alexander Hamilton every month.

Rdio
Rdio is set up similarly to Spotify.  Unlike Spotify or Pandora, however, it doesn't have a long-term free service.  Instead, new users can try the service for free for up to six months on a computer, after which they have a choice of Web or Unlimited service tiers.  For $4.99/month, Rdio Web offers unlimited music streaming with no ads through a computer browser or downloadable desktop client.  For $9.99/month, the Unlimited service gets you unlimited mobile streaming, on-demand music, and downloadable music for offline mobile listening.  Rdio also has a Family plan, which basically lets you purchase additional Unlimited plans at a discount.  Rdio is also integrated with Twitter #music to aid in music discovery, and enables you to follow friends and celebrities to see their playlists.  Like Spotify, Rdio has a 20+ million song library, but Rdio takes its radio station features a step further by adding some customization over the stations you create.  Ultimately, the two services are extremely similar and it'd be hard to go wrong with either one.  That said, I'd give the slight edge to Spotify for sound quality, with Rdio topping out at 192 kbps, but others may find Rdio's superior, more beautiful UI more important.

Google Play Music All Access
Come we now to the newest entry.  Not long after Google has established its own music storage locker and music store (see my previous post for more info on what Google now calls its "Standard" music service), it surprisingly beat Apple and Amazon to the punch to launch a streaming service.  While the name All Access may be bland, the service is anything but.  All Access has only one service tier, unlike the aforementioned services, but if you listen on your mobile (or any other device), you'll need one of the premium services anyway.  All Access costs that familiar $9.99/month - but wait!... you can get All Access now for the low, low price of... $7.99/month if you act now!  If you sign up before June 30th, that is, as a bonus for early adopters.  You can also try the service free for 30 days.

In addition to all the features of the standard service, All Access grants unlimited, on-demand streaming to Google's 18+ million song catalog, "smart recommendations" based on your listening tastes, and custom radio with unlimited skips based on an artist, album, or song.  You can also download songs for offline listening, and share socially on Google+.  If this all sounds familiar, it is.  Where All Access differentiates itself is its approach to radio and integration.  Like the other services, you can hit thumb up or thumb down to improve recommendations, but you can also customize a station you create by peeking ahead and reordering, adding, or removing songs (basically like a playlist).  There are also preexisting stations curated by "experts," and recommended to you based on your listening habits.  And, if you already use Google Play Music for storage of your personal library, both search results and (better yet) radio will integrate your own songs.  It also doesn't hurt that Google's UI is also extremely pleasing to the eye and intuitive, and streaming sound quality, like purchased songs from Google Play, come in the 320 kbps MP3 variety.

While All Access doesn't offer any new earth-shattering features, what it does do, it does at least as good as its competition, and better in many respects.  Taken in whole, though, none of the other services offer as robust a service as Google has, complete with subscription-based streaming and radio, music discovery, social integration (though limited to Google+), large music store, and music storage for personal libraries.  The icing on the cake is the on-the-fly radio playlist tweaking and mingling your own music with the streaming catalog.  Finally, Google literally just announced that All Access would also be coming to iOS "soon," making the service much more compelling and relevant to the non-Android world.  It may be a wash as to whether All Access is worth jumping from one of the other services, but if you don't already use a streaming service and are considering it, or are seeking an all-in-one solution with storage for your own songs, or already use Google Play Music for storage and syncing, it's difficult to see why you'd go anywhere else.

Other Services
There are tons of other similar services out there, many of which also deserve your attention, such as Rhapsody, Last.fm, Slacker, etc.  I could easily throw these three on the list, but I'd be approaching redundancy.  There are also services from other major companies, namely Microsoft with Xbox Music, formerly Zune Music, which is available for free on Windows 8/RT (supported by ads) and $99.90/year or $10/month for access on Windows Phone and Xbox 360.  Xbox Music Pass (the paid subscription), like the others, is an unlimited, on-demand and smart-playlist ad-free radio streaming service.  Microsoft also has a huge music store (30+ million songs), but its services are limited to its own platforms, at least for the time being.  Microsoft offers only decent quality, streaming at 192 kbps WMA.  Sony also has what it calls Music Unlimited (formerly Qriocity), with its Access plan for $4.99/month (available on desktops and the PS3) and its Premium plan for $9.99/month, with access on desktops, PS3, Sony-connected devices, Android, and iOS.  Again, Music Unlimited incorporates on-demand and smart-playlist radio, with one unique touch - channels - based on genre, era, and mood.  Sony also seriously upped the ante on its sound quality, formerly one of its weak links, with the option to stream at 320 kbps AAC on desktop, PS3, and Android.  I originally used Music Unlimited myself, before switching to Google All Access for its incorporation of my existing library.

Finally, as most of these services have either a free tier or a free trial period, I encourage you to try as many as possible before landing on the one that best suits you.

Music and the Cloud, Pt. 1

I figured I'd cover digital music in detail first since most people nowadays have at least some experience purchasing digital music.  This topic will be broken into two parts, one for cloud locker services and the other for subscription-based services.  We'll start with cloud locker, but both sections are going to be long simply because there's a lot of ground to cover.

Chances are that if you're reading this blog, or any blog, you've purchased music on iTunes.  Sure, you may still have a large leftover CD library from your high school and college days stashed away in one of those giant CD wallets.  Maybe you still buy the occasional CD when passing by the now-tiny music section in Walmart.  Maybe you're even a diehard purist who refuses to buy music any other way than on vinyl at your local, old school record shop (in which case this blog probably isn't for you).  Whatever the case, the vast majority of people now purchase their music digitally.

Even if you still buy CDs, there's really no reason now to not make digital backup or archive copies, if nothing else.  However, the sheer number of services for doing this can be bewildering. Let's take a look at three of the most well-known.

Apple iTunes with iCloud
iTunes is already the industry leader in terms of digital music distribution.  If you use an iPhone or iPod and live in the Apple ecosystem, iTunes with iCloud and Match provides a powerful solution for your music needs.  With one of the biggest selections - around 30 million songs - you're sure to find the music you're looking to purchase in the iTunes store.  In addition to downloading the song or album you just purchased from iTunes to your computer, iTunes will allow you to download your purchased songs onto another registered computer or iOS device.  You no longer have to hook up your iPhone to your computer and sync with iTunes to transfer music, and Apple makes this transition easy.  All users also get 5 GB of free cloud storage, but items purchased from Apple, including iTunes music, don't count against your storage quota.

Subscribe to iTunes Match for $25/year and get storage for up to 25,000 additional songs that you ripped from your CD collection or purchased from somewhere other than iTunes.  The way this works is that iTunes will scan your computer's hard drive for music and attempt to match each song to its master copy, giving you access to the iTunes copy.  The beauty here is that if your copy of the song is of an inferior quality (i.e. you downloaded a crappy ripped copy on Napster or Limewire before they were shut down), you will get the iTunes copy at 256 kbps AAC.  iTunes will also manually upload your copy of any song it isn't able to match.

Apple was also the first to introduce a smart playlist creator, called "Genius," and has integration with Facebook and Twitter if you want your pals to know what you're listening to. Rumor has it that Apple will also be introducing a subscription based service to broaden its competitiveness, but nothing further yet.  What we do know is that all this makes iTunes a powerful solution, but may not make sense for you if you don't use an iPhone or tote a separate iPod/iPad around with you everywhere.  Since iTunes is only available on iOS devices, you may want to look elsewhere if you have, say, and Android phone.

Amazon MP3 & Cloud Player
Amazon is very similar in its execution of cloud music strategy to iTunes.  For those not already aware, Amazon has its own extensive MP3 store with over 20 million songs.  When you search for music on the Amazon website, Amazon gives you a choice to purchase in CD or MP3 format if available.  Music on Amazon is often 10 or 20 cents cheaper than on iTunes or elsewhere.  When you buy an Amazon MP3 song, the song is automatically added to your Cloud Player.  Like iTunes, Amazon gives you unlimited storage for anything you buy from Amazon.  You can also import your existing music to Cloud Player in a similar fashion - Amazon scans your hard drive for music, matches what it can to its own 256 kbps MP3 files, and uploads the rest.  Amazon gives you storage for 250 songs for free, and you can upgrade to storage for 250,000 songs for $25/year.  It's hard to imagine anyone would need space for more than a quarter-million songs.

Amazon originally launched the Cloud Player interface is a Web app, as opposed to a software application you run on your desktop like iTunes.  So, no additional software is required to play your music on a computer; you just navigate your browser to Cloud Player from the Amazon website.  Since then, however, Amazon released a PC software app that you can use instead.  I find the desktop app more streamlined and intuitive than its cloud-based counterpart, and the program also handles library management (uploading and downloading songs).  Mobile playback is offered through the Amazon MP3 app on Android and iOS, which let you stream music through the app or download songs to your device for offline listening.  There are also apps available for Sonos and Roku devices, Samsung smart TVs, and integration with Ford SYNC.  You can purchase music through the mobile app to put directly on your device or store in the cloud.  Streaming playback is offered in the song's original bitrate quality up to 320 kbps.  The fact that Amazon MP3 is available on multiple platforms makes it far more flexible than iTunes by default.  However, Amazon is missing some other options iTunes offers, namely social integration and smart playlists.

Google Play Music

Google has had a somewhat tougher road that its trailblazing competitors in terms of securing the licenses it needs to make music available for purchase, but that's a topic for another article.  Google now has a fully competitive marketplace, with over 18 million songs in its Play Music store.  Google Play is accessible through the website on desktop browsers or through the Android app on any Android device.  Your music library is managed and played through a browser (like Amazon) or through the Play Music Android app.  Google's offering is very similar to Amazon's and Apple's with a few important differentiating factors.  Any song you purchase in the Play Store will automatically be added to your Google storage cloud, where you have unlimited space for Play Store purchases.  Google will also scan and match songs on your PC's hard drive and put them in the cloud if you wish, once again upgrading your poor-quality and ill-gotten songs if Google can find a match for them.  Play Music will then manually upload any song for which it can't find a match.  Google also has some similar features that other services offer - you can create an "Instant Mix" based on a single song, just like iTunes, and there's Google+ social integration, for whatever that's worth.

This brings us to the first and most important differentiating factor - cost, or lack thereof.  Google gives you space for up to 20,000 songs you upload to the cloud (not counting songs you bought from the Play Store), which is slightly less than Apple and much less than Amazon.  And it's completely free.  And you can't beat free.  Did I mention it costs nothing?  The second feature - sound quality.  While iTunes and Amazon offer song purchases at 256 kbps AAC and MP3 formats, respectively, Google offers songs encoded at 320 kbps MP3.  This may mean little to the vast majority of people, as most couldn't tell a difference between a 256 kbps file, 320 kbps file, or a lossless FLAC file, and still some would argue that AAC is a more efficient codec that MP3 so the difference in sound quality would be null.  Regardless, what you need to take away from this is that music purchased from Google is among the highest quality you can get from a digital storefront.  Third feature - free music and music discovery.  Google will often spotlight new and upcoming artists, and offer a track or two from them for free.  Sometimes, Google will spotlight a well-known artist for a special occasion (like a famous birthday), or a genre, label, etc., along with free or discounted tracks.  There are hundreds of free songs (some exclusive) available from Google.  The free tracks can be a bit of a mixed bag, but there are many well worth having.

So, while Google's ecosystem isn't platform agnostic, free cloud storage makes for an extremely compelling offer for people in the Android universe.  Like with iTunes, rumors abound that Google will also introduce a subscription streaming component to its service as well, sometime this summer.

As for myself, I have an Android phone and no longer use my iPod, so buying and storing my music on iTunes doesn't make sense for me.  My wife, however, uses it all the time with her iPhone.  And why wouldn't she, as Apple maddeningly convenient?  I personally use both Amazon's MP3/Cloud Player and Google Play Music.  While I started with Amazon before Google came out with its service (and was very pleased with it, I might add), I've found myself migrating to Google's offering.  It's free - that's the big thing - I don't need space for more than 20,000 songs (I seriously doubt most people will), and I like some the features better than Amazon's.  I still buy music on Amazon, as it's often cheaper, but will probably cancel my $25/year subscription the next time it's up for renewal.  Sorry, Amazon.

The next post will be about subscription music services, and why you may not even need to buy music at all anymore.

The weather's great up here, just don't look down!

In this post, let's talk about what it means to keep your stuff in the cloud and why you should do it.  As I mentioned in the previous post, it's mostly about convenience - the convenience of having your stuff accessible to you wherever you have an Internet connection.  First, let's define what we mean by "cloud."  Essentially, I'm just talking about saving files on a secure, remote server rather than on your own computer's hard drive.  In other words, remote storage versus local storage.  Think of the cloud (that remote computer server) as your own, rented digital locker.

Your immediate reaction may be, "wouldn't my stuff be a lot more secure on my own computer"?  The answer is, well... yes and no.  Most major, reputable companies that offer cloud storage use sophisticated encryption and data protection.  Your data should be accessible only to you, and your security credentials are usually a username and password.  Of course there's no absolute guarantee everything is 100% safe, but neither are the physical things you put in real storage.  On the other hand, things you store in a secure, rented pod may actually be safer in some ways than what's in your house - security may be tighter, tougher to break in to, and accessible only by someone who has your key or lock combination.  So it is with digital storage.  You have to decide for yourself whether you actually need the storage and whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

It used to be that you had to purchase sometimes costly cloud storage, manually backup your computer, and simply download files back onto your computer when you needed them.  This is useful for people and businesses who need protection/backup in case of a computer crash or similar loss of data.  However, the more connected people became and the more devices people had, the greater the need to share and access data across devices instead of just backing it up.  Nowadays there are a bewildering number of cloud storage solutions depending on your needs, the type of devices on which you will access the data, what type of data you'll be storing, etc.  These solutions can range from all-in-one, backup and store everything, to very  specific types of storage for very specific types of data.  Over the next several posts, I'll be covering different types of storage solutions for probably what are your most immediate needs.  I'll try to highlight services that I personally like and/or have used, and give you at least some information that could help you make an informed decision about whether to use a particular service.  Help me help you make your life easier!

Blogos-fear

Greetings!  I suppose it's time for the requisite first post, and to explain why this blog exists at all - wish me luck with that.  First, a little about me:  I hammer out the typical 8-5 for an insurance company, have a beautiful wife and probably the best 14-month old girl in the world, and am living in our starter house.  One of the best things about this house is that it has a finished attic on the third floor that I've converted into my man cave.  This allows me to play with all my little media gadgets and hobbies.  I have very little experience blogging, and as a result I've always been tentative to do it.  My wife has started blogging, and fairly successfully at that, so I figured what the heck.

Now that we have that covered, how about the blog?  Long story short, I like things that make my life simpler and more convenient.  Consumer technology has a tendency to do that.  I also happen to like technology.  Boom - reason to have a blog, right?  So, this blog is basically about leveraging technology and cloud computing/storage to make your life simpler and more enjoyable.  To narrow the scope a little, it's about storing and accessing your digital stuff in the metaphorical "cloud" you've probably heard about but don't really understand, so you don't bother with it.  Except if you own a modern smartphone, you almost certainly already use the cloud to some extent.  By the "cloud," I'm referring to the digital information you store on a service provider's remote servers that, at least in theory, should make retrieving that information more convenient.

No one should confuse me with an expert (whatever that is, anyway) or journalist, nor is this thread aimed at business IT solutions.  Basically, I'm just a guy who apparently knows slightly more than the average person about this stuff, so this is advice to the average, non-technophobe, person.  For example, I'll discuss making your music digital and ways to have that document you just created accessible anywhere without having to e-mail it to yourself (like I did in college all the time).  That's at least mildly useful, right?  I also welcome new topic suggestions, (polite) critiques or corrections, comments, and feedback.  So, enjoy!

Chuck Norris approves this blog!