Amazon.com Inc. wants to be more than a destination for shopping online. The online retailer launched two offerings late Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player.
Amazon Cloud Drive lets you upload and store files such as music, videos and photos on Amazon’s servers, which you can get to from a Web browser on a Mac or PC.
Amazon Cloud Player lets you play songs you’ve uploaded on your computer or on a smartphone that runs Google’s Android operating software.
While Amazon will charge for the Cloud Drive service, it’s offering anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of free storage. That’s less space than you’d get on the smallest iPod Touch, but it’s a move that’s likely to woo plenty of users who might later decide to pay for more storage space.
The company also wants to sell cloud storage. If your tunes and videos take up more space than the 5 GB Amazon is giving out, you can pay an annual storage fee to use Cloud Drive: The use of 20 GB of storage, for example, will cost $20 (and this includes the 5 free GB). For an undisclosed period of time, however, Amazon is offering 20 GB of free storage to those who buy a digital album from its Amazon MP3 store.
