Cloudy with a chance of music

By M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO

COMPANIES have long been talking about the potential of cloud computing, or the notion that data can be accessed almost anywhere at anytime via company-approved devices. Now it looks like consumers, too, will soon be able to roam about while constantly connected to their own personal clouds. On June 6th Apple unveiled a cloud-based service, predictably dubbed the iCloud, that will become available in the autumn and allow users to store up to five gigabytes of content for free.

The new service will make it possible for folk who, say, purchase music from Apple's iTunes store to then play it across multiple Apple devices, rather than just the one used to access the track in the first place. Other content such as books, software applications and documents will also become more broadly accessible, assuming users have the latest versions of Apple's operating systems on their iPhones and other Apple hardware. The iCloud will also make it easier for users to synchronise information such as online calendars, address books and e-mail across their iGadgets—a process that even Steve Jobs, Apple's famously perfectionist boss, has admitted is currently less than satisfactory using the company's paid-for MobileMe service. (Mr Jobs is still on medical leave, but made an appearance at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference to introduce Apple's foray into cloud computing.)

Although the iCloud will not offer music-streaming services, it represents the most ambitious attempt yet to create a broad-based consumer service that allows people to keep information and content up to date across numerous devices (up to ten on the same Apple ID). And it is bound to trigger a response from other tech firms that already have their heads in computing clouds, including Google and Amazon. Google has numerous cloud offerings such as Google Docs and Amazon offers users the ability to read electronic books on multiple devices, including its Kindle e-readers, as well as other gadgets such as the iPhone.

Some forecasters reckon that competition will rapidly expand the market for personal cloud-based services. Forrester, a research firm, has estimated that this will be worth some $12 billion by 2016, with half of that coming from direct subscriptions from users and the rest from sources such as advertising. Hordes of start-ups such as Evernote and Dropbox have been targeting this market for some time, but will now find themselves facing competition from some of the tech industry's behemoths. At this week's meeting, Mr Jobs referred to the software behind services such as Apple's iCloud as "the soul" that complements "the brain" that is Apple's hardware. In combination, they will be tough to beat.