There are a huge range of cloud applications available so I thought I’d do some opinion polling, some interweb searching and some close examination to find some of the best on offer.
With a huge range of applications available to us mere mortals, Google has taken to the skies with aplomb. One of the best services has to be Google docs. Offering you the entire range, including a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation creator, it allows you to share information, make changes on the fly and store your information to access from anywhere.
Access
ASUS have taken the cloud computing concept to heart and introduced a platform that offers far more than just dusty documents and business apps. You can store vast quantities of information, access a global wi-fi service and enjoy fun games and content such as movies, magazines and music. It’s a one-stop portal for anyone on the go.
G.ho.st
Short for Global Hosted Operating System, this flash-based virtual operating system gives you a PC desktop interface that you can access from anywhere. You are given 5GB of free storage and 3GB for email, web and office applications. Secure and easy to use it offers a private place to share and collaborate while working from anywhere in the world. This is a brilliant solution for both personal and business use.
Photoshop.com
Funky design and superb tools from Photoshop let you upload photos and videos from anywhere (and pretty much anything). You can store up to 2GB for free, easily organise photos into albums, tags and clips, use famed Photoshop tools to edit images and share your final work with drag and drop interoperability with Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and more.
Evernote
Say goodbye to being absentminded and hello to cloud reminding. Evernote saves your ideas, appointments, photos and notes in one central place. You can store webpages, photos, text notes, photos and screenshots and organise them by index, tags or notebook. Then to find your stuff just search by keywords, titles or tags and your world will appear before you. You can even save tweets you like.
picnik
Anyone who loves to take and play around with photographs will love the editing and storage tools arranged in the cloud that is picnik. You can use one-click fixes, do standard edits like crop and resize, add special effects and insert text. Working with Mac, Windows and Linux it’s a superb cloud-based image editing program.
Windows Azure
It looks as if this is going to be the cloud application of 2010, with Microsoft focusing heavily on delivering a streamlined and powerful cloud solution. It’s an operating system as an online service that can be built on to include things like cloud databases, interoperability across other services and applications and plenty more. It’s definitely going to be well worth a look for anyone interested in exploring cloud for business.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Winning prizes for the most entertaining name, the Elastic Computer from Amazon is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Part of Amazon’s Web Services offering that includes a ton of other services and products.