Google Music Beta on Android

You might have heard that Google had launched the music beta service, which is similar to the other Google service which is linked to your Google account, but only limitation as of now is that it is available on in the United States, and it also says that its free for limited period of time. May be only till the beta testing is complete, but I hope to have it continued after that. You can store about 20,000 songs to your account and they will be stored in cloud, so that it can be accessed from any device, such as TAB or Android Phone. You can carry your music collection where ever you go, sound impressive huh? why don't you get one? 

All you need is an US proxy and log into your Google account from the proxy server or VPN and request for one, or if you have a friend who can send invite ask him to send one. So you would get the invite in few days if you have requested for one. 

After the invite is received you can download the music manager from music.google.com and install it. 

• Make sure you keep all your tag information for the songs updated before uploading using Google Music Manager, otherwise it becomes a mess later to organize your music. Google music would organize your music based on the tag information.
• Also make sure that you use the folder upload option rather than windows media player library sync, because mostly if you have updated the tag information recently, it seems to be not working fine. 
• Anyways, follow which ever method, but upload the music, but one thing to remember, while uploading you don't need to be in VPN, and sometimes with VPN, if corporate it will not work.

Now you need android application to use the same music on your android device, but if you are not in US, then the market wont allow you to install from there, even though it is free application. So you need to download it from here, and install using any other method, such as copy to SD card then install by enabling non market application installation in settings.

Once you have installed fortunately, it does not need a VPN to play your music, you can be in any country, Wifi/3G/EDGE/GPRS, it can play the music for you.

Windows SkyDrive and Sync Storage

Now Microsoft has introduced an upgraded version of Live SkyDrive, a free online file storage service, that looks like a perfect choice at the moment for several reasons.

• You get 25 GB of free online storage space for your documents, photos, and all other files - the previous limit was 5 GB. Now you have 5GB sync storage and you can use it as a replacement to Dropbox and keep all your file in sync across your computers using Live Mesh.
• You have the option to download an entire folder on SkyDrive as a local zip file - huge time saver.
• You can upload files to SkyDrive through Windows Explorer itself through Gladinet - it's just like mapping a folder on the network drive.
• SkyDrive is like a social network for files. You can see files that your friends have shared on SkyDrive through your own Live Profile page (similar to Friend updates in Facebook).
• SkyDrive is Microsoft service and an integral part of their larger Windows Live strategy so you really don't have to worry about its future existence.
• Microsoft will soon offer an Online Office suite (like Google Docs) and it's a no brainer that documents uploaded to SkyDrive will be accessible from Online Office and vice-versa. Thus you indirectly get more storage space for documents.
• SkyDrive has no real competition. Google and Yahoo do not have a presence in the online file storage market while services like DropBox, Mozy, Box.net, etc. offer only limited space (couple of gigs.) to free users.

So, over all it’s the best cloud storage as of now, as good as Google Docs, Microsoft is trying his best to come back again in the battle on the clouds.