Top Trends of 2012: The Consumer Cloud — from readwriteweb.com by Richard MacManus

Excerpt:

In 2012 we’ve seen amazing growth in the Consumer Cloud, meaning cloud computing for everyday users. There are three main categories in the Consumer Cloud: storage, sync, and notes. Dropbox, Apple’s iCloud and Evernote (respectively) have been the most impressive performers in each category so far this year.

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How to Comparison Shop the Cloud: 5 Tips — from Inc.com
The cloud is cheap and easy to tap into–sometimes too easy. Make sure you get the right service and price with these tips.

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After Amazon, how many clouds do we need? — from gigaom.com by Barb Darrow

Excerpt:

With news that Google and Microsoft plan to take on the Amazon Web Services monolith with infrastructure services of their own, you have to ask: How many clouds do we need?

This Google-Microsoft news broken this week by Derrick Harris,  proves to anyone who didn’t already realize it, that Amazon is the biggest cloud computing force (by far) and as such, wears a big fat target on its back. With the success of Amazon cloud services, which started out as plain vanilla infrastructure but have evolved to include workflow and storage gateways to enterprise data centers, Amazon’s got everyone — including big enterprise players like Microsoft, IBM and HP worried. Very worried.

Addendum on 7/2/12: