Google likely to launch Dropbox-like cloud storage service soon

Search king Google is close to launching its own cloud storage service similar to Dropbox and Amazon CloudDrive, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

If the report holds true, Google will be entering an extremely crowded market with a product simply called Drive. (No relation to the awesome Ryan Gosling movie.) On top of Dropbox and Amazon, the market consists of strong players like Microsoft SkyDrive, Box, SugarSync, and many others.

Drive’s offerings would most closely resemble Dropbox, which gives users access to cloud-connected storage on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. People would be able to stores documents, photos, videos, and other large files. To send a file inside of Drive, the user could just send a link to download the file instead through a file-sharing service.

The Drive product could also very well be integrated with the Android mobile operating system, similar to what Apple did with iCloud. Apple’s iCloud, while picking up steam, only works for devices running iOS 5, Macs and PCs, so other non-Apple mobile devices are shut out.

The service is expected to launch in the “coming weeks or months.” It will offer free and paid tiers, depending on how much storage you need.

In 2007, now-CEO Larry Page had worked internally with other Googlers to launch a service called “G Drive,” but the service was postponed and never launched. During that same year, Dropbox was founded and has gone on to become one of the most widely used cloud-storage solutions with consumers, mostly because of its availability and ease of use across many platforms.

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