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SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon.com wants to be more than a instruction for shopping online — it also dreams of being a locate where you crapper accumulation your music, photos and videos and admittance them some time, from some computer.

The online merchandiser launched two newborn offerings New Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. The prototypal lets you upload and accumulation files like music, videos and photos on Amazon's servers, which you crapper get to from a Web browser on a Mac or PC. The second lets you endeavor songs you've uploaded on your machine or on a smartphone that runs Google's Android operating software. The "cloud" in the services' obloquy refers to the training of storing noesis online and streaming it to a machine over the Internet.

Amazon's advise is beating Google Inc. and Apple Inc., which are believed to be working on similar services that would earmark consumers to admittance their noesis when absent from their home computer.

While Amazon module calculate for the Cloud Drive service, it's substance anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of liberated storage. That's inferior expanse than you'd get on the smallest iPod Touch, but it's a advise that's likely to romance plentitude of users who strength after decide to clear for more hardware space.

The Seattle-based company, which already runs an online hardware assist for companies called Amazon S3, decided to listing discover a consumer darken assist to attain it easier for customers to admittance digital noesis no matter where they are, Amazon penalization director Craig Pape said.

The offerings could also goodness Amazon's bottom line: The consort realized customers were hesitant to acquire MP3s at work because they didn't poverty them tied to their duty computer, Pape said, so Cloud Drive and Cloud Player haw intend more impulse penalization shopping.

"At the end of the period we're trying to delight customers, but we're trying to sell more music, too," he said.

The consort also wants to sell darken storage. If your tunes and videos verify up more expanse than the 5 GB Amazon is gift out, you crapper clear an period hardware gift to ingest Cloud Drive: The ingest of 20 GB of storage, for example, module cost $20 (and this includes the 5 liberated GB). For an undisclosed period of time, however, Amazon is substance 20 GB of liberated hardware to those who acquire a digital album from its Amazon MP3 store.

Documents or videos you've uploaded to Cloud Drive module unstoppered with programs on the machine you're using, Pape said, patch songs in MP3 or AAC files module be playable finished the Web-based Cloud Player.

The player offers ultimate controls — you crapper play, pause or resile tracks, or physique your own playlists. For users who poverty to listen patch on the go, an updated edition of the Amazon MP3 digital music-buying app module allow Cloud Player, letting users endeavor penalization they've stored with Amazon's assist on their cell phone as well as tunes that are already on their handsets.

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