Amazon Launches Online Media Storage Service

Amazon.com wants to be more than a destination for shopping online — it also dreams of being a place where you can store your music, photos and videos and access them any time, from any computer.

The online retailer launched two new offerings late Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. The first lets you upload and store files like music, videos and photos on Amazon's servers, which you can get to from a Web browser on a Mac or PC. The second lets you play songs you've uploaded on your computer or on a smartphone that runs Google's Android operating software. The "cloud" in the services' names refers to the practice of storing content online and streaming it to a computer over the Internet.

Amazon's move is beating Google Inc. and Apple Inc., which are believed to be working on similar services that would allow consumers to access their content when away from their home computer.

While Amazon will charge for the Cloud Drive service, it's offering anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of free storage. That's less space than you'd get on the smallest iPod Touch, but it's a move that's likely to woo plenty of users who might later decide to pay for more storage space.

The Seattle-based company, which already runs an online storage service for companies called Amazon S3, decided to roll out a consumer cloud service to make it easier for customers to access digital content no matter where they are, Amazon music director Craig Pape said.

The offerings could also benefit Amazon's bottom line: The company realized customers were hesitant to purchase MP3s at work because they didn't want them tied to their office computer, Pape said, so Cloud Drive and Cloud Player may drive more impulse music shopping.

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

The company also wants to sell cloud storage. If your tunes and videos take up more space than the 5 GB Amazon is giving out, you can pay an annual storage fee to use Cloud Drive: The use of 20 GB of storage, for example, will cost $20 (and this includes the 5 free GB). For an undisclosed period of time, however, Amazon is offering 20 GB of free storage to those who buy a digital album from its Amazon MP3 store.

The player offers simple controls — you can play, pause or skip tracks, or build your own playlists. For users who want to listen while on the go, an updated version of the Amazon MP3 digital music-buying app will include Cloud Player, letting users play music they've stored with Amazon's service on their cell phone as well as tunes that are already on their handsets.

NASA's starship project sets sights on the final frontier

Shooting for the stars will first require a lot of down-to-Earth elbow grease, as NASA's new 100-Year Starship project illustrates. The effort, to journey between stars in the 2100s, began with a workshop and now is in the study phase.

NASA's Ames Research Center and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are collaborating on the $1 million 100-Year Starship Study, an effort to take the first step in the next era of space exploration.

The study will scrutinize the business model needed to develop and mature technologies needed to enable long-haul human space treks a century from now. Kick-started by a strategic planning workshop in January, the project has brought together more than two dozen farsighted futurists, NASA specialists, science fiction writers, foundation aficionados and educators.

But for the moment, put aside all those Vulcan mind melds and get a grip. Launching a truly interstellar human voyage is a goal that will require sustained investments of intellectual and financial capital from a variety of sources.

"The year-long study aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment to ensure continuity of the lengthy technological time horizon needed," according to DARPA thinkers.

Self-sustaining enterprise

Dave Neyland, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said that the 100-Year Starship name was chosen because it would require a long-range sustainable effort to get our species to other stars.

The long-haul starship plan

One participant in the workshop was former NASA scientist Marc Millis, a leading authority on breakthrough propulsion physics concepts that might make interstellar hops a doable proposition.

"The meeting and the DARPA funding is about creating an organization that could last for 100-years, rather than about the technological and sociological advancements necessary toeventually create starships," Millis said. "In fact, the funding is not allowed to be spent on any research or educational activities related to interstellar flight, but instead can only be used to define that organization. As much as I really like the name, '100-year starship,' this study should instead be called the '100-year organization study.'"

Millis pointed out that the overall goal of the organization is to sustain research that will lead to the creation of a starship in roughly 100-years, and to inspire students along the way. By asking “why-what-how,” it was hoped to flesh out some substance to define that organization, he said.

An interstellar challenge

"I find this new initiative to be more of a self-serving earmark using good-old-boy networking," Millis told SPACE.com of the study.

He said leaders of the new study need to first consider what other organizations have done in the past and are now accomplishing, such as the Tau Zero Foundation, the British Interplanetary Society and The Planetary Society.

Millis said that, as head of the Tau Zero Foundation, he picked the topic of interstellar flight "to seek game-changing advancements beyond what others even contemplate and to operate beyond the entrapments of all the competition and legacy constraints of nearer-Earth space activities. And now those entrapments are encroaching into the progress being made on interstellar flight."

Facebook for the Road? Call, E-Mail Other Drivers With New Social Network

Have you ever wanted to call another driver to complain about cutting you off? Or to tell him that his brake lights aren't working? Or even to ask him out on a date?

Through a new start-up called Bump.com, drivers across the country can use their license plates to connect with each other via e-mails, text and voice messages, and even access discounts to local stores based on the locations where they're driving.

"It's kind of like a Groupon and a Foursquare, meets AAA and LoJack -- all of which you can't turn off," said Mitch Thrower, Bump.com's San Diego, Calif.-based founder and CEO.

The company is powered by a program that scans and automatically recognizes license plate numbers in pictures taken by security cameras on the road. It then matches up those numbers with e-mail accounts, mobile phones and location systems to let people communicate.

Bump Scans Security Camera Images for License Plate Info

For two years, Bump.com has been in "stealth" mode, Thrower said, building up the technology behind the company and assigning e-mail addresses and voicemail boxes to license plates across the country.

At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin today, the company officially launched, on an open invitation basis.

To join, you can register on the company's website for an invitation to "claim your plate." After receiving the invitation, users can go to Bump.com to verify car ownership and set up a profile.

But even if you don't want to be a part of a social network for the streets, Bump will capture images of your license plate and assign it an identity. Other drivers will be able to send messages to your car, but you only receive those text and voice messages if you sign up for the network and register yourself as the license plate owner.

"Your license plate is basically a public document, a public record, and it ties back to a communication need," Thrower said. "Everyone's thought, at some point, 'Hey, I'd like to talk to this person. I'd like to send this person a message.'"