You’ve probably been hearing a lot about “cloud computing” lately, and it’s a term with which Kindle Fire owners should become familiar, if they don’t already know what it means.
Cloud computing means storing files and even software programs on a centralized server and accessing them via the web or a private communications network (such as your broadband cable provider). If you’ve owned a Kindle for any period of time, used the Dropbox program to transfer files, or have anything stored in your Amazon Digital Locker, you’re already using the cloud.
The reason why this should be of particular interest to Fire owners is that the Fire, like many mobile devices, has limited built-in storage capacity. Cloud computing allows owners of mobile devices to own very large digital media libraries (e.g., books, documents, images, videos, music, apps, etc.) without having to worry about hitting the storage limit on any of their various devices. The cloud makes it possible to quickly and easily transfer or download a copy of any content from the centralized storage repository to a specific device. When you’re done with the “local” copy of the content, you can remove it from your device or upload an updated version back to the cloud. Either way, removing the content from your device doesn’t mean deleting it from your media library. This is why the Fire offers access to Amazon’s cloud storage for each of its different content areas, and why Amazon offers 5GB of cloud storage to all its customers for free. Learn more about it here.
There are other cloud storage and service providers, such as Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box, and now there’s a new player in the Kindle Fire cloud computing field. Yesterday, software developer CX unveiled its new cloud storage and file management app for the Kindle Fire and Android devices. What makes this noteworthy is that CX has only made the new app available on the Android platform; this signals CX’s faith in the growth potential of the Android platform in general, and Kindle Fire in particular. From the press release:
PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 14, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — CX Inc. the fastest growing cloud storage and data file management system, introduced their CX Android application today. With the new application, Android and Kindle Fire users will now have additional devices for getting into the CXcloud.
“CX, which launched its production release in October, is one of the fastest growing cloud computing storage applications welcoming on average 30,000 new customers every week,” Brad Robertson, CEO of CX Inc. “While, CX can always be accessed via the mobile web client – users can now go native on their devices with the latest additions of the native Android and Kindle Fire applications. These recent additions complement CX’s ever-growing list of applications that enable secure syncing, creation, consumption, and collaboration of content in the cloud with CX. As promised, CX.com will continue to be your secure digital command center, through which you can take control of all your content from any device.”