Amazon provides hosted storage service

IDG News Service - Amazon.com Inc. has launched a hosted storage service for software developers so they can access their applications' data from anywhere via the Web, the Seattle online retailer announced Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Google Inc. is also planning a hosted storage service.

Google's initial product is rumored to be called GDrive online storage service, which surfaced after a blogger discovered apparent notes in a slide presentation by Google executives published on Google's site after its analysts presentation day.

Google's presentation stated the service should be able to "Store 100 percent of user data" and "house all user files, including: e-mails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)."

Amazon's service, which can be accessed at its website, carries no minimum fee and costs $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of transferred data.

Called S3, the service runs on top of the storage infrastructure on which Amazon runs its own Web sites and offers 99.99% availability.

A University of California science team -- among the service's first customers -- uses S3 to store and serve up 60 million images collected for a NASA experiment, while CastingWords, an audio transcription service, uses S3 to store audio files and text.