With Dropbox's announcement of auto-image upload from Android devices, following its acquring partners such as Picasa to use it as a device and set-top-box backing store, we are now seeing the emergence of Cloud Storage-as-a-Platform.
What's not mentioned by the TC article - this builds on the Dropbox SDK, growing in popularity, to enable apps on devices - from smartphones to notebooks/desktops - to integrate with Dropbox Cloud storage directly, enabling auto-synchronisation to the provider. Whilst not as yet neatly integrated as iCloud's Photostream, this is a solid step in the building of Storage-as-a-Platform, where one can plug in their Cloud storage solution of choice to their apps.
Watch for the continued transformation of Cloud storage from simple repository to content hub,, where one can look forward to accessing their content, anytime, anywhere, with ease, transparency and fine-grained management using their preferred apps. This architecture addresses one of the greatest problems of Cloudbursting: partitioning app processing from data sources. More than just connecting one's apps to one's data in a highly decoupled fashion, one can now run their apps in a Cloud separate from where their data lives. This may sound simple - but has been a messy and complicated problem for years. No longer.
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