BMW Now Supports Amazon Cloud Player

If you own a BMW or a Mini, you’ll now be able to use the Amazon Cloud Player for iOS. The service provides the ability to import existing music files onto mobile devices, and car owners with BMW Apps – or the ‘Mini Connected’ – can now access these files through the car’s dashboard. It’s a step forward in the connected car trend, one that allows users to access the cloud from directly within their car interfaces. Whether it will drive more users to Amazon Cloud Player is another question entirely, but what’s sure is that further personalized, cloud integration into vehicles is coming soon. 

Strategy Analytics Report On Cloud Market Share

Oftentimes, companies focus on market share for hardware and software, but in today’s world cloud media services are an increasingly important service for our devices, and Strategy Analytics has, for the first time, quantified market share data: Apple’s iCloud and iTunes Match are the leaders for cloud services in the U.S. at a combined 27% of usage. This makes sense, as apple has tried its hardest to ensure that the majority of users are synced into the cloud network, especially on iOS 5. For others, the gap is significantly smaller. Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Player are at 17% and 115% respectively, while Google Drive is hovering at just 10%. One of the most striking conclusions of the study: music is the driving force of cloud utilization, as audio represents 45% of the content on cloud-based any platform. At the same time, it’s clear that the cloud hasn’t fully developed: 55% of those asked hadn’t used a cloud service at all; it appears that there’s a long way to go before everybody is interacting with the cloud.