Google rolls out rival to Apple and Microsoft cloud storage services

The service, dubbed Google Drive, enables users to store up to 16TB (terabytes) of digital content such as photos, videos and PDFs, in the cloud, with the first five 5GB (gigabytes) of storage for free.

Cloud storage is one of the new online battlegrounds in which Apple, Microsoft and now Google will compete for users.

San Francisco start-up Dropbox is the current maker leader and says its users store around one billion files every two days.

But Google will be hoping that its brand reputation, coupled with the power and convenience of its tools, will help it muscle in on the market.

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president, Chrome and apps at Google, introduced the product as "a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff," on the company's blog yesterday evening.

He said the service has been built to "work seamlessly" with other Google products, which is part of the company's ongoing push to unify the Google experience online.

This means users of Google+ can store photos from the social network, and the will be able to attach items stored in Drive to emails in Gmail.

It is integrating search technology and image recognition into the service to enable users to find what they are looking for more easily.

However Pichai added this technology is at the early stages.

Drive is an open platform and Google is inviting third-party developers to create applications which is said could mean users can use drive to send faxes, create website mockups and edit videos through it.

Prices for the service start at $2.49 per month for 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99 per month for 100GB and $49.99/month for on 1TB. A Google spokesman did not confirm the UK pricing for the service.

Separately, Google founder Larry Page and chairman Eric Schmidt are backing a company that plans to mine asteroids for precious metals.

Follow Sarah Shearman on Twitter @Shearmans

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk