The additional space can be used to store photos, documents, audio files etc.

Here’s how the plans are changing:

5GB → 10GB
15GB → 25GB
25GB → 50GB
50GB → 100GB
100GB → 200GB

Pricing per year is now:

$19.97 for +10GB
$49.97 for +25GB
$89.97 for +50GB
$159.97 for +100GB
$289 for +200GB

“If you already subscribed to one or more of these upgrades ( yes, they are cumulative ), your total available space has been automatically updated as you can see in your Media Library,” says Paolo Belcastro on the WordPress blog. “If you don’t have a Space Upgrade yet, or need to add more, the new levels have been implemented in the Store section of your dashboard.”

WordPress.com will store your files for as long as your blog exists, and will not limit bandwidth.

In addition to the extra storage, WordPress.com has taken off the limit (previously 35) for users allowed to access private blogs. You can now authorize as many people as you want.

In fact, all Android HTC phone owners are eligible for the upgrade, even though there’s some ambiguity about accessing the additional gigabytes. The storage upgrade was announced on HTC’s Twitter account with the following post:

Initially, the partnership called for new owners to receive the extra storage, but now, as HTC’s tweet reveals, the additional storage is available for all Android-powered HTC devices. The problem is, however, accessing the extra cloud space. There aren’t any steps to guide HTC owners, although, the company did try to address these questions on their Twitter stream:

Apparently, the upgrade is still on the upcoming list, because a quick trip to the Android Market page for the Dropbox app reveals it hasn’t been updated since August of 2011, which sounds like the updated app and the additional storage amount it offers isn’t quite ready for prime time. Unfortunately, the Twitter account for Dropbox doesn’t address the partnership or the upgrade, nor does the company blog, so that’s no help.

That being said, if the announcement has been publicly broadcast, it’s safe to say it’s on the way. It would be nice, however, if the upgrade being tweeted about was, you know, available the same time the tweets start flying.

This is a feature of the upcoming iOS 5, announced at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in June. It lets you sync the music you didn’t purchase form iTunes. It upgrades songs to 256 kbps AAC DRM-free versions if it can match it to songs in its library. It if can’t match a song, it will upload it.

The email reads:

iTunes Match stores your complete music library in iCloud, allowing you to enjoy your collection anywhere, anytime, on any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or computer.

Please note that you must maintain a local backup of your iTunes library as well as any music you add to iCloud. Apple will periodically reset your iCloud library during the beta and it is critical that you backup your music regularly. Some features and optimizations of iTunes Match will not be available during the beta.

iTunes Match will be available this fall for $24.99 a year (US only).

The iCloud web interface at iCloud.com has now been opened up to developers, and shows apps that can utilize it. You need to have an Apple ID and developer account to enter.

With the announcement of iCloud in June, Apple also announced the end of MobileMe as a service, indicating that Contacts, Calendar and Mail services had been reworked to work with iCloud. It makes sense then, that web apps for these things, as well as Apple’s iWork, are featured on the beta site.

With iCloud, users will also be able to access any app, book, photo, document, etc. from any of their devices. More facts about iCloud can be found here.

When Apple first unveiled iCloud, it talked about pricing, and how competitive it would be in terms of music storage. Here’s a chart they shared.

Now, they’ve provided a bit more info. “5GB of free storage is plenty for most people,” the company says. “But if you need extra space, you can always buy additional storage.”

$20 a year will get you an extra 10GB. $40 will get you 20GB, and $100 will get you 50GB.

Were you under the impression that iCloud was a back up solution? Let us know.

For example, if you create a document on your iPhone, you can pull that same document up on your iPad through the iCloud. However, if you delete it on your iPhone, it cannot be retrieved on your iPad.

Anthony Palermo, the creator of online back up Dolly Drive, said that iCloud was “Apple’s introduction to services that go beyond your device.” His product, on the other hand, does serve as a cloud back up through Apple’s Time Machine.

“Dolly Drive is actually more than just the ability of backing up your information, [or] your computer to the cloud, it also has a framework to back up locally your drives, so that if you ever were to lose your hard drive, you can immediately connect an external hard drive and be up and running again,” he said.

He went on to explain that even though iCloud and Dolly Drive serve 2 very distinctive services, they are both critical to the needs of users. With iCloud, users can view their iTunes library from all their Mac and Apple devices, stream photos between devices, sync and store documents on devices, and see apps and app history on all devices.

Through Dolly Drive, users have a back up to all their computer files, if they want. Also, it backs up computer content automatically every hour and allows users to continue working even if their hard drive crashes.

“Our intent is to make sure that no matter what’s on your computer or where it’s at on your computer, it gets backed up,” said Palermo.

We asked him what he thought about Apple and Google’s very different approaches to the cloud. According to him, Apple wants to offer the best experience for their devices. Google, though, is focused on platforms and on a large-scale experience for users.

He also told us that he expects the value of the cloud to increase over the next several years.

“We’re going to see great things to come with the cloud in the next 5 years, and I think, at that point, younger, more experienced computer-savvy users will see the cloud as just a natural process of what they do as they sit down and work with their devices,” he added.

According to the company, mobile uploads have increased over 600% over the last year with users uploading more than 20 million photos and videos to Photobucket.com each month.

“We are seeing explosive growth in mobile, and at the same time we are adding a million new users a month on our website,” said CEO Tom Munro. “With our integrated platform, Photobucket is uniquely positioned to bring together the simplicity and spontaneity of mobile with the creativity and permanence of the web. In the coming months, we will continue to expand our leadership in mobile with additional products, including the release of a new creative video app.”

For now, they’ve launched Snapbucket, a new companion app to Photobucket, which provides filters, effects, frames, etc. Snapbucket is drawing comparisons to the popular Instagram (which is only available for iOS), with the added bonus of the ability to unlock new filters for pictures.

“Our users have been asking for more creative ways to express themselves through visual media,” said Kate Hare, VP of products at Photobucket. “Snapbucket gives our users what they’ve asked for – a simple, on-the-go application to capture, personalize and share their photos.”

“In working with users, they wanted enhanced creativity, original photo preservation and seamless ties to their Photobucket account,” Munro tells WebProNews. “Snapbucket brings those unique features together by allowing users to apply pre-loaded filter sets to their photo, or even create their own. In all, there are 9,500 unique combinations that can be created. Once a unique filter set is created by a user, it can be saved and used again and again. All original photos are saved to the user’s Photobucket account, along with the filter applied photo.”

He says he wants Photobucket to be “THE one place” where users can save, edit, create, and manage photos/videos. “We don’t want to just tell the story of what happened to you yesterday, but we want to tell the whole story of your life,” he says.

He considers the cross-platform compatibility lacking from some competitors “very important.”

“What is also interesting for Photobucket is how we integrate both our mobile and web platforms,” says Munro. “The ability to be deeply creative on our web site and then push down to mobile, or to have fast, easy on-the-go experience on mobile and push up to the web, provides a unique opportunity that you will hear more about from us in the near future.”

According to Munro, Photobucket is the largest dedicated photo hosting site, whether you are counting by the number of photos or by comScore stats, with 8.5 billion photos and videos and 24 million unique visitors on the web and over 15 million on mobile.

Amazon has said that .07% of the data not able to be fully recovered, according to several reports. “We have completed our remaining recovery efforts and though we’ve recovered nearly all of the stuck volumes, we’ve determined that a small number of volumes (0.07% of the volumes in our US-East Region) will not be fully recoverable,” Amazon is quoted as saying.

The company has been letting the companies affected know. It’s unclear what all companies are actually affected.

The whole incident hasn’t been good for the perception of cloud computing in general. After all, if something like this could happen, what’s to stop all kinds of similar incidents from happening in the past. Reliance on others for important data is a liability.

Look at Twitter’s inability to stay operational for all users at all times. What if Twitter was hosting a great deal of your company’s information. Business have come to rely on Twitter for various purposes, yet the site is often plagued with downtime. It’s just another example of reliance on third-parties for business-critical functions.

The whole Playstation Network debacle hasn’t done anything to help the perception of cloud computing either.

Amazon recently launched its cloud storage service for consumers. Amazon will have a lot more information on its servers than just businesses, as people store their music collections and other files.

As far as business, it might be wise to have a backup plan in case you can’t rely 100% on a third party. InformationWeek has an interesting piece about the need for failover planning.

Bizo, a company that depended on Amazon, “resorted to a practice that many observers were left wondering why Amazon itself hadn’t adopted,” writes InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock. “- the ability of a system in one data center to be shifted to another in a separate, geographic location.

Everything on Amazon’s status dashboard is currently listed as “operating normally”.

Naturally, one would have to assume Apple would be interested in that “i” in the name, as the company is expected to launch a cloud-based music service that would compete with Amazon, mSpot, and potentially Google. TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters says he asked Xcerion why they changed their name and got the following response:

“We decided we needed a name change to better reflect our new focus on files and storage, where the desktop is just one of many clients to access files and content stored in CloudMe. Since we a couple of months ago launched our iPhone and Android app, WebDAV and the automatic backup software, Easy Upload for Windows, Mac and Linux, we now have many clients that interact with our users’ content. There also are a lot of third party apps and software supporting the CloudMe online computer.”

Apple’s service is expected to be a paid service. While unconfirmed, a price that has been rumored is $20 a year. The service would let iTunes users stream songs from a remote server from anywhere there is Internet access.

Apple is said to be in talks with record labels about licensing of songs. Google is in the same boat. Both would surely like to have a product out as soon as possible, but those pesky legal issues always get in the way. Apple has reportedly already reached deals with a couple of the major labels. Obviously Apple has a foot firmly in the door with iTunes.

Google has actually been said to be talking to Spotify as a possible partner on its own music service, which was supposed to be ready with Honeycomb (the latest version of Android designed primarily for tablets).

Xcerion is still listed as the owner of the iCloud.com domain.

If you’re unfamiliar wtih Dropbox, it’s a srevice that ltes you upload documents, photos, and videos, and share them from your computer, smartphone or iPad.

“Dropbox transforms the way people create and share their life’s work,” said Drew Houston, CEO and co-founder of Dropbox. “Whether that’s designing buildings, writing music or raising a family, we’re focused on making it effortless to have your files wherever you need them, on any computer or phone. With this first step, we’re excited to reach new people around the world and delight them with all the ways Dropbox can simplify their lives.”

Meanwhile, the service has expanded into more languages:

“Computers should make your life easier, not harder,” said CTO Arash Ferdowsi. “We’ve spent hours sweating every tiny detail of Dropbox so you never have to think about it – it just works. Flawlessly synchronizing thousands of files per second across every operating system and mobile phone platform is an enormous technical challenge. We’ve built an incredible team to do this at a global scale.”

Dropbox gives users 2GB of free space. This amount can be upgraded for a fee. People are using it all over the world, in 175 countries.

In fact, soon after Amazon’s announcement hit the airwaves, the company also announced that it would be giving users 5GB of free space.

“We are breaking down the barriers to mainstream adoption of cloud music, so that it makes sense for anyone with a music collection to store it in the cloud, where it will be easily accessible on all kinds of connected devices,” mSpot CEO Daren Tsui tells WebProNews.

“Why?” continues Tsui. “Music collections are personal. People have already invested a lot in their existing collections and want to continue to build them – if its easy for them to listen on both mobile and their computers, their music collections will become more valuable and enjoyable.”

The immediate expansion of mSpot storage is nice, but how can mSpot expect to continue to contend with major players in this space, such as Amazon, Google, and Apple? They’re getting that question a lot, no doubt, which is why they’ve prepared a lengthy statement to answer it. Here it is in its entirety:

How does mSpot plan to compete against Amazon Cloud Drive and then Apple and Google?

Firstly, Amazon is offering a music in the cloud storage locker and player – and this is just one component of mSpot. We’ve had this feature out for almost a year, and in this time, we’ve learned a lot about our customers and what they really want. We’re gearing up to roll out our second phase very soon – including a new music discovery that will be completely unique to the market.

We’re in a multi-device world. While Amazon has done a decent job of their Web player – this is obviously the easiest half of the offering. We don’t think they can compete with us on mobile for the following reasons:

- We’re on both iPhone and Android; when people store their collections online, they don’t want to feel they’re locking down their choice of phone as well.

- Leading mobile carriers like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint have been offering our mobile entertainment services to millions of their subscribers for years, under ourwhite label.

- Why? Our technology is truly optimized for the mobile, which has different requirements than the Web. We offer music playback that feels local to the handset, (which is very hard to do); faster syncing and streaming; continuous connectivity to your music, even when you don’t have a connection; choice in how much music to store on your phone – all are not just nice to have, they’re essential. We also offer unique features like lyrics, album art and artists bios right on the handset.

- We believe our proven industry experience on the mobile gives us a big edge over Amazon, or even Google or Apple.

On that note: We would welcome an opportunity to challenge Amazon’s service on mobile usability – any time.

We’ve been out for almost a year on Android, and since December for iPhone. We have a significant lead with over 1 million downloads on Android alone. People have already taken the time to upload their collections into our service, and they love it.

mSpot’s position related to Amazon’s pricing model in comparison to our own.

We think we have a better service and in order to remove any price barriers we’re going to offer 5 GB free storage. Going forward, we expect that the market for storage will be very commoditized and price-driven; but unique music services like mSpot will appeal more to music listeners looking for a complete experience on both Web and mobile.

Amazon gives you 5GB for free, then offers yearly plans at a dollar per GB at 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, and 1,000. Google Music is expected very soon.