Google has announced a free cloud-based storage service called Google Drive. It’ll store up to 5MB of files free, allowing them to be accessed from different devices and also shared with friends or colleagues.
Drive can be installed on a Mac or PC and can also be downloaded as a Drive app to an Android phone or tablet, with an iOS app planned. Google Drive integrates with other Google products including Google Docs, Gmail and Google Plus.
As well as offering conventional searching, Drive can also recognise text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition. Customers who want more than the 5GB of free storage can pay for up to 1TB of access, putting Drive in competition with other services including Dropbox and Box.net.
[Google blog]