a few great ideas

The Inspiration
This one has come to mind as something useful several times. Now I can finally get it down for someone to (hopefully) make! A problem for the future is compatibility between cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Skydrive, etc... who all have their own document editors. Another problem is the legal requirements of these services to have to remove copyright infringing material when they learn of it's existence in someone's files. Yet another problem is the difficulty in keeping track of all of the different files across different services.

How it works
You could solve some of this by simply paying for the added storage and then using that one service for which you paid as your only cloud storage. This doesn't solve the security issue and another issue which is less common: the desire to keep up to date with different features in these different services (so that you can always be making the best use of them).

Keeping track of your files is easy with the "master" client/app/service which carefully distributes your files across all available free services and keeps a listing and has some buffer space to store the files when you download them for use.

This master app can also piggy-back off the features of each service and make sure the best document editor/viewer is used for the file stored

The master app can also encrypt your files, break them up into sections, and store them across multiple services under meaningless file names - so long as it maintains it's own record of which pieces of the puzzle are required to be called for each file. This protects each of the service you are using from knowledge of what is stored and they don't have to worry about removing illegal files.

It would be wise to design this system to store each file in at least 3 different locations to prevent accidental data loss and to maintain good service in case one or more data centre goes down. This might be a meaningless feature since each cloud storage service is in the business of protecting from data loss anyway.

Monetising
Advertising, offering premium features, and all of the other usual models would likely work. This is meant to be a service though, and because it builds on other cloud services free offerings it would be best to keep it as free as possible and advertise the cloud services used for free, i.e. provide traffic and customers and suggestions to buy products from the other services. While this "master" service is competing with the others, it really doesn't provide for big businesses - only individuals who would be using the free offerings from them all in any case. So it benefits those who can't afford premium services but also benefits the cloud services themselves.

Sam
9th November 2012

Google Doc for planning (come collaborate)