The cloud is the future of enterprise- this has already been established. Virtualization and instant, anytime access to vital company files and folders are opportunities that are, quite simply, too excellent and lucrative to pass up.

What a lot of folks seem to altogether unknowingly overlook is that cloud computing is revolutionizing the consumer sector, as well. Far from simply affecting large businesses and tech junkies, it’s gradually changing our lives, revolutionizing the way we interact with information – and with one another – and it’s got the potential to do so much more.

Already, we’ve seen a suite of applications that tap into this potential. Here’s to some of the most innovative, most useful, and downright -best- cloud computing apps on the market.

Evernote

I know David’s already talked about the virtues of Evernote before, so I won’t linger long on this one. I use it, too. See, I’m the sort of person whose mind is always chugging away. I’m always jotting down thoughts, ideas, concepts. I need checklists, and reminders, and schedules, all to keep track of what I need to do and where I’m going. Rather than have to haul my laptop with me everywhere (which, to be fair, I do anyway), I can simply jot everything down in Evernote’s mobile application, or hop on another system that has it in order to retrieve my information.

I love it, and I’m not even using it to its full potential.

Joukuu

Fragmentation’s an ugly thing, particularly when it comes to collaborative projects. Some people use Dropbox. Some folks swear by Box.Net. Still others adamantly turn to Google Docs for their collaborative efforts. Unfortunately, the time spent trying to figure out who’s using what and which person needs to install which program mean a considerable hit to productivity.

Joukuu’s developers understood this problem, and set out to tackle it.

It’s a marvelously simple idea and rather brilliant in its execution. Their platform simply displays files stored in Google Docs, Box.Net, and Dropbox, along with their contents. Not only that, drag-and-drop functionality means transferring files is a breeze.

Spotify

I’ll bet the recording industry (still stubbornly slogging through the primordial muck of its now-irrelevant business model) absolutely hates Spotify, since it more or less exemplifies everything they should have started doing the moment cloud computing started to get its feet off the ground. Meanwhile,they’re still dragging their feet, and bellowing about how pirates are taking their jobs to anyone foolish enough to listen.

We’re getting a bit off track.

Members of Spotify pay a $10/month fee and have access to all the music they can listen to. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to download that music from Spotify through the service itself, though their ‘premium’ offering does allow for offline music and syncing on any mobile device that supports WiFi.

Waze

Waze is an interesting one. It’s basically a realtime ‘traffic map’ of whatever city you happen to be in at the time. Using the GPS system already built into most mobile phones, the platform keeps track of traffic congestion and patterns, as well as giving people who use the app the opportunity to report traffic accidents and ‘problem areas’ of a city’s transportation infrastructure to avoid. True, people in your city will have to be using the platform for it to do any good…but at the same time, it’s a rather excellent idea.

Oh, and it also offers Twitter integration on the iPhone.

Gmail

Yes, Gmail. Really, any email client has been using the cloud since the 90s. Think about it. You’ve a huge collection of digital, virtual messages, none of which actually exist on your hard drive, and you can use the email client to sent more virtual messages to other users. Again, inaccessible from the hard drive of whoever’s viewing them. Email – and the Internet itself, truth be told – has been making use of Cloud Computing before the term even existed.

Steam

I’ll take a moment to gush about Steam (again). By far the largest platform for the digital distribution of video games on the market, it’s parent company Valve has become one of the darlings of the game industry. Few people are willing to criticize the platform, which includes online savegame storage, ridiculously good sales, and the ability to download every single game of your library to whatever system you happen to log in on at the time. Seems like a pretty awesome deal, no?

More people should follow Valve’s example, if you ask me.

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