Google rolls out online storage services

Web search and internet services company Google Inc. has started selling online storage capacity, a service aimed at users with large picture, music or video file collections.

Google said the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa and the e-mail service Gmail. The storage will soon also work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the company's online word processing and spreadsheet applications — services the company has rolled out tocompete with Microsoft Corp.'s market-leading Office software.

Gmail users currently get nearly three gigabytes of free storage, while Picasa users get one gigabyte. The expanded storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a particular service.

Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL already offer unlimited free storage for their e-mail services.

Mountain View-based Google has been adding about 145 megabytes of free storage to each e-mail account annually — a pace that would raise storage limits to more than 3.25 GB in three years. Instead of matching Yahoo and AOL, Google decided instead to charge for additional storage to users with extraordinary needs. Most users, however, don't even come close to reaching the free storage limits.

The annual prices are $20 USforsix gigabytes of online storage, $75 for 25 GB, $250 for 100 GB and $500 for 250 GB.