Given our recent announcements, we wanted to reiterate how developers can integrate SkyDrive into their apps and devices, showcase a few of our favorite integrations and let people know about a few developer events we are sponsoring in Amsterdam, NYC and Las Vegas.

If you want breadth, it's all about the APIs, and Skydrive is getting there with these.

Passengers travelling on London Overground are to get free internet access after the body that runs the train network, London Overground Rail Operations Limited, signed a deal with The Cloud to roll out Wi-Fi at its stations.

The contract will give travellers one hour of free online access every day, at any station on the network.

The Wi-Fi rollout, which will cover all 56 London overground train stations, will begin in the summer and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Nobody outside London wants Wi-Fi at stations, right? (And say hello to Guardian Government Computing, a great showcase for content aimed at professionals.)

Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of H.P.’s cloud services… did not say how much the computing services would cost, but said “we are not coming at this at ‘8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents.’” Amazon recently cut its prices, and its lowest cost computing is 2 cents per hour, though with extra features it can cost more. While Amazon tends largely to have a self-service model, Hewlett-Packard’s cloud will also offer more personalized sales and service, Mr. Singh said.

H.P. also plans to offer a number of tools for developers to use popular online software languages, like Ruby, Java, and PHP, as well as ways for customers to provision and manage their workloads remotely. The service will also include an online store where people can offer or rent software for use in the Hewlett-Packard public cloud.

Hard to see quite who HP is going for, though. If they don't go with Amazon, wouldn't those customers go with Microsoft?

"Which is which? Acer just showed off its AcerCloud service, something that already sounded suspiciously like Apple's iCloud. Even the "PicStream" element sounds a lot like Photo Stream. Still not convinced? Acer basically ripped off Apple's slide wholesale, outside of the font, which is a simulacrum of Apple's font of yore. Check out both slides below."

The slides are indeed a ripoff, though it's hard to argue that the idea of having a cloud storage system is unique to Apple. Although the key point here is that this isn't connected to Google, and it's like Apple's iCloud in that it abstracts the file system away - you have photos and you have documents.

Mary Jo Foley: "What does this mean? Customers who want to run Windows or Linux “durably” (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so. Microsoft is planning to launch a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test-build of the persistent VM capability in the spring of 2012, according to partners briefed by the company.<br />"The new persistent VM support also will allow customers to run SQL Server or SharePoint Server in VMs, as well. And it will enable customers to more easily move existing apps to the Azure platform."<br />What this means is that Microsoft is really serious about the cloud business.

"Mugeda is a cloud based HTML5 animation platform, where you can create, share, and publish organic HTML5 animation contents, all in your browser, without any download or installation. The created animation content can be used in a wide range of applications like ads, games, tutorials, cartoons, and can be viewed on any devices including PC, smartphone, and tablets."

Awesome.

The "what's in" easily outweighs the "what's missing". Azure now looks like a very comprehensive service.

Fair enough on the headline. However, here's what follows: "In what is perhaps the most boring piece of tech news to come out of this week, German software giant SAP has today announced that it will buy the US-based SuccessFactors, a company that “helps organizations align strategy with objectives and manage people performance to ensure execution & results,” IN THE CLOUD, OF COURSE."

Seriously, TechCrunch? A company that's crucial to many peoples' and companies' fulfilment systems buys another one for a serious amount of (putative) money - it's a shares, not cash, deal - and you call it a snooze? (via @ciaranj on Twitter)

Quick comparison of the four services on offer in the US.

"Microsoft has to have a conflict regarding how to proceed with mobile. On one hand, it is first and foremost a software company. Job One is to sell software and its primary focus is supporting Windows–and probably even more so on Windows Phone 7 where Microsoft is competing fiercely with iOS and Android.

"And as a company, Microsoft surely wants users to buy Windows phones, but it has to know that at present their market share is fairly minuscule. That’s why when it comes a popular enterprise software package like SharePoint, it has to be conflicted.

"Should it support iOS and Android versions of its more popular titles, and admit people might not be using Windows phones, or should it ignore these important rivals in spite of their huge market shares?"

"Apple appears to be working on a process to allow iTunes users with more than one Apple ID to somehow “merge” them into a single account. The ability to do so will be critical to the early success of the company’s new iCloud service, since it relies on Apple IDs for syncing iTunes purchases and other data."<br />
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Could get messy.

Google App Engine has changed its pricing model. "Pay for what you use has changed. From an abstract resource driven model, where pricing is pegged to actual CPU usage, GAE is moving to an instance driven model, in the Amazon style, where pricing is pegged to the fully burdened cost of real physical assets (see the FAQ for details). Estimates range from between 2x to 10+x cost increases for running on GAE with the new pricing scheme.<br />
"Dead easy has changed. Pricing is just part of the story. GAE still delivers on its zero platform maintenance pledge, but much more pressure is being put on programmers to navigate the new pricing model and recode to a complex moving target in order to minimize costs. It's no longer that simple to use. Work has shifted to clever programming."

Ed Bott searches the licence agreements so you don't have to.

You read the headline and say "Wow! This can be done that fast??" Then you read the first paragraph: "Don't get too excited: unless your music collection's already in the cloud somewhere, this isn't going to help you (with one possible exception, discussed below). In my case, that was Dropbox. The majority of my music - audiobooks and not yet unlocked DRM'd iTunes content excepted - was up in the cloud already."<br />
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Grrrrr.

"The one thing that pretty much anyone–whether they’re a politician, a member of the Washington bureaucracy, or a humble taxpayer–can agree on is that when a dollar is spent, it should be done effectively and productively. Kundra’s job is to whip government agencies into shape around IT spending, and make them think more like private companies in planning that spending.<br />
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"A keystone of his plan is to push federal agencies to embrace, where possible and appropriate, the cost-savings and efficiency that come from cloud computing."

"Today, Microsoft announced Windows Azure Toolkits for Devices, consisting of assets for Windows Phone, iOS and a preview of tools for Android.<br />
"Using the toolkits, developers can use the cloud to accelerate the creation of applications on the major mobile platforms. Companies, including Groupon, are taking advantage to create a unified approach to cloud-to-mobile user experience."<br />
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That's right - Microsoft cloud tools for Android.

"The latest rumor to emerge from the Google campus is that the company’s much anticipated music service is just about at the end of their rope with the major label licensing process. A source close to the negotiations characterizes the search giant as “disgusted” with the labels, so much so that they are seriously considering following Amazon’s lead and launching their music could service without label licenses. I’m told that, though very remote and my guess is that it would never come to this, Google may go so far as to shut down the music service project altogether."<br />
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Ironically, the fact that when Steve Jobs negotiated with the record companies in 2002 about licensing sales Apple was miniscule may have made his task far easier. If Apple were to go to the music business now and seek to license songs, it would probably have a tougher time. As Googie is discovering.