Google Buys PushLife In Cloud Music Combat With Amazon

Google's PushLife buy comes on the heels of Amazon's release of Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, a cloud storage offering and cloud music streaming play that lets users store music, photos and files in the cloud and access them from any device regardless from which device it was purchased.

Toronoto-based PushLife announced its acquisition by Google in a letter posted on its Web site. While Google did not reveal the details of the PushLife acquisition, Canadian news site StartupNorth estimated that Google paid around $25 million for PushLife.

"When we started our journey in 2008, we set out to build immersive mobile experiences for people to play, organize, share and purchase digital content across multiple devices," PushLife wrote on its Web site. "But we think there's a lot more work to do in the mobile space, like improving the way applications look and making them easier to use. And as Google is driving innovation on the mobile Web across a variety of areas, we thought joining the company would be a perfect fit."

According to PushLife, the company will join Google's engineering team in Canada and will work "on building better mobile applications for all users."

Toronto-based PushLife was founded three years ago by a former employee of BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM). PushLife's software let users buy online digital content like music, video and other media and sync it across mobile platforms, including Apple iOS, Google Android and BlackBerry.

Google has long been expected to launch a cloud-based music service on its Google Android platform. The rumor of Google's cloud music plans intensified in recent weeks with Amazon's launch of Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Last month, hackers reportedly uncovered evidence that Google was planning a cloud-based locker service and found a software update that enabled music streaming from the cloud for a future version of Google Android.

Along with Amazon, Google faces stiff competition from digital music pioneer Apple iTunes, which is also expected to have a cloud-based music service in short order.