I have just being scanning through the new “For Your Desktop” apps for Google Chrome, though I had to do this via the Chromebook as Linux and Mac support it coming later.

One thought did cross my mind about this gradual move to the cloud, how to bridge the gap between the user and the cloud? At the moment my largest hurdle is the simple of task of getting all my local data onto the cloud. With sub 300GB of data, even selecting portions of it to upload is just not something my ISP provider is going to facilitate without throttling my connection.

Thus my idea to bridge the divide, is what if Google was to deploy pop-up kiosks/stores with superfast connections to their cloud. You bring along a USB device, plug in and watch it vaccum up your data. You can then go home and manage/organise it. Locations would have to be picked based on a combination  of demand and were the connection speeds could be facilitated.  Maybe go crazy and tether a Project Loon balloon over one or two high profile locations. While at the kiosk people could also kick the tyres of various Google hardware and services available.

Crazy!?