Would you like a mSpot music streaming private beta invite?

Betanews has 500 of them. One could be yours.

The mSpot private beta opened today. The concept is simple: Your music available, anytime, anywhere on anything. The streaming service initially offers clients for Mac, PC and Android 2.1 phones, so mSpot is still working on the anywhere. Perhaps that's good reason for the private beta.

I've been asserting for years that the future of computing will be cloud services delivering anytime, anywhere access to anything -- with the primary emphasis shifting to mobile devices. In the 1980s, computing and informational relevance shifted from the mainframe to the PC because of lower costs and broader availability. The same factors are driving the shift away from the traditional PC client-server model to mobile devices and cloud services.

With mSpot, users sync their music library to the cloud, then stream it back to any device supporting the service. I like the concept, but a full-streaming, no-upload service would be better -- where users verify ownership that unlocks music already available in the cloud. Of course, music licensing restrictions limit what mSpot can do. Such an approach would better align with mSpot's movie streaming service, which I see as being a much more accessible anytime, anywhere, on-anything service; granted there are additional fees.

My music library is over 80GB, which would mean paying for upgrades. How large is your music library? The private beta limit is supposed to be 2GB. Services don't always strictly enforce such limits during private betas. We'll see what mSpot does. The service also syncs playlists, which is a must-have feature for a service like this one.

With that brief introduction, I send you off to mSpot. Just go to the Website and use "betanews" to register for the private beta, which is scheduled to lift sometime in the second half of June. Happy streaming -- well, for the lucky, first 500 registrants.