Google Drive Putting the Smackdown on Dropbox?

The search engine giant might finally have something to celebrate.

While Google

has repeatedly failed to crack two key markets -- music downloads and social networking -- the company might be on to something huge with its cloud-based storage initiative. According to Trip Chowdhry, the Managing Director of Equity Research at Global Equities Research, Google Drive's signups continue to be "very strong." "Converged view is that the freemium model has 5% conversions, much better than Dropbox, which has [a] conversions rate of 2%," Chowdhry wrote in an incremental update on Google. "Converged view for better conversions on Google Drive is the lower price. We met a few attendees who were reaching the upper limit of free storage on Dropbox but moved to Google Drive directly with the paid offering, thereby completely skipping the free offering." In his update, Chowdhry also spoke about Google's alliance with Visa

. "Google, along with its partners, Visa and Samsung, will be launching new NFC-based Android Phones for [the] London Olympics," he wrote. "These phones will be used for check-in, payments using Google Wallet, etc., and [are] also [able] to reduce the credit card fraud by 80%." Further, Chowdhry spoke about the mobile ecosystem, which he believes is continuing to gravitate toward Apple and Google. "We doubt if there will be any third slot left," he said. "Developer interest in Windows Phone is almost non-existent. Increasingly we feel that 95% of mobile market will be shared between Apple and Google, and in the leftover market we may see Microsoft

Windows and Research in Motion

." With regard to Apple, Chowdhry added that the company "continues to invest heavily into its North Carolina Data Center." "Converged view is that Hewlett-Packard

is sequentially shipping more cloud servers to Apple Data Centers," said Chowdhry. "About 90% of [the] Apple North Carolina Data Center is HPQ." Apple isn't the only one using Hewlett-Packard technology. "Facebook

also continues to invest heavily into its Oregon Data Center," Chowdhry continued. "Converged view is that HPQ is sequentially shipping more cloud servers to Facebook Data Centers. More than 90% of [the] Facebook Data Center is HPQ, as HPQ was the first large server provider to conform to [the] Facebook Open Compute model."