Apple Sued for Calling iCloud

Apple reportedly spent $4.5 million buying the iCloud.com domain off of Sweden’s Xcerion before the grand unveiling of its iCloud storage locker last week, but evidently it neglected to pay off a penny ante VoIP outfit in Phoenix called iCloud Communications. So iCloud Communications sued Apple last Thursday for willful trademark infringement, unfair competition and injury to its business reputation.

It wants an injunction. It wants Apple’s promotional material destroyed. It wants damages. It wants Apple to forfeit its iCloud profits. It wants attorney’s fees.

It claims people will be confused. It claims they’re both in the same line of work. It claims “the goods and services with which Apple intends to use the “iCloud” mark are identical to or closely related to the goods and services that have been offered by iCloud Communications under the iCloud Marks since its formation in 2005” – and that “due to the worldwide media coverage given to and generated by Apple’s announcement of its ‘iCloud’ services and the ensuring saturation advertising campaign pursued by Apple, the media and the general public have quickly come to associate the mark ‘iCloud’ with Apple, rather than iCloud Communications.”

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Why Apple scrapped MobileMe for iCloud

As Apple gets ready for the fall launch of iCloud, its brand-new Internet service for Mac and Windows, it seems only right to mark (if not exactly mourn) the passing of MobileMe, one of the rare product flops Apple has seen in recent years. While there was much to praise about MobileMe, there were too many problems -- both real and perceived -- that ultimately doomed the service.

What went wrong with Apple's pioneering Web services infrastructure? Why did Apple believe that its only option was to demolish the MobileMe brand? In part, it was a simple matter of established pattern. As we saw with MobileMe's predecessors, iTools (2000-2002) and .Mac (2002-2008), when Apple is ready to move on, these services simply cease to exist. MobileMe is on the same path, despite its being granted an unprecedented year to wave goodbye.

MobileMe featured several elegant-looking Web-based applications including Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, and offered corporate-style sync functionality to all users. Apple also threw in 20GB of online storage, the ability to synchronize browser bookmarks, an online photo gallery for all computers and devices, and more. The service also functioned as a Web host, specifically interoperable with Apple's iWeb, itself on the slow road to oblivion.

Despite its valuable features, the technical problems it eventually solved, and the improvements made to the service over time, MobileMe never was able to command the esteem of the Mac community. Here are some of the reasons why.

1. MobileMe could not recover from a miserable debut
No doubt, products have survived a worse rollout and managed to prosper. But MobileMe's debut debacle was no perception-versus-reality distortion field. MobileMe (aka ImmobileMe, MobileMess) collapsed on contact alongside an otherwise notable multiple product launches.

From the start, it was plagued with infuriating technical problems -- from syncing bugs that erased iPhone customer contact lists to a mail server crash that locked people out of their email accounts. These breakdowns forced Apple, at the dawn of the service, to apologize to its subscribers and make it up to them with a free 60-day subscription extension. Those events overshadowed the service from then on.

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iCloud, cloud computing services promise to change the way we use computers

Apple founder Steve Jobs announced a free service Monday that allows consumers to store vast amounts of music, video, photos and documents on the Web, one of several emerging “cloud” computing offerings that are diminishing the need for a computer.

Once a pioneer of the personal computer, Jobs forecast that his new iCloud service would replace the PC as the hub for people’s multimedia needs, making it far easier for them to gain access to their digital libraries on phones, tablets and a multitude of other devices that have an Internet connection.

“Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he said at a company conference in San Francisco. “We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device.”
The irony of Jobs’s statements was not lost on analysts who noted his role in putting a PC into nearly every household in the country.

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Apple Dives Back Into Cloud Computing

Despite a shaky track record when it comes to decentralized storage, Apple has announced plans to take another crack at the cloud computing market with iCloud.

Revealed at this morning's WorldWide Developer's Conference, the iCloud service "stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices," according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. This includes not just media files (photos, movies and music), but also a range of personal settings, as well as documents created in Apple productivity applications like Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

More impressively, the service will include no advertisements, and Jobs promises that syncing calendars, email and personal contacts across a user's range of iOS devices will be free, up to 5GBs.

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Apple iCloud: a beginner's guide

What is the 'cloud'?

Once, you would do your work on your personal computer and save it onto your hard drive. And there it would sit, accessible only to you (and maybe a few other select users on a local network), and could only be manipulated (edited) if you had the right software on your device. The cloud overcomes this limitation – all you need is connectivity (pretty much universal, with the internet), and a cloud provider (a company that facilitates access to the cloud or their data servers). This means that any computer which is connected to the internet (including mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets) is connected to all the same applications and files. In terms of online storage, it creates better conditions for collaborative work; for example, a change made to a Word document would be available to users on different computers because the information is synchronised across all computers. The need for carrying around physical storage devices is eliminated. Hundreds of millions of us already use the cloud everyday, to share photographs, music and video clips. It is, like love, all around. The cloud signals, by and large, the end of "stuff".


Where is all the information in the cloud actually stored?

The information in the cloud ranges from the personal but unimportant to the highly sensitive. So where is it all kept? If it is lost, can it be recovered? And is it secure? The data in the cloud exists on servers, and these are mirrored onto other servers to keep data secure and available. That way, if one cluster of servers falls over, then data is available from servers in another data centre or elsewhere in the same location. For example, Google's index is mirrored across thousands, if not millions of servers. So if your data was to be lost, it is more or less guaranteed that they would find it.
While it would be easy to find the information, it is no surprise that organisations do not willingly yield the details of where the physical servers are located. And why would they? No one wants to be held to ransom or attacked. Even so, if an attacker were to gain physical access to the servers, it is unlikely that they would gain any really useable data.

Uses of the cloud

Web-based email (like Gmail or Hotmail) has been acting in the cloud for a long time. People use their email accounts to back up the files on their personal computers – and this information can be held securely and indefinitely in the cloud. In addition to being a hugely successful online retailer, Amazon also provides cloud-computing services by renting out space on its powerful servers to customers worldwide. In April an Amazon cloud failure took out social-networking sites Foursquare, Reddit and Quora.

What is the iCloud?

It is, quite simply, a content-sharing service on the cloud. Sources from the music industry have indicated that Apple has signed up with the four major music labels – EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner Music, to provide a music-streaming service in the US. Some are suggesting that the iCloud is designed to be the new iTunes – in which music, videos, podcasts etc will be available for streaming.

What are the best cloud-based sites?

Dropbox.com and YouSendIt.com are just two of the most used cloud-based sites. Dropbox was created in 2007 by two MIT students who were "tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one computer". It's a free service that let you share your documents easily. YouSendIt.com allows you to store and send large files over the web.
Spotify is a music-streaming service launched in 2008. Previously free, it recently capped its free usage at 10 hours a month, with a premium membership allowing for unlimited listening at £9.99 a month. It has approximately 10 million users.
Amazon launched its cloud player in March, which gives users 5Gb of storage space to upload songs and play them from any number of Android devices.
Google Docs is a free web-based storage service. It allows users to create and edit text, spreadsheet and slide show documents in real time with other users. Google has also released Music Beta, a streaming service announced last month.

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Disney won't be a part of Apple's cloud-computing launch on Monday

When Apple announces its new iCloud initiative on Monday, one prominent content provider won’t be part of the iHoopla.

In an interview at the D9 digital conference last week in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Disney CEO Bob Iger said his company will not be part of Apple’s cloud-computing launch.

Apple’s initiative is rumored to be a streaming music service that would offer users the ability to store all their media in the cloud and have it made available to all of their devices.

It’s a concept that a lot of companies are finding attractive and possibly profitable as consumers increasingly expect to have their media available at all times and on as many devices as they might own.

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Will Apple’s iCloud Offer Movie And TV Show Streaming As Well As Music?

According to Cnet, we may see more that music streaming with Apple’s iCloud service in the future, as Apple are reported to be in talks with a number of movie and TV studios about bringing video streaming to their iCloud service.

It seems that this feature wont launch when iCloud is announced next week, as the report says there are a number of details that need to be ironed out with the studios in order to offer video streaming through Apple’s iCloud.

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Apple iCloud launching Monday 6 June

 

Apple has confirmed that it will be launching a cloud based music service on Monday 6 June to kick off it’s WWDC conference in San Francisco. In a press statement sent to Pocket-lint the company confirms that:? “Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address...
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