iCloud

Jun 6 2011

iCloud Feature – Photo Stream

With iOS 5, your phone became that much more powerful as a camera.  First we finally have a hardware switch to take pictures (Volume Up), second the camera app is instant along with being able to launch it while the phone is locked.  There’s a slew of other features, but the biggest one is Photo Stream.  This free iCloud service will upload your last thousand photos to iCloud where they are stored for 30 days.  This is long enough for your other devices to pick them up including the Apple Tv.  If you put a photo inside an album then it’s saved indefinitely up to our account limit which is currently set to 5Gb, but I’m sure you will be able to buy more space.

Why is this cool?  We’ll ever take a photo on your iPhone and wanted to show people on your iPad or your Mac?  Yep that’s why it’s such a big freaking deal.

By Corey • iCloud, iOS • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Jun 6 2011

iCloud Features for iTunes

There’s a lot of features that are coming with iOS 5 it’s almost impossible to tell which one is the best.  Out of the list I would say no longer needing a computer to activate your iPhone and iTunes Wireless Sync are at the top of my list.  With iCloud if you purchase a song through iTunes on your Mac, it will also download to your iPhone, iPad, or other sync’d devices as well.  This is a welcome feature, and you can have up to 10 devices to Sync to.  Which is 2 devices per member of a 5 person family.  Your music is also stored in the cloud.  I had guessed right that Apple would not be doing any streaming as that would of caused some angst with cellular carriers, and probably would of made the CEO’s of several carriers cry.

Another great feature is that you can access your purchase history and re-download songs finally.

Finally there’s iTunes Match.  This will save people some time.  iTunes Match will check your library and match those songs against a database of Apple songs, if a CD you ripped in 128k Mp3 then if there’s a match for those songs, Apple will copy a 256k AAC file up into your iCloud library and you can sync that back down to other devices.  Not only does this not kill your broadband caps, it saves you a ton of time, although you will have to manually upload any song that’s not matched.  Currently this is a fee service for 24.99 a year which is pretty cheap along, but there is a limit of 25,000 songs.  Most will not be anywhere near that limit.

You can read more by clicking here.

By Corey • iCloud, iTunes • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Jun 6 2011

Apple Letter to Mobile Me Customers – Mobile Me Ends June 30th 2012

Just received this in my inbox.  Interesting, do people keep their me.com addresses?

Important information for MobileMe members.
Dear MobileMe member, 

We’d like to share some exciting news with you about iCloud — Apple’s upcoming cloud service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to your devices. iCloud integrates seamlessly with your apps, so everything happens automatically. Available this fall, iCloud is free for iOS 5 and OS X Lion users.

What does this mean for you as a MobileMe member?

When you sign up for iCloud, you’ll be able to keep your MobileMe email address and move your mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service.

Your MobileMe subscription will be automatically extended through June 30, 2012, at no additional charge. After that date, MobileMe will no longer be available.

When iCloud becomes available this fall, we will provide more details and instructions on how to make the move. In the meantime, we encourage you to learn more about iCloud.

Sincerely,

The MobileMe Team

 

By Corey • iCloud, Mobile Me • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Jun 6 2011

Me.Com Renewals moved to June 6th

After seeing some reports of people having refunds for their mobile me subscriptions, I logged in to make sure my CC info was good since I moved, and I noticed my renewal was set to June 6th.  That’s probably not a coincidence I’m pretty sure (I’ve had it for quite awhile) that my renewal was never in June.  Gotta check my CC and see when it’s normally charged.   Just another hint that iCloud is involved in multiple aspects of Apple Services.

 

By Corey • iCloud, MobileMe • 3 • Tags: , ,

WWDC Prediction Report

Jun 3 2011

WWDC Prediction Report

So what do we expect from WWDC this year?  We know 3 things so far,  IOS 5, Lion, and iCloud.  These three things will take up and excuse the phrase the lions share of what goes on at WWDC.  Other less notable things would likely be questions from developers about the Lodsys debacle, we may also see new Airport and Time Capsule announcements tied to iCloud.  Lets move through the rumors.

More →

By Corey • iCloud, iPhone/Touch, OS X • 0 • Tags: , ,

Jun 3 2011

Apple Reportedly Pays Labels 100-150 Million

It looks like money talks when  you want to get licenses to do cool things with your shiny new cloud that the other clouds are not “Supposed” to be doing.  According to this Appolicious report Apple paid some good money to get permission to do what I still consider anyone’s best guess.  At minimum songs purchased through iTunes would be able to be streamed since Apple already has a list of what you purchased, the rest of your music, that’s anyone guess.  I would not be surprised if the labels imposed some sort of “Tax” on adding our ripped mp3′s or mp3′s purchased through say Amazon.  We’ll know Monday.

By Corey • iCloud • 0

Jun 3 2011

Apple to Compete with Netflix?

This is a reasonable question concerning Netflix.  iCloud is now the elephant in the room as nobody knows where Apple will really go with this.  Generally if Apple can stream content including movies and tv shows along with music for a reasonable price they will be put into direct competition with Netflix.  Over the years if Apple has seen a revenue stream being used on one of their products they have generally either copied it into their products or outright bought them out.  This could mark the first time that Apple actually competes with a revenue stream that exists on one of their products.  They did this with iBooks long after Kindle and other apps were available, and it looks like Apple will be able to do this with Netflix.

The interesting thing in this is that Apple could license more content than Netflix with revenue streams shared between Apple and the content holders.  This could mean iCloud has a bigger selection that includes TV shows that you can not find on Netflix, and things like Hulu could close up shop and just work through iCloud to provide access to their content.  It’s entirely possible because Apple is king when it comes to generating mobile revenue, they have a system in place with good DRM that works on the platform responsible for said revenue, and they have the cash reserves to pull something like this off.  Netflix however has not mentioned iCloud, they mention broadband caps as their #1 enemy.  What Apple can do is do direct peering with ISP’s across the country and route all that iCloud traffic directly to their datacenters.  Typically a company would go with some sort of content distribution network such as Akami to handle the load, but were talking about exabytes of data sitting in datacenters which would entice Apple to open even more mega datacenters to be their own content network.  Especially if they want to bring this to Europe and Asia, but for now I’m sure all the streaming and such will be for American customers only with a different subset of me.com features probably enabled world wide.

We’ll know next week, and what a ride that will be.

By Corey • iCloud • 0

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