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Apple May Have Snapped Up iCloud.com

Om Malik — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:21:24 +0000

What will be the name of Apple’s cloud-based music service? No one knows. However, a tipster of mine says that it might be iCloud. Why? Because the Cupertino-based computing giant is rumored to be a likely buyer of the domain iCloud.com.

Until recently, iCloud.com was a domain name and a storage-as-a-cloud service owned by Linkoping, Sweden-based desktop-as-a-service company, Xcerion. Xcerion’s iCloud service has just been rebranded to CloudMe, and the company acquired the CloudMe.com domain on April 5, 2011.

My source, who is familiar with the company, says that Xcerion has sold the domain to Apple for about $4.5 million. Xcerion hasn’t responded to my queries as yet. At the time of writing, the Whois database showed Xcerion as the owner of iCloud.

According to reports, Apple is building a cloud-based service and is in touch with large record labels as it plans for a service to compete with Amazon’s Cloud Locker. Of course, Apple might have acquired the name as an option and it could use it to build a whole different offering called iCloud.

Updated: Today, John Paczkowski has confirmed after talking to sources that Apple bought the domain though no clarity on the price. The way his piece reads – it is confirmation from Apple PR.

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iCloud Adds Collaborative Features, But Browser Support Lacking

Simon Mackie — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:00:55 +0000

Xcerion’s iCloud, a free “web OS” that we’ve covered previously, launches into public beta today with some interesting collaboration features, although limited cross-browser support will be off-putting for many.

iCloud is an impressive web application. It’s an OS-like desktop, complete with storage space and a Microsoft Office-like application suite, that runs in a browser that you can access from anywhere. It’s a very slick-looking app and functions very well. Applications run snappily, and everything operates as you would expect based on using your desktop OS.

According to Xcerion, iCloud’s primary market is Internet cafe users, but with this release the company has introduced some interesting collaboration features that could be useful for web workers, particularly if you find yourself using more than one machine. You can share calendars and to-do items with teammates and, thanks to built-in social networking features, see when your colleagues are online and chat with them. Most impressive is the ability to simultaneously collaborate on a single shared document, with multiple people making edits.

iCloud’s XML backend is clever, and because the applications execute locally on your machine rather than on a remote server, they appear much more responsive than other “web OS” offerings that we’ve seen before.

Xcerion envisions a future in which you can access your iCloud desktop from anywhere, including mobile devices. The idea of completely virtualized applications is very appealing: I would love to be able to leave my documents, web pages, etc. open on a virtual desktop and be able to return to them later from any device, anywhere. Unfortunately, though, that vision doesn’t match the current reality.

Disappointingly, iCloud is only completely supported in Internet Explorer. Firefox support is in “early alpha” and works OK in my tests, but the company says that you shouldn’t rely on it, and as of yet, other browsers are totally unsupported. For that reason I (and I suspect many of you) won’t be taking up iCloud just yet.

What do you think of the idea of a “web OS”?

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Use Starbucks card, get free WiFi deal starts today

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:13:33 +0000

At the risk of blasphemy, I’m writing this from my home office drinking a mug of WaWa coffee that I brewed myself. My well intentioned plan of rising early and hitting a local Starbucks to see if they indeed launched their new WiFi offering went amok, so I’ll have to rely on the source. Let me see… yup! Right on the Starbucks website, they now detail the plan. Here’s the skinny for those that prefer Skim Milk:

Register a Starbucks pre-paid card online
Use it at least one time per month for a purchase or a re-charge
Get two consecutive hours of WiFi use in a single session
Starbucks is working on allowing multiple sessions… stay tuned
Your free two hours is good every day for 30 days after you’ve used / re-charged your Starbucks card
You will need to agree to receive e-mails from AT&T and you will create an ID / password with AT&T

Not a bad deal if you hit Starbucks even once per month for a purchase. I still may get out to my Quakertown location later today to see if they’re up and running. Some locations might not be ready yet, so be advised…

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Web-Based "Cloud OS" Aims for App Developers and Users

Samuel Dean — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:25 +0000

While the idea of an Internet-based operating system has already been explored through offerings such as YouOS and EyeOS , Xcerion, a small Swedish company, is taking an ambitious new approach to the idea. The company’s XML Internet Operating System/3 Beta (XIOS/3) is best described as a “Cloud OS” and Web 2.0 service. I’ve been testing it on a Windows machine, loading XIOS/3 in Internet Explorer (you can’t yet load it in Firefox), and it generally looks promising.

XIOS/3 has many of the properties of an operating system (though strictly speaking it is more of a Web-hosted environment), and is targeted at online application development, collaboration, and sharing of free applications. It is XML-based, and uses AJAX to connect to back-end servers. If application developers begin to collaborate using it, it could become a promising new open-source platform and a flexible way for web workers to get jobs done.

XIOS/3’s desktop looks very much like the desktop that a Windows user is familiar with, complete with a sidebar on the right that resembles Google Sidebar (a clock, a weather widget, etc.), and tabs along the left that take you to programs you can run in the environment, a search engine, an XML editor for working with applications, and more.

Xcerion is backed financially by former Microsoft executives, and reports have already surfaced that XIOS/3 may begin to compete with Google and Microsoft in delivering numerous types of Web applications and services. For the time being, I see it as more of a Web 2.0 service that allows for collaboration on sophisticated online applications and sharing of those applications. It’s also in a limited beta version right now, so you need to apply to test the beta.

XIOS/3 allows you to do work offline and then automatically synch the work up with your data and applications when you go online. If I open up, say, a simple cash flow application and start changing values in the underlying data, then I go open another browser, my changes to the data will be reflected in the view in the second browser. In this way, web workers could easily collaborate on transaction-based, database-centric applications.

XIOS/3 also allows you to save data on your own hard drives, if you wish, or it can be stored online. Also, applications execute locally, so XIOS/3 is faster to use than some of the other Internet-based operating system offerings. It also has a very clean and easy XML editor.

To a large extent, the success of XIOS/3 will depend on coders building and sharing applications with it—just as standard operating systems have always depended on developers for success. You can find many screenshots of XIOS/3 and forthcoming applications at Xcerion’s home page. There is also a video demo and other information at the company’s blog.

The business model is to offer XIOS/3 and applications for it for free. In my own use, I found it stable, intuitive and good for collaborative application development. But what Excerion absolutely needs next, as is true in the Linux world and throughout the open-source arena, is enthusiastic developers.

Would you consider using a collaborative, browser-based spin on an operating system? Have you used any of the other Web-based OS offerings?

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Limelight Kicks Ass in IPO

Liz Gannes — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:39:02 +0000

Limelight Networks, the content delivery network focused on digital media and provider to many of the companies we write about, began trading on NASDAQ today. The Tempe, Arizona-based company sold 16 million shares of common stock for $15 to raise $240 million, and today closed up nearly 50 percent at $22.18.

At times the share price had jumped as much as 62 percent, according to Bloomberg. Limelight lost $3.71 million last year on sales of $64.3 million, but it has seen tremendous growth as more and more web video platforms and viewers are coming online.

Limelight faces a slew of new competitors, like Level 3 and Internap’s Vitalstream, who are ramping up their CDN operations. It has also been involved in a legal tussle with Akamai, the established market leader in the CDN industry.

The success of Limelight’s IPO amidst this fierce competition is more proof that CDNs are hot, and investors are willing to pay a premium price for these companies. Today Akamai also saw a boost from the market interest in CDNs, rising $3.37 to close the day at $45.60 a share.

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Convergence 2.0

Om Malik — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 16:03:43 +0000

Christian Lindholm, director of multimedia applications over at Nokia has some interesting thoughts on the whole concept of convergence and the role mobile phones will play in the evolution of a highly digital and mobile lifestyle. Lets call it convergence 2.0. He found evidence of it at the CeBit.

bq. Integrating voice, image, video and text is becoming possible in an uncompromised form factor known to the broad audience as a mobile phone.

Why because he thinks with tiny flash memory cards, MP3 players, cameras and videocams all being bundled into phones, the only thing missing is the high speed connection and even that is around the corner via 3G technologies.

bq. The integration of Wi-Fi totally changes to nature of a laptop. Laptops are now powerful enough and small enough to really become communications tools

Yeah we knew that and don’t need a phone guy to tell us about these things.

bq. The Home server, rebranded as an entertainment center is the future of the Home PC. Intel was showing off the “Kessler” concept which integrated PC, Wi-Fi, RAID and lots of other technology I still do not understand, but it left a permanent impression on me.

This is convergence 2.0, only I personally think the PC guys are still thinking of it as a PC. Intel and Microsoft despite their billions, and their allies like morons at HP, Dell and Gateway are going to fall flat on their face. I would have loved to hear Christian’s comments on the User Interfaces in phones and user Interfaces in the PC world, and what impact do they have in adoption and usage.

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