Word that Apple bought the icloud.com domain from Xcerion surfaced Thursday, and now another anonymous source has stepped forward to back up that report. The new source claimed that Apple has, in fact, bought the domain, but didn’t offer up any confirmation about the alleged US$4.5 million price tag.
Apple bought icloud.com? Seems likely.
News of the second unnamed source comes courtesy of AllThingsD. GigaOM offered up its own anonymous source earlier who also said the deal set Apple back over $4 million.
Adding a little more credibility to both reports, Xcerion has rebranded its icloud online storage service as CloudMe, and the icloud.com domain redirects to cloudme.com
Assuming both reports are legit, Apple may be planning on using the domain with its rumored online media storage service that’s expected to launch as a new MobileMe feature. The feature is expected to allow MobileMe subscribers to store music they purchase from the iTunes Store and other content from their iTunes library online, and then listen to that content from their computer or iOS devices.
Apple and Xcerion aren’t commenting on the alleged icloud.com domain purchase.
12 Comments Leave Your Own
I hope that they use a name other than CloudMe. There are some negative connotations in the word cloud; A state of gloom, worry, confusion and so on.
MobiCloud?
ClouMe?
CloMob?
CloMoMe?
MoCloMe?
CMM?
VapourWear?
CloudMob?
How about just MobileMe?
I would need to think about it, but there has to be some catchier name than iCloud.
Of course I never liked MobileMe. Seemed to narcissistic. I still call it .Mac
MobileCloud might not be bad.
Apple could have adapted the phrase “Me so horny,” from which to make “MeSoCloudy.”
But, you know…, I never liked the word “cloud” to reference a process which simply amounts to personal or business services subscribed from, and stored on, a remote server.
Cloud conjures up an amorphous shape, ever-changing, and ill defined. This is what troubles me. If the name of an object helps to determine its success, then this is the very wrong term to use.
The only useful thing that “cloud” signifies is a seclusion at a location found up there somewhere in the same way that electronic data first has to go up there first, then downward from a transmission line—from a satellite perhaps—, descending toward the client.
But there are way more interesting phenomenon than clouds up there in they sky, many evoking a focus, a desirable trait. We have heaven, sun, stars, planets, and asteroids. And then we have processes such as thunder, lightning, rain, snow, sleet, wind, hale, and tornadoes. We also have specular phenomenon such as rainbows, moon swirls, and earthquake lights on the lower level. And then we have newly-discovered electrical thingies such as sprites, blue jets, and elves.
Surely some technologically oriented wordsmith could have coined something other than the vagueness of “cloud.”
Agreed. It brings up connections to “blue sky conjecture”, “wandering around in a fog”, or even “clouding ones thoughts”. My data is too critical to keep in something as insubstantial and prone to evaporating as a cloud. Of course as Amazon showed last week, Clouds ARE prone to disappearing. Maybe the metaphor is not that far off.
As to names for Apple cloud service.
What is above the clouds, beyond the pie-in-the-sky of transient clouds that the competition offers? The Firmament? The stars, Polaris?
“I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”
Ether?
As in the Luminiferous Ether that was supposed to fill all of space and allow light to fill every corner. It also would fit as the signal runs over Ethernet Cabling.
Good one! We are on a roll, we will make the Welkin ring!
iWelkin?
Then the kit you got when you signed up for it would have to be
The iWelkin Wagon
Good one!
And it’s open mike night here at the MacObserver Comedy Club.
Hi Geoduck,
Since the remote server is basically a data disk, at least for now, and iDisk is dated, and one of its synonyms is platter, the URL could be called <iplatter.com.>
The jingle/slogan could be updated to “We Know How to Serve Mankind.”
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