Apple iCloud Purchase Hints At Cloud Intentions

Apple has reportedly acquired the the domain “icloud.com” from a Swedish company, which it aims to use as the name of its new online music and storage locker service.

Last Wednesday GigaOM’s blogger Om Malik revealed that according to his own tipster, Apple paid Swedish company Xcerion $4.5 million (£2.7 million) for the icloud.com domain name.

Xcerion had been using the iCloud domain for its own storage as a cloud service, but on 5 April the Swedish outfit acquired the CloudMe.com domain and consequently rebranded its service as CloudMe.

iCloud.com

Then John Paczkowski on The Digital Daily blog (on the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital site) also reported that Apple had acquired icloud.com, according to “sources in position to know.”

Robin Wauters of TechCrunch also claimed to have been tipped off that Apple purchased the domain name.

Yet despite these reports, as of Monday afternoon the icloud.com domain continues to redirect users to Xcerion’s CloudMe site.

And to make matters more interesting is the fact that the WHOIS registration record for icloud.com still shows Xcerion as the legal owner of the domain.

Neither Xcerion or Apple have so far confirmed the rumours at the time of writing.

Of course Apple has in the past purchased domain names, but that does not guarantee it will end up using it as a brand name.

For example back in December 2009, many months before Apple officially revealed its iPad tablet to the world, the company purchased the iSlate.com domain name, leading to a frenzy that iSlate would be the official name of Apple’s tablet offering.

Dirty Data

But if the rumours are true, and Apple has actually purchased iCloud, what is it intending to use it for?

Well Apple is widely believed to be on the verge of launching a cloud-based storage and online music streaming service.

This hunch was reinforced last month when Apple poached a cloud executive from Microsoft. It hired Kevin Timmons, general manager of Microsoft’s Data Centre Services unit.

“Kevin Timmons, general manager of Datacentre Services, has decided to pursue other career opportunities and is no longer working at Microsoft,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a 15 April email to eWEEK.

And it seems that Apple’s cloud-based services could be based at its new 505,000-square-foot data centre in North Carolina.

Last month Greenpeace warned that Apple was set to produce some of the dirtiest data in the world in North Carolina, because it was not forthcoming about the current or expected impacts of its online products.