Apples iCloud Services, A Central File Depot For Your Media!

Steve Jobs took a break from his medical leave today in order to reveal the details on Apple’s new iCloud service. The iCloud is Apples solution for connecting all your devices to a central repository for all your media files. This concept allows you to “store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly." Apple also claims that the free suite of iCloud services will work seamlessly with your iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac or PC. You will get 5GB of space for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream don't count as part of the 5GB limit.

The expected part of this service was the ability to have all your purchased music in iTunes available across all your devices and computers for no additional cost, new music purchases are pushed to all devices at the same time. "It shows the history of all the songs you've bought on any device. I can download any song to any device by pushing that little cloud button," said Jobs.
But what if you ripped your music from CD’s or downloaded them from a torrent? The iTunes match service will search through your music library and replace songs with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if it can match the song to one of the 18 millon songs available on iTunes store. If not then no harm. This service will cost $24.99 and a free beta version is available now.

The unexpected element from today’s announcement was the ability to not only put your music in the cloud but any content you want to share among your devices.

“"iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all your devices. When you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all your devices. Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps already take advantage of iCloud Storage. Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backup—which is more amazing since the storage for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesn't count towards this 5GB total.”

The photo specific version of this known as ‘Photo Stream’ automatically uploads photos to the cloud and pushed them to all your devices and computers.

In the fall when iCloud ships there will be a pricing structure released for users that wish to purchase additional space in the cloud

One final service in the iCloud workd was the backup service allowing you to securely backup you iOS devices to the cloud over Wi-Fi when you recharge your device.

"We've added wireless backup to the cloud. Once daily, we're gonna back up a lot of your important content to the cloud. If you ever get a new phone, everything will be loaded onto that phone automatically," said Jobs

Call of Duty Elite a cash grab ?

Activision Looks For Another Few Bucks With Call of Duty Elite

Activision today has released some details on the new Call of Duty Elite service. With more than 30 million people having played a "Call of Duty" game online this year, with the average player spending an impressive 170 hours a year they have an attentive audience all vying to be the best and now you can be better, for a fee. The new service will allow you to do the following:

1) Connect with people you want to play with
2) Compete in tournaments and events
3) Improve your gameplay with stats and strategy videos with tips for weapons and maps

They will allow users to test the new service for free with Call of Duty Black Ops with the focus of the service being the fall release of MW3. There is two levels of service with a free basic service and a premium one with a rumored $10 / month fee.

Playing on a PC you can already easily join your friends matches using steam and the stats are already available in black ops (although they may be more detailed which is to be determined). The real value to me seems to be in the tournament play (as all tips will be released online the day after it makes it to the Elite service). For console gamers these may indeed be features but why aren’t these already built in as a part of the games initial cost.

We have increasingly seen additional content (DLC’s) being released after a games release. The sad part as we saw with MW2 is that a majority of the content (if not all) was already created at the time of the games release but was left out so they could charge you for it later. To me this was a blatant cash grab of which this new Elite service is a further extension of. I wonder now though what will be new and exciting in MW3 that will justify the upgrade besides just having the pleasure of also paying a monthly fee. Battlefield 3 please do not follow the same route.
So what do you think?

Use the comment section below to let me know your thoughts, is Elite a cash grab or money well spent and a worthwhile addition ?

The release video for the Elite service below:

-

Apple Unveils Streaming Music Service iCloud

Apple has officially confirmed a cloud based music streaming service Apple iCloud. It will be officially unveiled at the WWDC keynote speech by Steve Jobs on June 6^th in San Francisco. In addition to the iCloud service we see a definite focus on software with releases of ‘Lion’ the eighth release of the Mac OSX as well as the iOS 5 which powers the mobile platform used by the iPod touch, iPad, and iPhone.

-

When Hot Wheels Comes To Life!

Tanner Faust Broke the world record for a distance jump in a four-wheeled vehicle at the Indianapolis 500 on May 29th 2011 The jump broke former record holder Johnny Greaves' mark of 301 feet. The record breaking jump was set with a 10 story drop down 90 feet of orange track and flew 332 feet through the air."

Foust said: "You're basically going down a really poorly designed rollercoaster, because there are no guard rails... We accounted for everything you could imagine outside of the weather."