Internet, Cloud Computing | featured news

Steve Jobs’ appearance Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference to introduce three new software products for Apple will be closely scrutinized by everyone from investors in the company’s stock to obsessed Apple fans who want to know how the King of Cupertino’s health is faring. Jobs, who went on medical leave in January, left chief operating officer Tim Cook in place to run things on a day-to-day basis. At the conference Monday, he (along with a team of Apple executives) will be introducing two new operating system software programs, as well as announcing iCloud, a widely anticipated service that lets users store content online.

It has been rumored that Google will announce a cloud music offering at the Google I/O conference on Tuesday. It seems that the live beta of Google Music has already leaked online.You can visit Google's Music Beta page and sign in using your Gmail or Google profile credentials. There's not much you can do yet, but you can request an invitation for when the service is up and running.

Sony said on Saturday it had removed off the Internet the personal details of 2,500 people that had been stolen by hackers and posted on a website.

Amazon.com issued a detailed account of last week's Web-services outage in which it apologized for the shutdown and offered a service credit to customers.

Apple may have purchased the domain iCloud.com from Sweden-based company Xcerion for a reported $4.5 million, according to GigaOM.

Companies are expected to reassess backup and recovery after the interruption at Amazon Web Services.

Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon's servers and play them via the web or Android.

Amazon.com, apart from being a major online retailer of books, DVDs, music, games, apparel, and other merchandise, also has a small business of providing cloud and other Web services. It offers Web services like cloud computing and cloud storage service offerings, in which it competes with bigger players like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Amazon also owns and operates websites such as Audible.com, IMDB.com, and Shelfari.com.

As Microsoft moves into the cloud with Web-based versions of its Office suite of applications, Google has been beefing up Google Docs to stay one step ahead. The Big G has just made it much easier to share documents online through the service's online document editor, Google Docs.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc, a making it the largest city in the nation to have made such a move. Welcome to the cloud.