Apple joins the cloud race

In April, I wrote about Amazon.com's digital locker service that allows you to store your music in the cloud (read: Amazon's servers). About a month later, Google announced its version of the digital locker.

The rationale for digital lockers is that it gives your music ubiquity. You can access your music anywhere as long as there is Internet access.

With Amazon and Google in the digital locker race, it was just a matter of time before Apple would announce its answer to this hot new sector. And sure enough, it has done so.

Steve Jobs (left), the charismatic Apple chief who is battling illness, made an appearance at the Apple World Wide Developer's Conference this week to reveal details about iCloud.

But before we get into that, let's quickly look at two other important announcements at the WWDC 2011.

Firstly, there's Lion, the latest version of OS X, Apple's operating system for its computers. Apple's been so successful with iPads, iPods and iPhones in recent years, sometimes it's easy to forget that it still makes computers!

The interesting thing about Lion is that it borrows many of the best things about iOS, the operating system for iPads. For example, it supports multi-touch gestures and it has an app store built into it.

The other interesting thing is iOS 5, the next system upgrade for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone. What the new update will do is make these mobile devices more computer-like and capable of doing more of the kind of stuff you'd normally do on your computer. For example, editing photos and audio files.

Many people - myself included - have lamented the fact that the iPad, for example, in its current form is really not suited for doing work but is more a content consumption device than a content creation tool.

Basically, what these two important announcements are saying is that computers and tablets are coming together. With Lion, the Mac will act more like an iPad, and with iOS 5, the iPad will have more Mac-like capabilities.

Now, onto the highlight of the WWDC 2011, the announcement of iCloud. There is an element of iCloud that closely resembles the digital lockers that Amazon and Google are offering, but with an interesting value-added feature.

There is no need to upload songs.

With Amazon's and Google's offerings, in order to use the digital locker to store your music, you have to upload the song files. If you have a big collection, it could take a very long time. It's definitely a slow and cumbersome process.

With Apple's system, you don't have to do that. Apple has successfully obtained agreements from record labels that allow you to sync any songs purchased on iTunes to all of your devices.

For music that was not purchased through iTunes, you can useiTunes Match, a premium service (costing US$25 a year) which scans your song collection, matches your songs with copies in iTunes' massive library, and then allows you to access those iTunes songs on all your devices. There's no uploading involved.

The interesting thing about iTunes Match is that it could be an innovative means for record labels to earn some income from the massive music piracy that everybody knows exists. I mean, just look at your own MP3 collection. How many of them were paid for?

With iTunes Match, Apple struck a deal with record labels that gives them more than 70% of the iTunes Match fees. So, in an indirect way, it allows these labels to at least generate a little income from the pirated songs that are scanned by iTunes Match.

The ability to recognise songs

The key to the success of a service like iTunes Match is its ability to recognise songs. Well, Apple currently has 18 million songs on its database. Unless you are into very rare, obscure and niche music, there's a good chance the songs in your collection are in Apple's library.

But hardcore music fans sometimes have tonnes of super rare stuff, like bootleg recordings which aren't even available commercially. Apple would not have such songs in its library. So, what can you do? You can manually upload them to the cloud.

Jobs has called iCloud "an industry-leading offer" compared with the cloud services Amazon and Google have come out with. This is true with regard to digital lockers. Apple's version removes the need to upload, which is a major point.

However, both Amazon and Google have other cloud services that are far more extensive than anything Apple has to offer.

Amazon has, for example, Amazon Web Services, which allows clients to rent Amazon's massive computing and server infrastructure for a fee. Google, meanwhile, has been rolling out all kinds of cloud services, most notably an online calendar and an online productivity suite.

Apple's iCloud has nothing to do with either of the two services described above. But it's still early days. Who knows, Apple might want to further encroach into Amazon and Google's cloud territory as the industry matures and becomes more popular and common.

OON YEOH is managing editor of a local publishing house. You can follow him at www.twitter.com/oonyeoh