It’s not much of a secret that Apple is up to something involving cloud-based services beyond MobileMe, and another piece of the puzzle may have just fallen into place with the rumored purchase of a domain name, iCloud.com.
GigaOM is reporting that Apple has purchased the iCloud.com domain name for a cool $4.5 million, according to one of their tipsters. Does that mean the company will use “iCloud” as the name for their forthcoming cloud-based service? No one knows for sure, but that’s a lot of money to drop on something that won’t get used.
iCloud.com was previously owned by Xcerion, a Swedish company offering a cloud storage service called -- you guessed it -- iCloud. Curiously, the service was rebranded as CloudMe earlier this month, with the accompanying CloudMe.com domain name purchased on April 5.
While GigaOM’s source seems confident that Apple purchased the iCloud.com domain name from Xcerion, the Whois database still lists the Swedish company as owners -- and attempts to visit iCloud.com are currently rerouted to CloudMe.com.
Apple is widely believed to be building a new cloud-based music (and possibly video) service, with a massive new data center in North Carolina nearly ready to start pushing data here, there and everywhere.
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(Image courtesy of CloudMe.com)
