Following up on a rumor from yesterday, Digital Daily‘s John Paczkowski has confirmed that Apple has purchased the domain name icloud.com — henceforth to be known as iCloud, we’re sure. “Sources in a position to know” confirmed to the publication that Swedish company Xcerion has sold the domain to Apple, although they could not confirm that the Cupertino-based company paid $4.5 million for it as was reported yesterday. Apple is widely expected to launch a cloud-based service in the very near future.

Read

According to the latest Internet rumor, Apple’s presumed cloud-based service may be getting a familiar moniker. Blog GigaOM is reporting that the Cupertino company has purchased the domain name iCloud.com from Swedish company Xcerion. We wouldn’t be surprised if the rumor turned out to be true, Apple has had a love affair with the vowel “i” since the early 1990′s, although, as TechCrunch points out, the iPad was thought to be called the iSlate at one point. The report states that Apple paid $4.5 million for the domain name, and states that Xcerion recently re-branded its service’s name from iCloud to CloudMe. Apple did not respond to the site’s request for comment.

Read [GigaOM] Read [TechCrunch]

Google today announced a series of updates to Google Docs which are sure to please everyone who relies on the free cloud-based service. The documents editor received additions such as a margin ruler, tab stops, comments, a re-worked system for placing and maintaining bullets and numbers and support for real-time collaboration of up to 50 people. Spreadsheets now allows for cells to be edited from the forumla bar, the use of auto-fill and the dragging and dropping of columns. Overall, everything is said to be much faster, smoother and intuitive. There’s a whole bunch of other changes we haven’t gone over, so why not hit up the jump to watch a quick little into video and then explore the service for yourself? We’re loving the realtime collaboration improvements.

Read

Read

Remember when we first mentioned OS 5.0 nearly one and a half years ago? Yes, it’s been that long. Although that version matured into what we now know as OS 4.5, earlier this year, we broke the story about the formal introduction of OS 5.0 within the walls of Waterloo. Many revisions and version updates later, including a few different creative direction changes — we now have OS 4.6.0 (Bold and Pearl Flip), as well as the upcoming OS 4.6.1 (Javelin/8900 and 8350i) and OS 4.7.0 (Storm) — OS 4.5.0 still hasn’t been officially released in the United States, home of RIM’s largest user base. Hit the jump for the full run down!

So what do we have for you? Yes, that’s right, OS 5.0 for the BlackBerry Curve. For those of you who have looked on enviously at the slick-looking ’Clock’ application on the Bold and Pearl Flip, you will one day be able to have this rather simple Alarm-replacement application on your last generation device. You can throw in the accessibility options and most of the other features found in OS 4.6, as well.

One new feature we noticed was the “Files” application. Although it doesn’t appear to work, this new feature appears to add network share access, which has been a fairly popular request for a number of years. Assuming that BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 will likely be available by the time OS 5.0 is available, we will make the assumption that this will be a new server-client feature. Let’s just hope none of us are sporting walking canes by that time. You know, RIM kind of has a bad track record when it comes to release dates…

To be honest though, having been on a BlackBerry Bold for a few weeks now, this new OS seems a bit underwhelming at this point. Granted, this is a fairly early beta and has a long way to go in the life cycle process (it is good to see RIM working on this version prior to wrapping up OS 4.5), so there’s still time to really “WOW!” each and every one of us. However, until that time, we think this version should currently be considered OS 4.6 for the Curve.