Approved: iCloud getting biogas cell farm, too

by Christian Zibreg on May 23, 2012

Apple’s plan to use renewable energy sources to power its $1 billion data center in Maiden, North Carolina by the end of this year has received another important nod from The North Carolina Utilities Commission.

The agency just greenlighted a 4.5-megawatt fuel cell installation that will produce electricity from eco-friendly biogas in order to power a huge array of iCloud servers.

Not bad for a cloud that relies on “19th-century coal energy”Read More

 

Take that, Greenpeace! Apple’s iCloud solar farm is a go-go

by Christian Zibreg on May 17, 2012

Apple doesn’t run the cleanest of clouds, we all know this. Fortunately, the company’s strides to reduce reliance on “19th-century coal energy”, as Greenpeace put it, have received a boost from The North Carolina Utilities Commission which has now approved plans for a massive solar farm to power Apple’s $1 billion data center in Maiden, North Carolina.

It’s gonna provide 20 megawatts of power to power iCloud servers that host the iTunes infrastructure, your music, photos, contacts and iOS device backups, to name a few… Read More

 

Greenpeace protests outside of Apple HQ for cleaner cloud

by Cody on May 15, 2012

Environmental friendliness has been an important subject for Apple over the past few years. It’s currently building one of the largest solar panel farms in the U.S. to power its North Carolina data center, and plans to do the same thing in Oregon.

But apparently that isn’t enough for the folks at Greenpeace. The environmental organization recently staged a major protest outside of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, pleading with the company to increase its ‘Green’ efforts… Read More

 

iCloud down this morning for nearly 15 million users

by Cody on May 14, 2012

Having problems accessing your iCloud email today? You aren’t alone. A simple search for ‘iCloud’ on Twitter returns 1000s of results, showing folks started experiencing problems with the service early this morning.

Apple has updated its iCloud System Status page, confirming the outage. And according to the Cupertino company, around 12% of users were unable to access parts of the cloud-based platform for almost two hours… Read More

 

WSJ: photo-sharing, video syncing coming to iCloud as upgrade looms

by Christian Zibreg on May 14, 2012

According to the usually well-informed Wall Street Journal, Apple is readying an upgrade to its iCloud service that will expand on the basic features which sync content between iPhones, iPads, iPods and Mac or PC computers. iCloud also provides device backups in the cloud and supports other capabilities specific to Apple’s iOS devices.

Two new features will reportedly enable basic photo sharing features with other iCloud users and will include the ability to sync videos… Read More

 

Apple bringing Reminders and Notes web apps to iCloud?

by Christian Zibreg on May 11, 2012

Are you a developer? Have you visited the iCloud.com beta login page recently? In case you missed it, two new icons appeared at a beta login page for iCloud.com briefly before Apple took the beta page down. This clearly suggests Apple is working on bringing Notes and Reminders web apps to iCloud.

Folks also discovered references to an upcoming iOS 6 beta in the code strings for this iCloud beta page.

As we told you last week, Apple could be bringing iOS and Mac Notifications to the iCloud website. So it all makes sense now: Reminders and Notes apps, which are now available on iOS devices and are coming to Macs with Mountain Lion installed later this summer, will also be replicated on the iCloud web site along with web notifications.

Let’s hope Apple will take the resulting notifications conundrum seriously… Read More

 

Looks like Apple is taking iOS notifications to iCloud website

by Christian Zibreg on May 8, 2012

A new feature is being tested by Apple, according to reports, that allows iOS banner notifications to be displayed on the iCloud website. It’s unknown whether this particular occurrence was only a one-time test or a sign of things to come.

While notifications on the iCloud website may prompt some to scratch their head, this could actually indicate Apple’s plans to roll out rich web apps to iCloud that would benefit from the ability to display notifications, much like Google’s Chrome lets web apps render unobtrusive notifications even when the browser is minimized… Read More

 

Confirmed: Bloom Energy to power iCloud cell farm

by Christian Zibreg on Apr 30, 2012

Itćs been officially confirmed today that Apple will use cutting-edge, power-efficient, eco-friendly fuel cells from California-based Bloom Energy startup to power its huge iCloud data center located in Maiden, North Carolina.

Hopefully this move will appease Greenpeace, whose recent report titled How Clean Is Your Cloud slammed Apple over the company’s use of “19th-century coal energy” for its data centers… Read More

 

iTunes Match goes live in new markets across the globe

by Christian Zibreg on Apr 30, 2012

iTunes Match, Apple’s $25 a year cloud locker and scan-and-match music service, is being rolled out in additional countries, according to web reports. Last time we heard, Apple expanded iTunes Match to 19 countries, with a focus on the Baltic states, Latin America and the Netherlands.

Macstories first spotted that the iTunes terms and conditions for Italy have been updated with new terms suggesting an imminent launch in the country. Other web reports confirmed a similar changes to iTunes terms and conditions for Greece, Portugal, Austria, Slovenia, Bulgaria and other markets… Read More

 

Cloud storage price comparison: iCloud vs. SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. SugarSync

by Christian Zibreg on Apr 24, 2012

Microsoft yesterday updated its iOS SkyDrive client and released a brand new app for both Windows and Mac desktops while putting into effect paid storage upgrades.

At the same time, Dropbox released an updated iOS client with new sharing capabilities and Google upped Google Docs storage to 5 GB.

iDownloadBlog thought you might be interested to check out how major cloud storage services fare in terms of value so we’ve put together a handy comparison matrix providing an at-a-glance overview of paid tiers available from iCloud, Dropbox, SkyDrive and SugarSync… Read More

 
Page 112345...