I see clouds everywhere

iCloud is coming Monday. At least we think it is. The logo at the entry at Moscone Center clearly showing a cloud, a Lion and a big #5. In Chinese culture number five (五) means the Emperor of China, and the Tiananmen gate, door to the Forbidden City has Five arches. By an extraordinary coincidence it is today the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown.

But what is iCloud really? From what everyone says on Internet, it will allow people to stream music from the cloud. Another buzz word we will hear at nauseam in the next few week. All journalists will talk about that all the time and ask each other "are you on the Cloud?"

OK but what is "The cloud"? It is basically storage outside of your computer. It has been around for years MySpace, Google Apps, Google docs, Google Bookmarks are clouds.

Clouds are nebulous entities which stores and keeps your files, somewhere, in the clouds, instead of carrying them on removable drive or flash drives. This means that you can access your files, and information from anywhere in the world, provided you have an Internet access.

Imagine you loose your iPhone in Paris (they like iPhones over there), you go to Apple, with"Find my iPhone" you block your phone and/or brick it, you get a new iPhone and from the cloud reload all your contacts, calendar, music etc... In an hour or so, you are back on your merry way to the Louvres. The Impressionists are at Musée d'Orsay BTW.

You want to exchange files with colleagues or friends, easy. You upload to the public part of your cloud location and pass the link by SMS or Email and that's it.

Here some interesting pictures of iCloud. No this is not Apple, it is just another cloud in iTunes App Store.

For more clouds go there.