“On October 27, 2011, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals a new media tagging system that will be integrated into Apple’s iCloud,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.
“In some respects portions of what is described in the patent is likely already in place,” Purcher reports. “However, Apple is shown to already want to push iCloud services deeper into the sources of media like radio and TV. They also want to work closely with car and/or car stereo OEMs to integrate their new tagging standard to better tie content to iCloud for the benefit of iOS device customers.”
Purcher reports, “According to Apple’s invention specs, iApp Developers will be given design specifications so that current and future apps on iTunes will be able to conform to Apple’s new emerging tagging standard. Apple’s patent even illustrates a new iTunes UI for iPhone…”
Read more in the full article here.
hmmm…so the media industry adds Apple tags and iCloud collates and serves it all up, everywhere, sans ads – that’s going to be a hard sell to the industry monopolies.
After a week of playing around with iCloud, I finally get it. The first thing to understand is you need to upgrade to Lion 10.7.2 to obtain the full benefit of iCloud on your Mac. I was still on Snow Leopard and didn’t see the value of iCloud until I upgraded to Lion. If you’re still on Snow Leopard, iCloud will be of limited use syncing between your iDevices but syncing back to your Mac will be a little troublesome to say the least. So the word is get Lion for iCloud to sync wirelessly with your Mac and iDevices.
Since figuring it out I find iCloud much more enjoyable to use syncing calendars, emails, reminders, contacts, notes, iWork documents and other stuff than Google docs, mail or Google related cloud. iCloud works seamlessly in the background and pushes data to your devices invisibly and unobtrusively. Changes are instantaneous.
I get iCloud. It’s one of the biggest features in iOS 5 for me and makes my iPhone 4 and iPad much more functional and in lockstep symmetry data-wise with other devices in the Apple universe.