“Cloud computing” is a white-hot buzzword these days. It basically means working with files and programs that reside on the Internet, beyond your company’s walls — out there in the “cloud.”

With the MobileMe service, photos can be uploaded to a gallery site, where visitors can download them for printing.

Everyday consumers are doing cloud computing, too, maybe without even realizing it. When you use an Internet-based backup service, or Google’s online word processor or spreadsheet, or a Gmail or Yahoo mail account, you’re working with data on a secure Internet server somewhere — not on your hard drive.

Apple is the latest company to find a silver lining in the cloud. Its new MobileMe service ($100 a year) is an overhaul of a suite of Internet features that used to be called .Mac.

Over the years, two million people signed up for .Mac, according to Apple, even though it was a sort of motley, unfocused service.

MobileMe, however, has a much clearer mission that solves a much clearer problem. It’s meant to keep the e-mail, calendars, address books and Web bookmarks on all of your computers — Macs, Windows PCs, iPhones and iPod Touches — synchronized in real time.

It works by storing the master copy of all this information in the cloud. Whenever your machines are online, they connect to the mother ship and update themselves. When you edit an address on your iPhone, you’ll find the same change in Address Book (on your Mac) and Outlook (on your PC). If you send an e-mail reply from your PC at the office, you’ll find it in your Sent Mail folder on the Mac at home.

MobileMe can be very helpful to families with busy calendars; now everybody can refer to the same, always-current datebook. You also escape the “two mailbox problem,” where your cellphone and computer have different e-mail addresses, so you can never remember where you read something. And you’ll never have to call home to ask someone to look up a phone number for you.

All of this should sound familiar to corporate employees; the BlackBerry works much the same way, and so do computers and phones that connect to corporate Exchange servers. Indeed, Apple’s tag line for MobileMe is “Exchange for the rest of us.” (Which is an odd slogan, since the target audience — “the rest of us” — is people who have no idea what Exchange is.)

So how is MobileMe? Well, let’s get the ugliness out of the way first: Its debut last week was a disaster that persisted for days. Existing .Mac members were supposed to be upgraded automatically, but many wound up having no e-mail at all for a day or two. There were bugs, glitches and error messages for days, making it one of the most ham-handed launches in Apple history.

Maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to introduce MobileMe and the iPhone 3G simultaneously. (Apple has since apologized to its customers and extended their subscriptions by 30 days.)

All right, then: how is MobileMe now?

Allow a couple of hours to set it up. There’s a lot of stuff to download and prepare, and Apple’s instructions aren’t always complete.

You also have to set up your e-mail program to recognize your new MobileMe e-mail address, which ends with the conveniently short “me.com.” Mine, for example, is pogue@me.com; one perk of this fledgling service is that all the good addresses aren’t yet taken, as they are on Yahoo and Gmail.

(Apple won’t say how much it paid to get the juicy domain name me.com. “Let’s just say it wasn’t sitting for $9.95 in the domain registry,” cracked a product manager.)

Once everything’s ready, the magic is impressive. Make a change on your Mac, watch it appear on your iPhone and your PC. Add a new friend to the address book in Outlook Express on your Windows XP machine, and watch it appear in Windows Contacts on your Vista PC. Change an appointment in iCal on the kitchen Mac, and know that it will wirelessly sprout onto your traveling spouse’s iPhone four states away. And your Web bookmarks are the same everywhere.

If a change is made on two machines simultaneously, you’re presented with the conflict — you see both versions — and with one click, you choose which one “wins.”

On Macs, MobileMe can keep even more stuff synched, including your passwords and preference settings.

Actually, there’s a fourth place where you can work with your data: on the Web. At Me.com, Apple has built attractive, ad-free, online versions of your address book, calendar, e-mail program and photo-organizing programs. Unlike most Web programs, these have the fluidity and shortcuts of desktop software. For example, you can drag and drop messages into e-mail folders, flip through photos with the mouse, drag vertically to create appointments on your calendar’s timeline, hit the Enter key instead of clicking O.K. in a dialog box, and so on.

The beauty of the Web is, of course, that you can get to it from almost any computer. Beware, though: you need the latest version of Firefox or Apple’s Safari Web browser to exploit all the features. (After all those years of being treated like an oppressed minority, it must give Apple some satisfaction to exclude Internet Explorer because it “has known compatibility issues with modern Web standards.”)

There’s actually a lot more to MobileMe than sync, since it also retains most of the features of the old .Mac service.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Microsoft executives have met representatives of Time Warner Inc. (Owners of AOL) suggesting that Microsoft had a plan B from Yahoo’s failed buyout. Microsoft Live Search has been trying to compete with Google for some time and seem to have decided they need people with experience to make it successful.

With Google’s possible move to controlling Yahoo’s advertising stream, Microsoft has become a little worried about the overall outcome. AOL hold approximately 11% of the US advertising market matching Live Search’s 11% according to eMarketer.

AOL’s current advertising is already managed by Google, it is unclear how long this deal would be honoured for if any deal took place, or even what would happen to businesses using adwords to advertise on AOL. Whether or not it goes ahead, we can only speculate.

What would be Microsofts benefit to buying AOL? Microsoft would increase it’s online services, particularly in the social networking scene. They would obtain TMZ, AOL’s celebrity gossip site, AOL’s Bebo, several online display advertising networks like advertising.com and tacoda.com. In terms of unique users, they would effectively become larger than Google, the current industry leader.

“It’s a deal worth doing” at a reasonable price, said

Charles Di Bona, an analyst with Bernstein Research. “It would bring some search and some significant display advertising assets.” Bernstein’s parent company, Alliance Bernstein, owns shares in both Microsoft and Time Warner.AOL’s advertising business is worth somewhere around£4.4bn according to J.P. Morgan. In contrast, Bear Stearns values it at nearer £7 billion.

Following Microsoft’s failed bid to buy Yahoo!, a deal is underway for Google to gain control over Yahoo’s search advertising. Presumably this means that Google adwords will spread to Yahoo! increasing coverage while removing choice. With Google taking over 90% of the internet advertising revenue, this would certainly impact on Microsoft’s Live Search wallets, but could wipe out existing smaller search engines and any future competition Google could ever have.

It would also affect smaller businesses in terms of getting a competitive deal on online advertising as the choices would be removed, prices could go up, the smaller voices would be muffled, and advertisers would have nowhere else to turn.

Yahoo! anticipates additional revenue from the deal, presumably Google will do too (else why make the deal) and all this extra cash is coming from somewhere.

Microsoft is making noises, they’ve been in court for similar practices with Micrsoft Windows Monopoly and now they want their own back. There are talks from their corner of price-fixing similar to the UK’s big supermarket agreements where minimum prices are set further hitting the smaller businesses. Microsoft’s best move now would be to file an antitrust lawsuit through the US Justice Department as happened to them prior to 2002 when the case was settled.

As there’s no merger, the Google Yahoo! partnership (hereafter known as Goohoo!) would not need to go through the US Justice dept. but they can challenge the agreement if it’s shown that competition would be stifled.

Goohoo! have agreed to give the deal a 2 1/2 month for the dust to settle and to back out if Yahoo! is ever bought. (Perhaps a collaborative effort to push Microsoft towards a higher bid?) They also deny any claims of potential price fixing and minimum ad costs.

Good idea? Bad idea? Your views and comments are welcome:

We’ve just launched a new look for our website, as the site grew, it’s navigation became a little… disjointed… serves us right for not using the newest version of our own editing suite. Now it’s all content managed by our own updated software and all text effects, animations are available to our clients.

Let me know here or by email, what you think. We will soon update the blog to match the new design.

www.zakomedia.com

It’s big product time again and once again, it’s another complete flop… but is it? Big companies are spending billions of pounds on an amazing marketing campaign which works. The iPhone is today’s example but other companies, including Sony do the same technique with every new model of the Playstation.

If you want to market a product or service, and have the budget, these big corps have got it sussed. Word of mouth coupled with overexposure leads the general public into a frenzy but there’s one more element we miss, the real clincher. They knew it worked, they knew people would be queuing from 1am outside stores to get their hands on one, they knew they need a system which is going to process thousands of credit checks an hour, and they knew they needed the stock available for the desperate public.

According to a Carphone warehouse representative, each store received on average 40 iPhones. The central Watford branch had 10 of the 16GB models and 30 of the 8GB models.  With £50 difference between the two (on lower contracts) it’s a no brainer, most people will aim for the better model with the (false) belief that it’s twice as good. However with limited stock, impatient individuals are now buying a substandard product and still left wanting. The stage is now already set for their next release.

Is there more to this than simply under supply? So far the general public are:

1. Under the belief that even Apple couldn’t anticipate how popular the new iPhone, making it even more desirable.
2. Determined to get one before anyone else throwing rational thought behind them. Humans are competitive and will fight for something for the sake of winning regardless of whether or not they actually need it.
3. Phoning and texting friends about how good the iPhone is. Thinking about blogs to write when they get home providing more free word of mouth advertising for the company.

Next problem, O2’s credit check system simply could not process the number of checks required and basically crashed, at least that’s the official report. According to one news site, the first iPhone sold in a UK store was at 10:15am in York. So before 10:15, not a single application was processed? Yet we are told they crashed through processing too many? They hadn’t processed a single application in hours.

In Oxford Street, people were queuing outside the o2 store from 1am and didn’t leave until 10. With more waiting, buyers are left with more determination to not waste their time and will walk away with the iphone if it kills them!

It seems like under-demand, underestimation, lack of planning and ignorance but it happens time and time again. It’s not that they don’t learn, it’s a fantastic piece of marketing. I’ve not even seen the iPhone properly so far and yet still I want one… I want one more than I’ve ever wanted any phone in the history of mobile communications.

They have me, and millions of others right where they want us. They now know the only part left for this sale is to hold up a phone for us to snatch away. No sales talk, no Q&A session, just a nice easy sell.

Take a small peice of plastic and hold it near a child. He will eventually pay attention and try to take it through shear curiosity, but snatch it away before he has a chance, make him wait for it and he’ll be hypnotised, repeat a few times and he’ll want it more than ever… and it’s only a peice of plastic. Minutes later he’s got it and disappointed, so do the same with plastic of a different colour, extra memory, slightly better camera… Now that’s true power!

This technique will probably not work for lesser brands and smaller businesses, but some elements of this we can take and use in our business lives. The most important one being not to stay still, keep improving yourself, keep making your business better and letting people know about it so they understand more about the message you are working hard to put accross. The internet is a great way to do this, more and more people are turning to the internet for news, updates and information and it’s up to you to make sure they get it. If your website is stagnant and needs updating, do it. Zako media provides an easy to use website editing suite at a very competitive price which is well worth a look.