Apple Purchases iCloud.com for $4.5 Million | Hacker News Reader

Apple Purchases iCloud.com for $4.5 Million

macrumors.com

28 pointsolivercameron13 comments

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you forgot the question mark in your headline. the source has it.

Good point, I thought I'd put it in. Seems my editing time has passed too, sorry!

Whether or not this is true, please note that the post has not one single piece of evidence. Just a rumor.

Deleted comment

Not one word about the buyer being Apple. Not even on the Whois.

Again, it might be true, but this post (and the Gigaom post) have no proof. That's what I meant.

I have a hard time believing they'd move away from the MobileMe brand (I mean, a music locker slots in perfectly), and an even harder time believing they'd call it iCloud - Cloud is very much still a buzzword.

Then again, I thought for sure it would be iMobile instead of iPhone, so what do I know?

Cloud is a buzzword, but there's very little brand equity in MobileMe. I bet less than 1% of iPhone owners have heard of it. And those who have heard of it probably haven't heard very good things.

I bet it's more than that, just because of Find My iPhone, which requires a free MobileMe account. However, I would bet far less than 1% actually has any real education about what it is.

MobileMe will be three years old in July; they used the previous .Mac brand for six years. The me.com domain is a great asset, so I think it more likely iCloud would be a separate brand for media storage.

Perhaps they'd rebrand iTunes, though? The 'Tunes' feels stagnant now.

"Now you're thinking with clouds!"

4.5 million is a lot for icloud.com. It isn't even that great if a name.

But bought from a running business, venture funded. So, it had to be worth it to them to rebrand their entire business.

That doesn't make it a great name. It's worth $4.5 million to exactly two entities: CloudMe and Apple. If Apple didn't have $50+ billion in the bank it would probably be worth a lot less.

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