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If Apple Inc. can uniquely keep its famous logo as a shape of apple, than it shall be not be so surprising to know that their much-anticipated new music service, iCloud, is nothing but a shape of a cloud. It was first discovered at the headquarters of Apple Inc. in San Francisco, where the host company has almost reached the final phase of preparation of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). This internationally admired week-long conference will begin this Monday. Apple Insider reported that it has seen across the building and witnessed a large banner placed in the lobby of Apple’s headquarters building. It was revealed that there were total three large logos placed on the banner, first for the upcoming Lion OS for Mac PCs, second for the latest version of its mobile OS which is iOS 5, and the last one for its new cloud-based music service iCloud. Shaping the iCloud’s logo, it was explained that the logo has a simple black outline at its silvery background. This is the first time that iCloud service is explored more than just a title name; it has been given a shape.
The CEO of AliBaba, the largest Chinese online retailer company, has been constantly been tied up with endless boardroom talks as two of the chief stakeholders of the company give critical disagreement on a decision. The divergence in opinion came between the management when the company announced to give the control of its online payment service exclusively to the Chinese citizens, making it a disconnected entity from AliBaba Group. The chairman, C.E.O., and the key person behind AliBaba group, Jack Ma, recently stated at the All Things D’s Digital conference, that this move was extremely necessary for ensuring that AliPay gets licensed by the Chinese regulatory authorities. He claimed that this option was being constantly discussed with all stake holders since three years now and, according to him, there is now way possible that board was unaware of this move. AliBaba Group has been facing major criticism in this regard specifically from its 43 percent shareholder Yahoo Inc. 
Image via CrunchBaseSince the announcement of Alipay’s spinoff on 10th May, the shares of Yahoo Inc have downed by almost 15 percent, eradicating a complete $3.5 billion off of its market value. Ma is now the only person running the online payment system, and not Yahoo Inc., which Ma defended by saying that "We've been discussing that for over three years, so it's impossible that the board does not know that." He also stated that "somebody has to take responsibility. Somebody has to take the leadership to move things ahead. ... If we do not get the license, Alipay's gone, Alibaba's gone."
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The world’s second largest PC manufacturer, Acer Inc, has decided to take a $150 million charge for writing off inventory and doubtful payments in Europe while giving up almost 300 jobs due to the after affects of the abrupt withdrawal of its CEO in March. According to an official statement released by the company on Wednesday, Acer declared that all of its internal audits have disclosed that "abnormalities in terms of channel inventory stored in freight forwarders' warehouses, and in accounts receivable from channels in Spain." This write-off is an additional bad news for the company after the critical withdrawal of its former CEO, Gianfranco Lanci. Acer had first cut its first-quarter PC revenue on 24th of March, which led to a downfall of 18 percent in the stock price in four days, till the time when Lanci quit. Even before a month had passed, the company cut the second-quarters’ shipment predictions and asserted that the situation has even worsened with 64 percent of decline in the first-quarter net profit. The sales of April, 2011, steeply fell to 23 percent compared to last year.
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The famed C.E.O. of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, will be returning from his medical leave as he makes an appearance to give the keynote speech at Apple’s hosted WWDC next week. It was revealed officially by the representatives on Tuesday, as they also added that keynote will specifically include Apple’s new service called "iCloud." It was still left unexplained whether what exactly the iCloud service is referred to, but the rumors have been extremely explicit regarding the negotiation of Apple with all four major recording companies. Hence it is largely suspected that iCloud will be Apple’s cloud based storage service for songs, which will allow the users to keep their library updated on the Apple-run servers rather than their home PCs. Steve Jobs took a medical leave in January this year due to undisclosed reasons, as the temporary control of the company was handed over to C.E.O. Tim Cook. But even after staying on leave, Jobs still was highly consulted in all major decisions of the company, and he also displayed the new iPad model at a news conference in March. Now Apple’s famous annual Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC, will start this Monday in San Francisco. The news of Jobs to make a special appearance at the conference from his leave is a clear signal that he is hoping iCloud to be the next record breaking innovation of the company.
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The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has straight forwardly asserted that all the evidences, including the alleged emails and signed documents, which form a part of the lawsuit by a New York resident regarding the claim of part ownership in Facebook are completely fake. The official statement of Mark Zuckerberg was recorded in the paper filings submitted by his attorneys in federal court in Buffaloon on Thursday. The attorneys emphasized that they would like to speed up the process of getting access to the original documents, as only the carbon copies of actual documents were filed in the lawsuit of Paul Ceglia. Furthermore Zuckerberg’s attorneys also requested the court to further inspect the computer and other such personal computer gadgets of Ceglia. The official response filed to the lawsuit asserted that "the contract is a cut-and-paste job, the emails are complete fabrications and this entire lawsuit is a fraud." It was mentioned that "Zuckerberg has now declared under oath that he did not sign the contract attached to Ceglia's complaint and that he did not write or receive any of the purported emails." The prominent lawsuit filed by Ceglia was initially brought under light in 2010, though it later had to be filed again in April 2011. It is fundamentally based mostly on two-page "work for hire" contract, which ties down the names of both Zuckerberg and Ceglia. The resident of Wellsville in Allegany County, Ceglia, claims that he had a contract signing with Zuckerberg in the times when he was still a Harvard University student. He asserts that he initially began helping Zuckerberg with the street-mapping database recreation he was working on. Ceglia claims he even paid $1,000 to Zuckerberg for his services. It was also alleged in the lawsuit, that later Ceglia again gave Zuckerberg additional $1,000 in support for his idea, which turned out to be Facebook, on the condition that Ceglia would get 50 percent of whatever comes off of it.
Image via CrunchBaseTwitter has recently acquired an internet company which will reward it with an advanced expert team in the technique of advertising campaigns on Google Inc. AdGrok has now stepped up to Twitter, from Google, to help gain the company better revenue generation. It was announced on the official website of AdGrok, that the company has been acquired by Twitter as of this Tuesday. Further the notice on the website revealed that this acquisition has been made to work on a "monetization platform" for Twitter. It was also notified that now the company was not working to serve the customers of Google's AdWords platform anymore and it will discontinue all of its previous endeavors by the end of June.The statement at AdGork’s website stated: "We're happy to announce that Twitter has acquired the AdGrok team. Starting today, we will be working full-time on Twitter's revenue engineering team." According to the spokesperson of Twitter Inc., Matt Graves, two executive of AdGrok team will now be collaborating with Twitter and reporting at its San Francisco headquarters. While it was revealed by an email of Graves that the third executive and co-founder of the company has found an employment and will join Facebook, the fiercest rival of Twitter.
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Microsoft has released the first sneak peak of its upcoming Windows 8, which will be the next version of the Windows operating system. It has been designed to work on both PC’s and touch screen tablets. The sneak peak was actually shaped into a blog post, which also featured a YouTube video representing the functionality of the operating system. The President of Microsoft Windows Division, Steven Sinofsky, personally demonstrated few of the features of this new operating system, which is not actually named yet but only coded as "Windows 8," at the D9 conference by All Things Digital. Sinofsky declared that "laptops, slates, desktops -- all can run one operating system." He said that "Things that people see work... on an iPad, I think we can do that and then bring with it all of the benefits that you have with Windows." Finally he also added "We have an approach that is different but builds on the value of an operating system that sells 400 million or so units a year."
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