My Take On Apple's Cloud Strategy

TechCrunch has an article entitled: iOS 5 Likely Pushed To The Fall After A Cloud Unveiling At WWDC.

This article mentions a “music locker” service.  Other analysts have predicted a possible music streaming service.  Hmmm....I don't know.

The one function that I am looking for, however, is telegraphed by the wireless behavior of the iBooks apps on iOS.  When I read a book on my iPod Touch, my progress in the book is communicated wirelessly to somewhere (perhaps some tiny, secretly operational part of the new data center in North Carolina)--so that my iPad knows where I am when I begin to read that book again on that different device.  This functionality is the guaranteed minimum of what I am expecting from Apple's cloud strategy.

All my devices need to be able communicate wirelessly in this way; keeping track of where I am and what I have listened to.   Music, podcasts, movies, and TV shows all need to behave like the books in iBooks--all without needing to sync to my iTunes.  If I am watching Star Trek on my laptop and have to stop, when I pick up my iPod Touch it should automatically know where I had left off in the movie.

Will the actual content get transferred wirelessly without the iTunes sync?  I don't know--but I am pretty confident that this wireless communication of media activity tracking data will be part of the strategy.