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Apple launches iCloud

CNN, New York : Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled iCloud, a free wireless storage and syncing service, at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. Jobs took a break from his medical leave of absence to deliver the event's keynote address in San Francisco. It was his second public appearance since he temporarily turned over day-to-day operations to Apple's COO Tim Cook. ICloud automatically stores content to Apple's servers (also known as "the cloud") and wirelessly pushes information to all of a users' Macintosh computers or iOS devices, like the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The new service will launch this fall, Apple said on its website. The splashiest part of iCloud is its iTunes integration. When a user purchases a song in iTunes, it will automatically push to all other devices that run iTunes for free. Additionally, for $25 a year, users will be able to access up to 20,000 songs from their entire iTunes libraries-including those songs not purchased on iTunes-on all of their devices with a new service called iTunes Match. To do this, Apple scans a user's library, and within a matter of minutes matches it to the more than 18 million songs that the company acquired licensing rights for. For songs that don't match, users can upload those online. "It has all the same benefits of music purchased in iTunes, but it takes minutes, not weeks," said Jobs, taking a dig at competing services offered by Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500), which force users to painstakingly upload all of their music to the cloud.