telling

Some interesting Apple news this week from AppleInsider revolves around Apple's acquisition of the iCloud domain name. Apparently, according to sources, Apple paid Sweden-based company Xcerion an estimated $4.5 million for the domain. It is rumored that the cloud service will be announced this summer at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference here in San Francisco.

There have already been plenty of rumors that Apple's cloud service would enable users to stream music to iOS devices, but according to the article, it may also offer a personalized "locker" where you can keep photos and videos as well. It will be exciting to see how this all pans out at WWDC, and whether people will be more inclined to sign up with iCloud than with MobileMe, which received a somewhat lukewarm response from users.

What kind of things would you like to see offered in an Apple-based cloud service? What would be a reasonable price for such a service? Let us know in the comments.

This week's apps are an instant voice mail messenger and a full-featured MMORPG that closely resembles one of the most popular games of all time.… Read more

Strange Rain is pretty hard to describe without actually playing with it, but we'll give it a shot. The primary function of the app is to give you a break from your hectic life by displaying a mesmerizing scene of rain falling from the sky. The iPhone screen acts as a skylight, so you're looking straight up as rain drops fall and hit the screen. You can slightly affect the raindrops as they fall by touching the screen and moving your iPhone, and tinkly music from a haunting melody plays amid soothing storm sounds, every time you touch … Read more

Microsoft wants to make its voice platform a little more decisive.

Over the years, Microsoft's speech technology has gotten increasingly more capable of figuring out what people are saying, as well as letting them do voice-powered searches and commands on devices besides the phone. But what's been missing is the second part of the equation, which is a deeper understanding of their meaning and the context behind them.

To that end, Microsoft is in the process of building what it's calling "conversational understanding" (CU), which mixes speech, a dictionary, grammatical structures, and machine learning to … Read more

Earlier this month, an octopus named Paul living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany, proved capable of successfully "predicting" the results of his home nation's World Cup soccer matches--and then went a step further and correctly selected Spain as the winner of the final.

Of course, there's now an app for that.

An iPhone app development company called uTouchLabs just released an app called "Ask the Octopus," which lets users input two options for any query and then has a cartoon "octopus oracle" choose one much in the way that Paul would … Read more

Besides the wheel, fire, and air conditioning during the month of August, caller ID is on the short list of life-changing inventions. Though its one hang-up (no pun intended) is that its directory of phone numbers, which is attached to names and readily available for landline phones, has not been carried over to mobile phones. Instead, mobile-phone users get numbers only.

One company that's helping to change that is PhoneTell, which is launching at Monday's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. Formerly CallSpark (which debuted at last year's DemoFall) PhoneTell aims to help you figure out who'… Read more

We've reviewed a lot of programs from Mystic Board, and almost all of them are poorly designed pieces of software that contain very little in the way of useful content. Although MB Tarot Suite is a disaster as far as its design is concerned, we do give it credit for delivering something that vaguely resembles an actual tarot reading.

MB Tarot Suite actually contains four applications: Tarot Reading, Astrology Tarot, Tarot Numerology, and Runic Tarot. Each of these asks for the user's name and date of birth, and then provides users with a basic reading. Of course, the … Read more

Everybody chuckled when Tellme, a mobile voice company snapped up by Microsoft almost two years ago, released its smartphone voice search application for BlackBerry, instead of for Windows Mobile. Thanks to a new native application that will be released on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones this coming fall, the ribbing may entirely subside.

On Wednesday, Tellme announced the application's features and its shipping plan. Like rival voice services for smartphones, you click a hardware hotkey to initiate the program's digital ears, and from there you can begin a search, call a number, or dictate a text message. This … Read more

Whether you're moving to a new place or you just want to be more familiar with your surroundings, there are a variety of sites on the Web that fill you in on everything from restaurants to businesses to apartments in your area.

BooRah If you're only looking for restaurants, BooRah is for you. The site features information on how to get to a restaurant, but really shines when you read through the informative reviews from users and consider the "similar restaurant" tab, which features a listing of local eateries that are similar to … Read more

Note: The iPhone 2.2 firmware update is now available. Connect to iTunes to get all the details. My app update issue is fixed!

One of the great things about my job writing about iPhone apps is I sometimes get to look at what's coming up in the future for the iPhone. I was invited to a small gathering of developers and reviewers this week to see the latest games and apps from premiere software companies. The future of iPhone apps looks great.

While many of the apps were must-haves, one of the best of the bunch was a … Read more