Pulse, a popular news-reading app for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, could end up being the Netflix of the news business if Akshay Kothari can have his way.

Kothari is one of two 24-year-old co-founders -- along with fellow Stanford Institute of Design grad Ankit Gupta -- of Alphonso Labs, the Palo Alto start-up that makes Pulse, which is on a bit of a hit streak lately.

Alphonso Labs announced Thursday that it had closed a $9-million round of funding to help Pulse make its way to other mobile platforms. Pulse won an Apple Design Award at the tech giant's annual Worldwide Developer Conference this month. Alphonso Labs also rolled out a new website, Pulse.me, which enables its users to save stories they find on the Web to read in the Pulse app later on.

This month Alphonso Labs surpassed 4 million downloads of Pulse across Apple's iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as phones and tablets running Android.

"We really want to create something that stays with you wherever you are, that stays consistent across platforms and devices," Kothari said in an interview Friday. "I really like how Netflix works in wherever you stop watching something, it picks up right where you left off. No matter what app or platform you're using Netflix on, you can pick up at the same spot if you want next time you use Netflix. You don't have to start over.

"I'd like to bring that sort of thing to news reading, so we might explore that a bit."

Pulling off such a lofty goal, and being as disruptive to publishing and journalism as Netflix has been to movies and TV, will take some resources -- probably far more than the $9 million that Alphonso Labs has just raised.

It will also take having the right people guiding the company's growth, Kothari said, who noted that he believes the company has the right people in place.

Those people include Alan Patricof and Ken Lerer, who were part of the team that first financed the Huffington Post website, which has provided a bit of disruption to the paradigm of news websites and blogs.

Patricof is managing director at Greycroft Partners and Lerer manages Lerer Ventures, two venture capital firms which, along with New Enterprise Associates, make up the funders of Alphonso's $9-million round of Series A investments.

Lerer will serve as an advisor to the app maker, which was founded just 13 months ago. Patricof, along with New Enterprise's co-head of consumer investing, Patrick Chung, will join Alphonso Labs' board of directors.

Kothari said the new leadership and advice should help Pulse, a 10-employee company, continue to grow by bringing in some news-industry savvy that wasn't around before.

"I think not having the background allows us to in some ways think from a very clean-state perspective," he said. "We're basically technology people. We're product people. We don't have a deep understanding of journalism or publishing. But we do have a deep understanding of user interface and we just wanted to make news reading fun again."

As graduate students at Stanford when Alphonso was founded, Kothari said he and Gupta were hoping to make Pulse something people would want to go back to multiple times a day, in the way millions of people do with other popular mobile apps.

"If you have five minutes in a coffee shop and you look at your phone, you're looking at Twitter or Facebook," Kothari said. "So we wanted to try and make that five minutes worth spending in our app becoming more informed, reading the news. And what we're seeing is the same person coming back four or five times a day to get some small news and then coming back again. We don't have a lot of people just sitting reading in the app for an hour."

While that type of user behavior is what Alphonso Labs had hoped for, other user reactions have been a bit unexpected, he said.

"I wouldn't have thought it would have ended up here when we started as really a class project," Kothari said. "We didn't do any marketing for the app, but when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4, he mentioned some iPad apps they liked and we were one of the apps mentioned. That really helped. And from there, we've just seen more and more growth."

By the end of November, Pulse was downloaded 200,000 times, "and in just six months from that, we've passed 4 million," he said. "It really feels like a dream sometimes."

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Image: A screenshot of Alphonso Labs' Pulse news-reading app on an Apple iPad. Credit: Alphonso Labs /Apple

Yahoo debuted two new products -- the Yahoo App Search website and AppSpot app -- on Thursday aimed at helping users sift through the thousands of apps available in Apple's AppStore and Google's Android Market.

"The ratings and reviews in app stores help, but with 425,000-plus apps in the Apple App Store and 200,000 apps in Android Market, discovering new apps you like isn't easy," said Anil Panguluri, Yahoo's product director of mobile search, in a blog post.

"And what's more challenging -- if you don't know the specific name of the app you want, finding the right app out of the tens of thousands of possibilities requires multiple searches, downloads and general uncertainty about the quality of the app you download," Panguluri continued.

That's where Yahoo's App Search and AppSpot come in, the Sunnyvale-based company hopes.

"Mobile users rely on apps to continuously be informed and entertained, yet discovering new apps on a daily basis is still much more difficult and less intuitive than searching for Web content on the PC," Panguluri said. "At Yahoo! Search, we think there is a better way -- both for discovering personally relevant apps on a daily basis and finding the utility apps that help get the job done -- regardless of the type of device or platform."

Yahoo App Search is a new website, a search engine for apps, that can be accessed through any Web browser but is designed for use while on a PC.

The App Search site navigates through apps for Apple's iOS operating system and Google Android OS and, just as searching within those respective app store's own search engines, returns suggested results based on keywords and descriptors a user types into a search bar on the site.

The AppSpot app, Panguluri said, offers the same benefits of the App Search site, but does so in the form of an app for iOS or Android.

In both products, searched-for app results offer descriptions, prices, user ratings and screenshots. Yahoo will also offer up recommendations called Daily Personal Picks based on what apps you may like based on what apps you've already purchased.

Yahoo is promising "more precise results" that "using Yahoo!’s sophisticated search technology, quickly zero-in on an app by showing matching app titles as well as related keywords as you type," Panguluri said.

Once an app a user wants to download is found, Yahoo offers up QR codes and hyperlinks that then take users to either the Apple AppStore, iTunes, or Google's Android Market, where they can purchase the app they want.

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Images: Screenshots from Yahoo's AppSpot app for iOS. Credit: Yahoo

Facebook may be building a photo-sharing app for smartphones and tablets, in a bid against social networking apps from Instagram, Hipstamatic, Path and even Twitter.

The Palo Alto-based social network is the world's most widely used, with an estimated user base of more than 600 million, and it's also the most popular photo-sharing website, with more than 100 million photos uploaded daily.

According to the website TechCrunch, Facebook is developing an app for Apple's iOS operating system (used on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) that would allow users to take and edit photos, then share the shots on Facebook.

In Facebook fashion, users would also be able to "like" photos from friends, tag people they know in pictures, check-in to locations, comment on shots and group photos into albums, TechCrunch said, adding that the site was given screenshots of the app from an unnamed source at the social network.

The screenshots don't make it clear whether Facebook is building a standalone photo-sharing app, a Web-based HTML 5 app, or simply adding the new photo taking and sharing functions to the pre-existing Facebook iOS app, TechCrunch said, adding that maybe they're doing all three.

Facebook officials were unavailable for comment on the report on Wednesday.

[Updated 4:11 p.m.: A Facebook spokeswoman emailed along a company statement that neither confirmed nor denied the TechCrunch report, stating: "We're constantly working on new features and enhancements to our products but have nothing new to announce at this time."]

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Image: A screenshot of TechCrunch's report on a rumored Facebook photo-sharing app under development. Credit: TechCrunch

The smartphone market worldwide could end up growing by 55% in 2011 as more consumers ditch other mobile phones for smartphones, and Windows Phone could be the second-most-popular operating system by 2015, according to a research group.

International Data Corp. said in its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report that about 472 million smartphones could ship to retailers in 2011, significantly outpacing an estimated 305 million shipped in 2010.

The research group also is predicting that smartphone shipments could nearly double to 982 million by the end of 2015.

The reasons for the rapid growth in the smartphone market, "which will grow more than four times the rate of the overall mobile phone market this year," include declining average smartphone prices, increased functionality and cheaper data plan options, which all make smartphones attractive and attainable to an increased number of consumers, IDC said in its report.

"The smartphone floodgates are open wide," Kevin Restivo, a senior research analyst at IDC, said in a statement. "Mobile phone users around the world are turning in their 'talk-and-text' devices for smartphones as these devices allow users to perform daily tasks like shopping and banking from anywhere."

Growth in the smartphone market is taking place worldwide, but is especially noticeable in emerging markets such as the Asia/Pacific and Latin American regions of the globe, which will only accelerate in coming years, Restivo said.

In a prediction that few other analysts probably would share, IDC said in its report that it expects Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system to account for as much as 20% of the smartphone market by 2015 largely because of its alliance with Nokia -- which so far has yet to produce a Windows Phone 7 handset for consumers.

"Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile will benefit from Nokia's support, scope, and breadth within markets where Nokia has historically had a strong presence," IDC said.

Nokia isn't expected to begin producing a significant number of smartphones running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS until 2012, which will result in Windows Phone remaining a small player in the market this year, and probably next year too.

"Nevertheless, assuming that Nokia's transition to Windows Phone goes smoothly, the OS is expected to defend a number 2 rank and more than 20% share in 2015," the group said.

IDC estimated that Windows Phone will end up with about a 3.8% share of the worldwide smartphone market at the end of this year.

The research firm also predicts that Google's Android OS will remain in first place, growing to more than 40% of the global smartphone market in the second half of 2011, and taking about a 43% share by 2015.

Apple's iOS platform is ranked third in IDC estimates and the firm is expecting that to remain all the way through 2015.

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Photo: An HTC HD7 smartphone running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system. Credit: Camknows via Flickr

The teenager who hacked into Apple's latest mobile operating system said he is sharing how he did it in order to get Apple's attention and show the company the problem in its software.

Mert Erdir, a 17-year-old student in Turkey, found a way to unlock iOS 5 on his device on Tuesday, the day after Apple announced the new mobile operating system. Apple said iOS 5 will be available to the public in the fall, but it was available to developers on Monday.

Erdir said he had contacted Apple before going public to inform the company of the flaw so it could be fixed, but after receiving an automated response from the technology company, he decided to get its  attention by going instead to Gizmodo, the technology blog that published Erdir's method on Tuesday.

"I sent a video to Gizmodo to get Apple's attention on the flaw, but this grew far beyond than I expected and I found myself everywhere on the Net," he said in an email.

Erdir said he figured out how to unlock iOS 5 almost by accident.

"I downloaded it, and as expected, my iPhone got stuck in the activation screen," Erdir said Wednesday. "Then I joked to myself 'Dude, I can open this!' But I really didn't have any real hope."

Erdir said he thought that if he could access the notification center, a new feature of iOS 5, he could unlock the operating system.

"That's where the magic comes in," Erdir said.

After messing around with the device a few times, Erdir was successful in unlocking the operating system.

Apple has not contacted Erdir since he shared how to unlock iOS 5, but Erdir said he has received lots of attention from the tech community.

"It's a little bit awkward to see yourself in all the technology blogs and it came along at the same time with my exams, so it makes it hard for me to work for both," he said.

In the post by Gizmodo, Erdir said he would appreciate donations in order to become an official iOS developer, which costs $99 a year. So far, Erdir said, he hasn't raised much.

"I can buy some ice cream and diet coke with my money," he said in an email. "Yes only these two."

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Image: Mert Erdir's default picture on Twitter. Credit: Twitter.com/merterdir

Apple's next iPhone and iPad operating system, which is not set to reach the masses until sometime this fall, has already been hacked one day after it was announced, claims technology blog Gizmodo.

The hack allows any iPhone user to install the latest version of Apple's mobile operating onto their device months before Apple intended them to.

Registered developers for Apple's mobile operating system were able to officially upgrade to iOS 5 on Monday before the general public as is customary with Apple in order to get an early look at new features and begin updating their software accordingly.

The program was hacked by a man named Mert Erdir who was described as an "Apple lover" in the post by Gizmodo and tweets from Istanbul, Turkey, according to his account on the social network.

Correction: Earlier post said that Erdir had discovered that the program had been hacked when in fact he was the one who found holes in it.

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Apple and Twitter have teamed up to allow iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users to tweet photos, maps, websites and other items directly from within the iOS operating system.

Scott Forstall, Apple's senior vice president of iOS software, announced Monday morning at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco that Twitter would be baked into iOS 5, which is coming to i-devices this fall.

"People send more than a billion tweets per week," Forstall said during the event's first-day keynote. "And we hear from a lot of our customers on iPhone and iPad and iPod Touch that they love Twitter. And so we want to make it even easier for all of our customers to use Twitter on iOS products."

One of the major ways that Apple is integrating the microblogging site into iOS 5 is with a single sign-on feature. Users will be able to sign into their Twitter accounts once, and all Twitter-enabled apps will respond -- eliminating the need to enter a username and password for each individual app.

The single sign-on feature then will enable iOS 5 users to post directly to Twitter from built-in iOS apps such as Photos and Camera, Safari (for tweeting links to websites), YouTube (for tweeting videos) and Maps (for tweeting locations). And Apple has made APIs available so third-party developers can take advantage of the single sign-on feature for their own apps.

Apple's iOS 5 will also pull Twitter profile pictures and Twitter handles into an iOS user's contacts list alongside names, email addresses and phone numbers.

Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter and oversees the San Francisco company's product development, wrote a short post on Twitter's blog about the iOS integration.

"Building Twitter into iOS 5 truly creates the easiest way to share everything that's happening in your world," Dorsey wrote. "Take a picture, tap 'Tweet.' Tweeting has never been simpler."

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Apple WWDC: Mac OS X Lion will cost $29.99 in July, 250-plus new features

Apple WWDC: Steve Jobs announced iCloud in San Francisco [Live blog]

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Image: The steps of how to share a photo via Twitter from an iPhone's Camera app. Credit: Apple

As expected, Steve Jobs said Monday that Apple's iCloud service will offer a feature called iTunes in the Cloud that replicates users' music collections (instead of copying the files from their hard drives into the cloud) for free.

And, as reported by The Times before Jobs' announcement, a $25 annual subscription option will be made available. The Apple chief executive called it iTunes Match.

For $25 a year, an iTunes Match user will be able to add music not purchased from iTunes to his or her iCloud music collection. The number of songs an iTunes Match subscriber can store is unlimited, Jobs said at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday.

"Here's how it works," Apple said on its website. "iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can't match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch."

Songs with a match in the iTunes catalog are all replicated in a user's iCloud library at 256-kbps quality, which audiophiles should appreciate, even if the user had lower-quality files. 

Matching a user's iTunes library in the cloud take minutes, not days or weeks, Apple says. By contrast, Google's Music Beta and Amazon's Cloud Player services require users to upload song files to "cloud lockers" themselves and offer no matching options.

In order to pull all this off, Apple reached large contracts with major record labels, agreeing to give them a share of the revenue from iTunes Match subscriptions.

If iTunes Match users let their subscriptions run out and don't pay to re-up, their iCloud libraries would revert to just the songs they've bought from iTunes.

Apple released a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud on Monday for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users running iOS 4.3. ITunes Match will arrive this fall.

The cloud efforts will be taxing on Apple's servers, but the company says it is prepared for the increased traffic.

"Apple is ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers, including the third recently completed in Maiden, N.C.," the company said in a statement. "Apple has invested over $500 million in its Maiden data center to support the expected customer demand for the free iCloud services."

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Photo: Steve Jobs unveils the iCloud service at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Credit: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg

Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, is expected to take the stage at 10 a.m. today to keynote the annual Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone Center West.

Jobs, who has made few public appearance since taking another medical leave in January, will help show off a mysterious new Internet service, iCloud, that many predict will let users to store all their music online, allowing them to access and listen to it from a number of devices.

The new iteration of iOS5, Apple's mobile operating system, and Mac OS X Lion, the equivalent for Mac computers, are also expected to be introduced. 

We'll be updating through the day, so check back soon and often!

----

10:40 a.m.: Multi-touch gestures, Mission Control and AirDrop

Steve Jobs showed up to a standing ovation, then passed the stage to Phil Schiller, Apple's marketing chief.

Schiller said that Lion, the new Mac operating system, has hundreds of new features, including full-screen apps and multi-touch gestures. That means getting rid of scroll bars on the side of windows.

A swiping gesture can flip from one Web page to the next. A double-tap zooms into a specific section. A new Mission Control service compiles all running apps and windows on the desktop into one view with a pinch gesture.

Applications in Lion will automatically save your work -– when you quit and reenter, they'll revert to the window placement and text highlighting from when you left. Users can also see older versions of individual documents and do comparisons with past edits -- dragging and dropping portions from older versions into newer ones.

And with AirDrop, you can drag files to others in your network through WiFi.

10:55 a.m.: iOS -- iPad, music, book sales

Moving on to Scott Forstall, the senior vice president of iOS software. So far, more than 200 million iOS devices have sold to date, making it the top mobile operating system, with 44% of the market, he says.

More than 25 million iPads have sold, along with 15 billion songs through the iTunes music store, making it the top music retailer in the world. More than 140 million books have been downloaded through the iBooks store.

More than 90,000 apps exist for the iPad on the App Store, Forstall said. In less than 3 years, the store has seen 14 billion apps downloaded total, with Apple paying out more than $2.5 billion to developers. There are more than 225 million customer accounts.

11 a.m.: iOS 5 with notification center, Newstand and Twitter

The iOS 5 is a “major release,” says Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS software.

Users can get to the centralized notification center with a single downward swipe to see missed calls, Facebook updates, stocks, weather. When playing a game, the notification will show up at the top so it doesn’t interrupt the player. Sliding the notification icon sends you to the app that sent the notification.

There’s also Newstand, which has subscriptions to magazines and newspapers and downloads new issues in the background.

Twitter is now easier to use on iOS products, with a simple sign-on. Twitter is intergrated with the camera and photos, so it’s easier to tweet photos. Users can also tweet videos from YouTube and articles from Safari.

11:20 a.m.: Safari improvements

Safari users can tap a button to read articles on a webstie in full-screen as a single scrolling story, even for poorly-formatted stories. A reading list added to all iOS devices bookmarks stories for later.

On the iPhone, there’s now tabbed browsing on Safari that can be tapped to quickly switch windows.
Stories can be tweeted by tapping the Twitter button or emailed from within Safari – previously only possible by sending the link or pasting into an email.

The new Reminders feature can store multiple lists (like groceries) and dates with location – someone who wants to remember to call his wife when he leaves WWDC can set up a geo-fence that will remind me when he goes outside. The app can be synced with Outlook.

Now the camera function is faster and users can get to it via a shortcut past the lockscreen, even skipping the passcode, by tapping the camera icon on the unlock slider and then using the volume up button to snap a shot.

There are now optional gridlines. Users can pinch to zoom. They can lock autofocus. And the iPhone and iPad now have photo editing capabilities – to crop, rotate, remove red-eye and adjust color tones.

11:30 a.m.: Mail

One of the most-used apps on iOS is mail. Apple has added rich-text formatting, message flagging, bolding, indenting and underlining, and the ability to search the contents of messages instead of just the sender and subject line. Users can swipe to the inbox. Addresses can be dragged between the To, Cc and Bcc slots. A new variant-keyboard iPad allows keyboard splitting and also lets keys be dragged closer to thumbs.

“We’re living in a post-PC world,” Forstall said, noting that the new iOS doesn’t need to hook up to a PC for an initial startup or for updates. Most households don’t have computers, he said, so PC functions have been added to iOS -- for example, creating and deleting calendars and mailboxes. There’s a built-in dictionary that shows definitions right in the email message.

Users can start a message on one device and push it to another and continue the conversation.
“Now if you want to cut the cord, you can,” he said.

11:40 a.m.: Game Center and iMessage

Apple’s Game Center was launched nine months ago and now has 50 million users. Microsoft’s Xbox Live has been around for eight years and has 30 million users, Forstall said.

Apple users can now add photos, see friends of friends and get game recommendations. They can buy and download games directly from Game Center and get support for turn-based games like Scrabble.

The new iMessage is supported on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch and can send texts, photos and videos as well as contacts and group messages. There’s delivery confirmation and an indicator for whether someone is typing to you -- kind of like in Gchat.

11:50 a.m.: iCloud and Jobs

Jobs is back on stage, talking about iCloud.

PCs worked smoothly for a decade, he said. But with a slew of devices with photos, music and movies -- it’s been “driving us crazy trying to keep in sync.”

Here’s the solution: “Moving the digital hub into the cloud,” he said. And it’s not “just a hard disk in the sky.”

Why trust Apple, Jobs asked -- after all, “MobileMe was not our finest hour.”

This new system has been “rewritten from the ground up,” he said. Users can add a new contact -- or a new calendar or mail item -- to their mobile device and have it automatically copied on the cloud and advanced to the user’s other devices.

And there are no ads, Jobs said, in a dig at Gmail.

In the App Store, users can see the purchase history on all their devices and can add more devices at no extra charge. All apps purchased will show up on all devices. With books, users can start reading on one device, put in a bookmark and pick up reading on another device.

The cloud also wirelessly backs up the devices once a day.

11:58 a.m.: Photo Stream

The idea is to get rid of the file system, Jobs said.

The cloud system also works via the new Photo Stream service for photos. Photos taken with an iPhone, for example, will automatically be uploaded into the cloud and downloaded to other devices and stored. Same drill with imported photos.

On iOS, the last 1,000 photos are stored. For PCs and Macs, photos will be wiped off Apple’s cloud servers after 30 days. Users should move photos to an album if they want to keep them permanently.
The new capabilities are built into the apps, so there isn’t anything new that consumers have to learn, Jobs said. Photo Stream has also been incorporated into Apple TV.

“It just works,” he said, apparently the motto of the session.

12:05 p.m.: Drumroll please -- iTunes in the cloud

Jobs says that iTunes will also exist in the cloud. Music already purchased through iTunes will show up on up to 10 devices, at no cost to the user.

This is the first time something like this has been available in the music industry, he said.

Cloud-based iTunes is available today in beta form on iOS 4.3, but the full version will come this fall with iOS 5.

Users get 5 gigabytes of free storage for Mail, Documents and backup, not counting purchased apps, music, Photo Stream or books.

Oh, and “one more thing,” Jobs said: Users need to sync their devices once over Wi-Fi or using a cable, and after that, iCloud will spread new iTunes purchases over the gadgets.

With music not purchased from iTunes, Apple has software that will match it to the 18 million songs in iTunes and upgrade it to create a higher-quality copy in the cloud -- a process that takes minutes and costs $24.99 a year. The offer is better and faster than Google's and Amazon’s cloud music services, Jobs said.

12:15: And with that, Jobs is done! Thanks all.

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Top photo: Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Credit: Beck Diefenbach / Reuters

Bottom photo: The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Credit: Paul Sakuma / Associated Press

Apple's upcoming iCloud service is looking to push users into the cloud -- or at least their iTunes music collection anyway -- and it will be doing it for free.

Well, at no charge to consumers to start.

But, later on, Apple is planning to charge iCloud users a fee of about $25 a year to upload their music collection to the tech giant's servers so they can stream the music through a Web browser, or to whatever iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad or Mac they like, reports The Times' Alex Pham over on our sister blog Company Town.

And while sources familiar with the negotiations between Apple and major record labels surrounding the iCloud service have said music listeners won't have to fork over cash for cloud at first, funds will be changing hands between the companies involved to pull all this off.

Apple completed its negotiations with the four largest record labels on Thursday for iCloud, and is set to have contracts in place with music publishers by Friday, Pham reported.

From Company Town:

The agreements, finalized this week, call for Apple to share 70% of any revenue from iCloud's music service with record labels, as well as 12% with music publishers holding the songwriting rights. Apple is expected to keep the remaining 18%, said people knowledgeable with the terms.

Music companies that have signed on to iCloud include Warner Music Group, EMI Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Representatives from the four companies could not be immediately reached for comment.

Though the service is initially focused on allowing consumers to store their music on Apple's servers, the Cupertino, Calif., technology company ultimately envisions the service to be used for movies, TV shows and other digital content sold through iTunes, said a person knowledgeable of the company's plans.

If Apple has, or gets movie and TV studios on board, that might pit iCloud as a challenger to services such as Netflix or Hulu, and put in competition with cloud-based music streaming services from Amazon and Google, which beat Apple to the market, but haven't done so with the cooperation of major record labels.

Apple's Chief Executive Steve Jobs will be unveiling the details of iCloud, iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion, on Monday at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

Twitter.com/nateog

Photo: Apple CEO Steve Jobs gives a wave at the conclusion of the launch of the iPad 2 on stage during an Apple event in San Francisco on March 2. Credit: Beck Diefenbach / Reuters