Apple has announced that Steve Jobs will give the keynote speech at next week’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference and that he will announce iCloud — the company’s widely rumoured suite of online services.
Jobs will also ‘unveil’ Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5, according to Apple. The company didn’t confirm whether either operating system would be made available immediately, but has previously said that Lion would be available this summer.
Among the services in iCloud, Apple is expected to introduce an iTunes streaming music service to compete with those recently launched by Google and Amazon. It was reported last week that it had signed deals with three of the four major record labels to allow it to stream music to users’ computers and mobile devices.
Also expected as part of iCloud is a re-vamped MobileMe which will include location-based services and allow users to upload content from an iOS device. That data could include location, ohotos, videos, apps, music, websites visited, and updates from social networking sites. According to reports, the new service would notify users when friends are close by and allow them to tag locations with ‘tokens’ such as photos or reviews of local restaurants.
WWDC starts on Monday 6 June. The keynote speech is at 6pm BST that day.
