Edible Apple

While details of Apple’s iCloud initiative weren’t revealed until Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center earlier this week, Apple’s purchase of the iCloud.com domain name for $4.5 million certainly tipped Apple’s hand.

Following Monday’s keynote, Apple went on quite a domain name shopping spree, securing domains that relate to a number of its new services and features in OS X. This move is largely a defensive measure against name squatters who like to purchase domains that relate directly to new Apple products or software in an effort to garner cheap pageviews.

All told, Apple has registered 50 new domain names. Clearly, the company is serious about ensuring that web searches for Apple related products direct back to Apple and not to some third rate website looking to make a quick buck by piggybacking off of Apple’s intellectual property. After all, remember the influx of iSlate-related domain purchases that occurred back when no one was quite sure Apple was going to call its tablet device?

In any event, these are the domains recently acquired by Apple:

airplaymirroring.com, appleairplaymirroring.com, appledocumentsinthecloud.com, applegestures.com, appleicloudphotos.com, appleicloudphotostream.com, appleimessage.com, appleimessaging.com, appleiosv.com, appleitunesinthecloud.com, appleitunesmatch.com, applelaunchpad.com, applemailconversationview.com, applepcfree.com, applephotostream.com, appleversions.com, conversationview.com, icloudstorageapi.com, icloudstorageapi.com, icloudstorageapis.com, icloudstorageapis.com, ios5newsstand.com, ios5pcfree.com, ipaddocumentsinthecloud.com, ipadimessage.com, ipadpcfree.com, iphonedocumentsinthecloud.com, iphoneimessage.com, iphonepcfree.com, itunesinthecloud.com, itunesmatching.com, macairdrop.com, macgestures.com, macmailconversationview.com, macosxlionairdrop.com, macosxlionlaunchpad.com, macosxlionmissioncontrol.com, macosxlionresume.com, macosxlionversions.com, macosxversions.com, mailconversationview.com, osxlionairdrop.com, osxlionconversationview.com, osxliongestures.com, osxlionlaunchpad.com, osxlionresume.com, osxlionversions.com, osxresume.com, pcfreeipad.com, pcfreeiphone.com

Notably, Apple still doesn’t own iPad.com or iPods.com, though they recently initiated a legal filing to acquire the latter.

via TechCrunch