Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has reached the one trillion mark in number of objects stored. For some perspective, that's 142 objects for every person on the planet, or counted one per second, it would take you 31,170 years to count them all.

The feat shows that Amazon's cloud business growth continues to accelerate. In a blog post announcing the event, web services evangelist Jeff Barr notes object growth reached an astronomical 3.5 billion per day, or about 40,000 every second. There doesn't appear to be any end to it either as more and more large scale customers hop onto S3.

Amazon Cloud Player, a service that lets Amazon users stream their cloud-stored music collection to their mobile device over a regular data connection, has been available on Android for more than a year. Tuesday, Amazon finally released the iPhone and iPod touch version of the Cloud Player App.

Just like the Android version, users can stream their music, download songs, or manage their music in the cloud, with the included ability to share playlists created in iTunes with the user's cloud library.

While the focus of WWDC's iOS 6 announcements surround Apple's decision to kick Google to the curb when it comes to maps, there are plenty of other features coming to the next version of Apple's mobile operating system that deserve mention.

"iOS 6 continues the rapid pace of innovation that is helping Apple reinvent the phone and create the iPad category, delivering the best mobile experience available on any device", iOS chief Scott Forstall says.

It's a big number and one still well ahead of Android. Just in early 2012, Apple has shipped at least 50 million iOS devices, with iPad adding force to iPhone. Apple calls them "post-PC devices". For all 2011, Apple sold 172 million iOS devices. But wait, haven't we heard this 365 million number before? Indeed, it's same as revealed in late April for the period through end of March. I'm quite surprised Apple didn't update the number, considering the big iOS 6 reveal during today's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote.

New iOS 6 features include FaceTime video over cellular, Facebook integration, Passbook for buying movie tickets and other passes, shared photo streams and new maps app, among others. The new capabilities aren't just for iPhone users but developers, as Apple provides them more built-in utilities to tap into. They received iOS 6 beta today. The software ships in autumn, presumably with iPhone 5.

Apple's yearly developer conclave is here, and we're expecting a good deal of news out of this year's event. We'll see the debut of iOS 6, and likely a significant refresh to the Mac lineup. Of course, Apple always likes to surprise, so it's fairly likely that some of the rumors we've heard -- from new native apps to some enhancements to iCloud -- will also be announced.

WWDC 2012 is also the first major company event to happen after the death of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. It will be interesting to watch how CEO Tim Cook and the team handle the event without their iconic and charismatic leader running the show.

Microsoft is doing what it can to promote cloud computing, focusing on the platform at the TechEd annual developer conference in Orlando, Fla. this week. In the event's opening keynote, Server and Tools chief Satya Nadella told a sold-out crowd of 10,000 that the future of Microsoft is in the cloud.

In the month or so leading up to TechEd, Microsoft has made a fair number of cloud-related announcements. Some of this is out of necessity, because of customer demand, but a lot of it has to do with competitive pressures.

As we move through June, there are more and more software titles being released. The past week has been pretty busy, particularly on the web browser front, but there have also been a number of other programs worthy of note.

If you still use physical CDs and DVDs, ISO Workshop 3.0 is worth taking a look at as it enables you to work with virtual drives to save having to keep switching discs. Diskeeper 12 Home is a great tool for anyone looking to ensure that their hard drive is completely defragged, and Diskeeper 12 Pro includes support for drives exceeding 1TB. Another interesting tool for maintaining your system is GhostBuster 1.0.1.0, a free utility that remove references in the registry to hardware you no longer use. There’s also a portable version available – GhostBuster Portable 1.0.1.0.

With the recent announcements of password breaches at LinkedIn, and warnings from Google about state-sponsored attacks on Gmail accounts, it seems like a good idea now to review some password security basics. Then there is report today that someone hacked presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Dropbox and Hotmail.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at a rather low-tech solution to a decidedly high-tech problem: How to guard against password reset attacks, and where to securely store the answers to your password reset questions.

Two days ago, 3,000 important websites, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo as well as many top Internet Service Providers, turned on their IPv6 support and this time they left it turned on. Nothing happened. Or maybe I should say nothing bad happened, which is good, very good.

The world is quickly running out of new IPv4 addresses, with almost 3.7 billion issued. There are two workarounds: 1) complicate the Net further with cascading arrays of Network Address Translation (NAT) servers that slow things down, inhibit native inbound connections like VoIP, and defeat location services both good and bad, or; 2) move to IPv6 with 128-bit addresses (IPv4 is 32-bit) that would allow giving an IPv6 address not only to every person and device but to every sock in everyone’s sock drawer as well, allowing bidirectional communication with hundreds of billions of devices from pacemakers to doorbells. Editor: Yes, but what about the socks that disappear in clothes dryers?

Microsoft's Office 365 cloud productivity suite gained even more momentum on Thursday, with both the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration announcing they will move some 80,000 employees to the platform.

The deal is worth some $91 million over seven years, and is provided through Microsoft partner Computer Sciences Corp. Office 365 plays a central role in the SaaS deal, which will offer DOT and FAA employees email, instant messaging, calendaring and webconferencing tools in a multi-platform environment.

New York City buzzed earlier this week when Salesforce announced it will acquire Buddy Media for $689 million. For those that have watched Mike Lazerow build the company from "a social media agency", as people jabbed in the early days, to a true social management platform, this outcome doesn’t come as a surprise. Buddy quickly grew as brands’ presence on social media shifted from experimental marketing budgets to a critical part of any chief marketing officer’s strategy. While Buddy originally (and wisely) hitched its wagon to Facebook as the network took off, they have since diversified outside the walls of Mark Zuckerberg’s castle and into other networks and platforms like Twitter, Google+ and more.

While this purchase may or may not come as a surprise to people, I have seen many folks scratching their heads and asking: "Why Salesforce?" Why not go, instead, with WPP (who’s an investor), Facebook, or another big agency holding company. The answer to this question lies in the difference of business fundamentals between agencies, Facebook, and Salesforce.

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For as long as Microsoft has offered a search engine, CEO Steve Ballmer or one of his minions has talked about the goal of providing answers to real questions rather than forcing people to use keywords. The success of social search service Quora or Yahoo Answers shows how much people simply want to ask. Bing and Google handle questions much better today than ever, but often the answers come unqualified and without the depth or authority of, say, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. Apple tries with Siri on iPhone, with Wolfram Alpha behind it. But we all know that, for now, Siri sucks.

Today, Microsoft seized the answer search initiative, by incorporating Encyclopedia Britannica into Bing results. Sure Google places Wikipedia front and center, but Britannica is an undisputed, reliable authority -- well for anyone old enough to have owned a set of the books. Ask a question. "The answer provides a quick overview of the subject, a thumbnail image, and useful facts and figures making it easier than ever to get trusted content in search", Franco Salvetti, Bing principal development lead, explains. "We also pull in direct links to other trusted sources".

Red Hat moved its hybrid cloud management software called CloudForms out of beta on Thursday, aiming to allow IT customers with considerable infrastructure to leverage it with public cloud resources to enable easy migration between the two.

The open-source software company first introduced CloudForms last May, then positioning it as an IaaS product. Since then, the company has begun contributing heavily to the OpenStack IaaS platform, and is now a platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation.

Hidden away in the middle of the concourse walkway between South and West halls of the Los Angeles Convection center sits this little corner display booth. Most people pass it by not knowing how big it might be to the future of gaming but as soon as I see who is there I have to stop and ask questions.

Gaikai is a service that started just two years ago -- at first thought of as nothing more than phantom console level vapor it is one of the two companies to announce "Cloud Gaming"; PC gaming via virtualization. Its first demo shows off high-end games from producers / developers EA and Red Project for titles like Mass Effect 3 or The Witcher 2. Using a web page Java applet client it runs on any Windows, Mac, or even Linux machine.