According to OregonLive, Apple is considering another large data center, this one at Prineville site in Oregon.

Those familiar with the discussions say that Apple’s Oregon plans have been in flux while it awaited word on whether there would be adequate electricity transmission in Prineville to meet its needs.

Whether or not Apple settles on the site, and whether it ends up being on the scale of the multi-billion dollar North Carolina facility are unknown. With iCloud and online services like Siri becoming increasingly important to Apple long term strategy, it does make sense they’re looking to expand and add both capacity and redundancy to the services.

Source: OregonLive

Sorry, but when the Charlotte Observer reported that Apple was planning to build a solar farm across from their massive North Carolina data center, that’s the headline that popped into mind.

Permits issued by Catawba County show that the Cupertino, Calif., company has been approved to reshape the slope of some of the 171 acres of vacant land it owns on Startown Road, opposite the data center, in preparation of building a solar farm.

Source: The Charlotte Observer

Apple’s new data center can now be seen on Google Earth and Maps, where until yesterday it only showed woods and farmland with a driveway that ended in the middle of a field. Now you can see the data center in all its glory.

It seems to be quite a coincidence that the data center has now appeared after Apple announced that iCloud would be shown off at WWDC next week. We assume that this huge data center will be the source of all the iCloud goodness that we will find out about on Monday coming. Remember, we will be covering all the events as they unfold.

If you want to have a look at the data center for yourself, just type in 6081 Startown Road, Maiden NC into your Google Maps search box!

[Fortune]

TechCrunch has followed up on their original report on Apple/Nuance partnership talks, saying the deal might already be on its way and could be part of next month’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote.

More specifically, we’re hearing that Apple is running Nuance software — and possibly some of their hardware — in this new data center. Why? A few reasons. First, Apple will be able to process this voice information for iOS users faster. Second, it will prevent this data from going through third-party servers. And third, by running it on their own stack, Apple can build on top of the technology, and improve upon it as they see fit.

Obviously, Nuance, which owns the technology, would have to sign off on all of this. And we now believe that they have. Hence, the big time partnership that should be formally announced soon.

Apple can’t build this stuff themselves, buying Nuance is too expensive, so they’re licensing it and deploying it on their massive cloud so they can integrate it into iOS 5 and make SIRI-style voice recognition and “artificial intelligence” core to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch moving forward.

But here’s the thing. Google introduced system-wide voice control in Android with the debut of the Nexus One, and so far it hasn’t really gone mainstream. Last year, with iOS 4, Apple tried to mainstream video calling with FaceTime and… it’s hard to say how successful it’s been. It’s by far the easiest video calling system released to date, usable by kids and grandparents alike… but who knows how much they use it?

Apple could make an incredibly simple, “it just works” voice control system as well — MouthTime, so to speak — but would you use it? Would your parents?

[TechCrunch]

Apple is reportedly in negotiations with major record labels to allow users to download music they’ve already purchased without having to pay again. This would be similar to how the App Store lets you re-download purchased apps as often as you like without additional charges — as long as your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is logged into the same iTunes account. Right now if you download the same song more than once you’re charged again each and every time. Allowing unlimited downloads would also act as a backup of your entire catalogue of purchased music in case the original files are lost or damaged.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is in talks with record companies to give iTunes customers easier access to music they’ve purchased across multiple devices [...] The arrangement would give users more flexibility in how they access purchased music. A deal would provide iTunes customers with a permanent backup of music purchases

If all goes well during these negotiations the service should be going online sometime this summer, and sounds like some good use of that massive data center Apple has been working on.

Is this the type of iTunes cloud service we’ve all been waiting for or do you think Apple could be doing more? What about streaming? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

[Bloomberg]

The new Apple data center located in Maiden, North Carolina, is expected to begin its operations “any day now” according to local officials. Amidst Apple getting ready to begin production inside the massive 500,000 sq. ft. data center, rumors have been milling around the internet stating that Apple plans on doubling the size of its already massive data center.

A local realtor, Bill Wagenseller, posted an aerial video of Apple’s facility had these comments to share:

Though there has been no official announcement, I discovered that site work is being performed and it clearly appears that there may be some truth to the speculation.

This new data center is what many are saying will be the heart of Apple’s  new cloud-based services which will allow users to store files such as their iTunes libraries on Apples servers as to stream them to all their devices.

Are you excited about possibly getting to utilize the cloud soon to store your files or does the cloud experience have you nervous about leaving all of your files in the hands of Apple and their servers?

[ Data Center Knowledge ]

by Brian Tufo

When Apple needed land for their $1 billion dollar data center the farmers who owned it decided they needed $1.7 million to sell. Not bad considering they bought it for $6,000 just 34 years ago.

“They told us to put a price on it and we did,” said Kathy Fulbright, 62, seated on a brown leather sofa in the living room of the home she and her husband built with the proceeds. The 49-acre property boasts a 4,200-square-foot house with a Jacuzzi in the master bathroom, as well as a manmade pond stocked with bass and catfish.

Other farmers in the area are apparently sizing up supercars should Google or Microsoft decide they simply must move into the neighborhood as well.

Apple meanwhile aims to finish the data center, dubbed “Project Dolphin” this year and we aim to keep speculating on just what they may use it for. iTunes.com streaming media to iPhone and iPad tops the list, followed by amped up MobileMe services, remote backups, and everything else that comes with massive investment in cloud infrastructure.

Now excuse us as we try to lock up all the rest of that land, Scooby Doo villain-like, and wait for our Apple-bucks payoff…!

[Bloomberg]

Cult of Mac claims a source has told them Apple is live streaming today’s special music event as a way to test their massive new, North Carolina data center, set to go fully operational later this year.

Apple’s first live video broadcast in years is a test of the server farm’s ability to stream a future version of iTunes for iOS devices, our tipster says.

“The goal is to monitor traffic load and quality,” says our tipster, who asked to remain anonymous to preserve their connections at Apple.

Apple product events are the Oscars or Superbowls of the Internet, with traffic numbers high enough to take down the biggest sites, and sometimes entire data centers (plural). So if they’re going to test something as bandwidth intensive as video, does it make sense to test it under the harshest conditions imaginable?

Either way, we’ll find out soon enough how it holds up. Hey, why not watch along with us?

[Cult of Mac]

During Apple’s Q3 2010 conference call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple’s massive North Carolina data center is on schedule and should go online in 2011. Oppenheimer didn’t reveal what the data center would be used for but rumors persist of an iTunes.com streaming music, TV, and movie service.

With 100,000,000 iOS devices sold to date, additional rumors of an iOS Apple TV, and countless desktop iTunes installs on the market, pushing that much content would certainly need a world-class data center.

If this year’s iPod touch event in September doesn’t offer any clues, maybe next year’s iPad event will?

Remember that $2 billion world-class data center Apple is building in North Carolina, the one that could be mean iTunes.com or a super MobileMe or only-Jobs-knows-what? Well here’s some video purporting to show it from the sky (if not show it looking like SkyNet!)

Check it out after the break and let us know what you think is going on inside those massive, machine-filled walls!

[DataCenter Knowledge via Macrumors via 9to5mac]

Techcrunch thinks the move of iTunes to the clouds is inevitable. Back in February there were rumors of something called iTunes Replay, that would allow users to store their media purchases — which can easily grow to 10s if not 100s of GBs fairly quickly — on Apple’s servers and then stream them down to iTunes, Apple TV, or their iPhone or iPod touch on-demand.

Nothing came of it at the time. Since then, however, Apple has begun building a world-class data center in North Carolina, and baked a new HTTP streaming media feature into both the iPhone/iPod and the Mac.

With cost of hard drive storage still falling, and 2TB soon being realistic capacities for standard home media centers, do we — or Apple — really need to think about the “cloud” so much?

We do if we use iPhones, iPod touches, laptops… or upcoming iTablet and like-devices dependent on smaller, still more-expensive solid state storage. Sure local copies for backup are nigh impossible for old curmudgeons like myself to even consider giving up, but syncing, deleting, and otherwise managing content can be a pain in our old curmudgeonly nethers as well.

There’s one key area, however, it doesn’t address — bandwidth caps. Sure, they’re not an issue for most people in the US, but they are in countries where internet service is both more expensive, slower, and far more tightly capped. (Like where I am, in the distant realm of Canada.)

And even in the US, if cable and DSL companies start losing TV subscribers to iTunes, those prices and lack of caps might just change as well.

Of course, letting us sync and manage our content over WiFi could and should be an alternative. iTunes and Apple TV can already sync over WiFi, and the iPhone can download movies from the iTunes Store over WiFi. Why can’t the iPhone browse our PC’s iTunes library and transfer media over via WiFi?

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. That’s the future. Maybe. This is now. Do you want your iTunes in the cloud?

Google bought Grand Central and rebranded it Google Voice, now Apple has rejected Google Voice for the iPhone and the FCC is looking into it. Based on the responses Apple had given the FCC, it looks like they might be afraid Google is taking over the iPhone and Google Voice is a big piece of that. So what if Apple had bought Grand Central instead? Or what if that new world-class data center Apple is building will be home to a Google Voice competitor? (Tip of the theoretical hat to Derek in our comments, who delightfully calls such a thing iVoice).

GrandCentral (not to be confused with Apple’s upcoming multicore processor handler, Grand Central Dispatch) was an innovative service that gave users a new phone number that could replace any number of other and assorted numbers (one line to ring them all), along with SMS, transcribed voice mail, conference calling, call switching, call screening, etc. It was purchased by Google in 2007 for $95 million, and relaunched in 2009 as Google Voice.

If Apple had bought it instead, they would of course now be spared the headaches surrounding the above mentioned rejection and investigation. But they’d also have a fairly compelling set of services to roll up into the iPhone…

The original iPhone 2G saw Apple neatly remove carriers from a large portion of the smartphone experience by handling the selling and activation themselves, and not allowing any so-called carrier crapware (or even physical branding) onto the iPhone.

iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 saw the removal of carrier application portals with the introduction of an Apple-controlled App Store (though that inarguably has crapware all it’s own, users don’t have to fight with it being pre-installed and/or baked in).

At the same time, the original iPod touch went from being a crippled, no external speaker, no external volume control iPhone, to a fairly good non-phone iPhone. In a couple of weeks, Apple is widely expected to ship an iPod touch with a camera and perhaps microphone as well.

That makes it a potential VoIP monster.

Of course, GrandCentral/Google Voice doesn’t use VoIP (despite Apple’s weak-tea response that they’re still investigating it). That doesn’t mean it couldn’t (as in never will).

An iPhone — or iPod touch — with “iVoice” phone, sms, voice mail, etc. behind it…? That removes the carrier further still (dumb pipe chants, if you will), and the iPod touch as a VoIP monster? Heh. It becomes the Balrog.