Apple® today introduced the Apple Store® in China (apple.com.cn), the easiest way to shop online for Apple products including the revolutionary iPhone® 4 and the magical iPad™. Apple’s online store in China features free shipping, free personalized engraving on any iPod® or iPad, and the ability to custom configure any Mac® with just a few clicks. The online Apple Store also offers a wide selection of third-party products and is the only place online to buy the iPod nano® (PRODUCT) RED.

“We are thrilled to open our newest online store in China,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s COO. “With personalized engraving, configure-to-order options and free shipping on everything, the Apple Store is a great destination for our customers in China.”

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, signature gift wrap is available with the purchase of most Apple products including iPod, iPad and iPhone. The online Apple Store also lets eligible students and faculty members take advantage of special education pricing on Apple products.

Also starting today, customers in China can access Apple’s legendary App Store℠ in Simplified Chinese, with localized featured apps and charts of the most popular paid and free apps in China. The App Store offers iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users access to the world’s largest catalog of apps with over 300,000 apps in 20 categories including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

Editor’s note:

I’ve checked some of the prices on this new store.

iPad: RMB (China Yuan Renminbi) 3.988

iPod Shuffle: RMB 398

iPod Touch: 8GB RMB 1,798

32GB RMB 2,398

64GB RMB 3,198

Macbook 13′ : RMB 7,988

Mac Pro: RMB 19,988

As well known, Cloud Computing is online-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.

Cloud computing allows you to host your files on the web, run your own applications, launching operating systems and scale them.

Amazon.com the Online shopping site from the earth’s biggest selection of books is also one of the biggest cloud computing services on the market. Also there are other big boys on the park as Appistry-Cloud computing middleware, GoGrid, Flexiscale, Microsoft Live Mesh, Force.com, 3Tera and more familiar;  Google App Engine.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is it’s global, private hard disk across the Internet; accessing from any computer and smartphone or even cell phone. Cloud computing offers you world class accessibility.

Is it really so?

This is fact that internet is global, but the laws are not.

Not long ago, Turkey has coincidentally blocked access several Google services, including Google Docs and its translation service because Turkey already blocked YouTube and some of the Google services use the same ips with YouTube. According to users in the country, docs.google.com, translate.google.com, books.google.com, google-analytics.com and tools.google.com are affected by the ban.

On another note, Turkey wants Google to pay 30 million lira (about $18.7 million) in taxes.

Users couldn’t access their Google Docs spreadsheets and documents. They couldn’t measure their web sites using Google Analytics.

Today, Iran, UAE, Thailand, Morocco, Iraq, Brazil, Australia (in schools) are blocking YouTube.  Do you see how many people can be affected with their cloud computing services?

Same had happened in 2009, because The Great Firewall of China blocked some of the Google Apps services.

China’s internet authorities blocked many Google searches for terms and websites deemed politically sensitive.

These are just popular issues and can be multiplied. People who use cloud computing services around the world, cannot always benefit from it’s global Access as it was told. As IT budgets pointing to the cloud computing this is still risky.

So far the issues are about Google App Engine but it’s clear that the risks and trust building mechanisms of cloud computing should be reconsidered.