The "cloud" is the internetz, it's called a "cloud" because you don't really know what's going on inside it or where your data is at any given point (false, but the level of abstraction for the end user makes it simple to explain this way), all you know is you send information into the cloud, it reaches it's destination, and the cloud spits back out data to you. Therefore "cloud computing" is using one, two, 40,000, etc. servers that are out there to do your information crunching for you instead of on your local machine. I'm trying to come up with a simple example. Web e-mail, (GMail, Yahoo!, etc) is all in the "cloud" since you can access it from any terminal anywhere in the world. You don't know where the servers are that hold your e-mail, you just know you can sit down and access it from where ever you want as long as you have the internet. If it was on your local machine (e.g. retrieved it periodically from a server via MS Outlook or something) you'd have to access it differently, not from the cloud, but from your local machine.