Today Jolicloud, a Chromium-based Operating System designed to put old or relatively weak computers back to work using the cloud, released version 1.1.1. The OS works by moving tasks typically processed locally to the cloud, and has now extended its support include to computers manufactured more than 10 years ago.  Supported graphic cards include:

Support for NVIDIA graphics cards 10+ years old including RIVA TNT/TNT2, Vanta, Aladdin and early Quadro and GeForce cards.

Enhanced support for NVIDIA graphics cards 5+ years old including early GeForce2/3/4, and Quadro2/4 generations.

Enhanced support for NVIDIA graphics cards 3+ years old including GeForce FX and Quadro FX.”

The system requirements for Jolicloud – a minimum of only 384MB RAM. According to ReadWriteWeb, Jolicloud’s App Center features more than 700 apps. While the platform and machine powered by it are not built for intensive activities, they can be useful as an affordable answer to lightweight, limited personal user needs. That includes web surfing, the use of Skype and so on, but that doesn’t make Jolicloud the only cloud utility around.

GoToCamera shares several common traits with JoliCloud, most notably the fact that the cloud webcam security vendor allows users to reuse an old Smarthphone or webcam for cloud-based security services. Our News Editor Kristen Nicole interviewed the brains behind the innovation, Varun Arora.

“The cloud has enabled a great deal of scalability for GoToCamera to be able to do this, but Arora is finding the industry is ripe for partnership opportunities. “We have a good relationship with Oracle and other cloud companies,” Arora tells me, saying there are “many things we’re doing now to become available from as many places as possible. We’re seeking partners that have access to the end user.”

Smaller companies are coming up with extremely creative desktop uses for the cloud, but Apple is also very likely to jump on the bandwagon with the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Switched reports that an Apple patent may bring users an all new feature: secure cloud storage. The basic concept is a ‘safe’ icon on the Mac X Doc to which users can drag file and automatically have them stored on Apple’s servers in an encrypted form. The supposedly upcoming feature would simply introduce the cloud element to the already existing FileVault, but represent a huge leap for the cloud in the Mac space.