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July 24, 2006
The Internet is Your Next Hard Drive
MIT Technology Review's latest article: The Internet is your Next Hard Drive, is a great read. Nice tagline Wade: "The forecast for the future of the PC: partly cloudy."
It's a piece about new web-based services that don't just store your data online, but also keep it synchronized across your laptop, desktop, and mobile phone.
The article suggests were entering a new reality for online storage systems: "Online storage systems that can automatically synchronize the data on all of your computing devices, including the PCs you use at home and at work and your smart phone, are finally a reality. One industry watcher, Thomas Vander Wal, calls them "personal infoclouds": technologies that scatter your data across the Internet and reassemble them on your preferred devices."
Client Sharpcast is a perfect fit here of course and gets a few plugs in the piece. With offerings like this --- "assuming that broadband Internet connections keep getting faster and more ubiquitous -- it might become unnecessary to store local copies at all, meaning your hard drive could be entirely replaced by remote Internet servers."
Tag: Sharpcast
July 24, 2006 in Client Media Kudos, In the News, On Mobile & Wireless, On Technology, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Permalink
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Comments
Renee,
There has been a bit of chatter on the various forums about the provocative title of the MIT Technology review article (which is the title to your blog post as well). So, even though I know you know what I am about to say, I wanted to clarify something for the benefit of your audience.
Our perspective at Sharpcast is that the future is going to be a hybrid online/offline world, with the distinction blurred for you with a technology like ours.
You will always have your local device storage, which gives you many benefits like cheap storage, quicker-than-broadband access, offline access, etc, but it will work seamlessly with a web data store, which gives you the benefits of remote backup, anywhere access, etc -- with a transparent sync engine bridging the two, making the distinction irrelevant to you whether you are online or offine or what device you are on. In our model, we allow you to make easy choices on what you want online and what not, so you can assess the cost/benefit tradeoffs yourselves and make smart decisions.
Sharpcast Photos beta is just a sneak preview of this future. I would encourage everyone to try it out, so you can form your own opinions. Plus, feel free share those opinions with me, whether you good or bad ;)
Cheers,
Gibu Thomas,
CEO Sharpcast
Posted by: Gibu Thomas | Jul 24, 2006 5:53:50 PM
I use PixSense (www.pixsense.com) for photo and video sharing and uploads and I'm extremely happy with its performance. One of the outstanding features for me in PixSense is the way they categorize and organize my collections on the device as well as on the website.
With respect to transfer speed and filesize PixSense uses a compression technology that compresses the file on the device by 50-60% before transferring. So users end up spending less using PixSense for photo, video and text upload than with other moblogging applications.
They've been churning out software upgrades pretty frequently and it keeps getting better with every new version. Check out some of these links from users posting videos:
http://beta.pixsense.com/gertv8/
http://beta.pixsense.com/boat/
Posted by: mkhan | Jul 31, 2006 1:36:16 AM
As the person whose work is pointed to at the beginning of the article, I should point out that the Personal InfoCloud (and Local InfoCloud) can be online or offline, but more than likely a mixture. It could be all web, but not everybody lives their life on the web. People live their life across devices while participating in a non-digital world too.
Posted by: vanderwal | Aug 25, 2006 10:14:22 AM
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