My Personal Cloud

One of the important concept behind the Gladinet initiative is a personal cloud and how to present the personal cloud to an end user in an easy and consistent way.

An Internet savvy user nowdays use different services and store personal data in different places .

It started when people have multiple PCs (including home, work and on the road), a bunch of solutions came out, such as GotoMyPC, VPN to solve the remote access problem.

Then there were Flickr, Picasa and other online solutions. People were afraid of putting tax record or birth certificates online. So online photo storage services led the charge. Also value-add services like Google Docs, Zoho online suites are coming out as online applications backed by online storage services.

Slowly people are more willing to put more documents online as backups in case something like Katrina happens. Solutions like Carbonite, Mozy came out to help backing up local folders to online storage services.

Then a one way backup becomes multiple way synchronization. You see solutions like Groove, Live Mesh, Dropbox that help data move from PC to PC and from PC to online storage.

We are also seeing division of labor with all the evolution of a personal cloud. For example, Amazon specialized in backend cloud storage service like S3 and delegate the front end to partners. We are also seeing cool related solutions like EC2, when online desktops became reality.

So how does Gladinet fit into this? It is a specialization in the division of labor. Gladinet focused on integration and delivery of services to the front end like desktop; just like Amazon specialized in the backend technology.

Now you are seeing the functionality of a vertical service provider (such as XDrive has both front end and backend) getting replaced by more specialized horrizontal pieces. It helps company to focus, for example, Amazon S3 can focused on how to push the cloud storage closest to where the user can get and rest assured that other people will help delivering the service to the desktop.

The winner is us, a regular Internet user. We can pick and choose the best from each category and continue to grow our personal cloud, in Amazon S3 or on external hard drive; or there is no difference, just a personal cloud in Gladinet's view.

Comments

sanj said…
Jerry
when are you inviting people for beta testing.
jerryhuang said…
For the current beta 1, you can download and start testing right away in a stand-alone mode. Since the stand-alone mode doesn't depend on a Gladinet server, it helps us focus on this side of the issues first.

The beta testing for the standard version will happen Q1/Q2 next year, after we push the current beta 1 to beta 2 level.

For existing Tech Preview users, you will need to "Switch to Stand-Alone Mode" from the Systray menu.
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