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Personal Cloud Semantics

By Carolynne Schloeder on April 4, 2012   /   Blog   /   Leave a comment

I’m in the trenches in the war of words around cloud computing. Well actually Polkast is more “cloud” than “computing,” and you could say technically we’re not “cloud” in that we don’t require any third party cloud servers. What we are doing is paving the way for consumers to build their own private cloud using their own devices — a new frontier, one core component of the larger personal cloud trend.

This reminds me of the early days at Visto (now Good). That’s where I met Hong, by the way, and a lot of other really great people. We struggled with words like “universal access” before people even had broadband connections, let alone multiple devices. Visto has done well, despite the fact that we were early in what has become a common practice. Timing is everything. It feels like Polkast is hitting the timing just right.

What do consumers think about the cloud? Our very preliminary, very informal street intercept market research shows that people associate cloud with Apple iCloud. Once again Apple is taking tech concepts to the mainstream. (Before the iPhone ad campaigns, we in the mobile industry avoided using the term “app” when talking to consumers.) Now people get the cloud is about storing stuff or doing stuff on the Internet. They think of backup and access.

We’re broadening “access,” debunking the myth that public cloud storage is necessary for ubiquitous content access. The personal cloud = my cloud, my way. Yes, that includes the Internet. But it can also be a private cloud of your own connected devices. Wherever you choose to store your terabytes of content.

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Thoughts on Gartner’s Personal Cloud Research

By Carolynne Schloeder on March 28, 2012   /   Blog   /   Leave a comment
Polkast Personal Cloud

My Cloud, My Way

Twitter has been on fire for weeks with Gartner’s proclamation that the personal cloud will replace the PC by 2014. Michael Gartenberg and Carolina Milanesi did a great job laying out their research findings in a webinar titled The Personal Cloud and the $3Tn Consumer Market.

Here are my key takeaways – and I’m happy to say, it’s all very much in line with our vision here at Polkast:

Consumers are interacting with technology more and differently, driven by multiple devices, ubiquitous connectivity, rich content and apps, plus the middleware “glue” (insert Polkast here). We are in the midst of a sea change that is driving a huge revenue market.

The CE market is transitioning from device supremacy, to ecosystems, to services shaping the experience. At the center of a cool sideways pyramid chart is Wider Consumer Choice. And a big fuzzy cloud.

People carry multiple devices, and their uses/apps overlap. We can all relate to the charts on when/where/how we use our phone/tablet/laptop. For me there is a ton of overlap, and it’s sort of arbitrary which device I pick up. I still prefer typing on my MacAir, but funnily I often read email on my phone instead of my iPad. The point is I want all three of them; I choose how I use my devices, and all the apps and services I use on them.

My world, my way. Late last year Hong was using “my cloud, my way” as a tag, and I told him I didn’t think it would resonate with enough people. Oops. You were right Hong! It’s all about me (and by that I mean you, the consumer). Consumers’ ability to customize their content, storage and access is core to the definition of the personal cloud.

“The personal cloud is the consumer expectation to seamlessly store, sync and share content on a contextual basis from platform to platform, screen to screen and location to location that is now the hub of their digital lives.”

One question I have for Michael is about the prominence he gives sync in the 4S. Sync is the old way, when you had a couple of computers with roughly the same storage capacity. Now people carry multiple connected devices with differing storage capacity. It just doesn’t make sense to force a sync of 500GB of files on your computer to your 32GB iPad. Our model is on-demand direct access to distributed storage: file virtualization. Cloud sync and storage is for some of your content; direct peer-to-peer access is for everything.

Back to the presentation… The personal cloud is happening now, it’s ushering in disruptive business models, technologies and new competitors, and it creates opportunities and threats. Personal cloud providers have to be trustworthy, easy-to-use, interoperable and consistent across platforms. The networks have to provide the seamless connectivity to make it all hum. And device manufacturers and platform providers need to adopt personal cloud services.

The webinar is recorded, and the presentation is available for download. It’s full of great stats and charts, I highly recommend reading it.

 

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Polkast iOS and Android app updates

By Carolynne Schloeder on March 9, 2012   /   Blog   /   6 Comments

We just released updates to our iOS and Android app versions.

Yes, we now have streaming video!! Thank you all for your patience and your input. You can now do progressive streaming on supported file types. That’s where you start viewing right away while the video downloads. We still support download, temporarily stored in cache (or –on Android only — your SD card or internal memory), so you can watch offline.

Video formats that support progressive streaming are:

  • iOS — most .mov, mp4, .m4v and .3gp
  • Android — may vary depending on the device. The basic supported file types are listed here. There are third party apps that can extend Android’s capability – make sure you’ve installed a media player that supports streaming.

Not all videos with these file extensions will stream. There’s some detail around compression standards that could affect streaming, and your network bandwidth will have a big impact. Check out our FAQ for more information.

We also implemented smart caching on our mobile apps. This is especially important with large files on small capacity mobile devices. You don’t want to have to worry about managing your file storage. Recently viewed, favorites and files shared to you take priority in the smart cache. Thumbnails and your file index always remain in cache. So if you want to make sure a file stays in your local cache, mark it as favorite by tapping the gold star next to the file name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now iOS users can upload multiple files/photos at one time – another much-requested feature. It’s really easy to save files from your mobile/tablet back to your computer through Polkast.

Finally the app updates include some bug fixes and performance improvements.

We rely on your feedback to improve our product — please keep it coming! And look out for the software updates in the Apple and Android app stores.

 

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The New iPad, the Post-PC Era and the Personal Cloud

By Carolynne Schloeder on March 8, 2012   /   Blog   /   Leave a comment

Wow, the new iPad announcement (I guess I can’t say iPad 3) and the related discussions are building the groundswell around the post-PC era and driving the need for the personal cloud.

Whether you call it post-PC or PC-plus (we’re excited about Windows 8, too), the point is the computer is now just one of many connected devices people use.

Some quick facts for perspective:

  • Apple reported 315M iOS devices have been sold — over half of those in the last year, and 20% in Q4. The rate is increasing.
  • Google reports more than 300M Android devices sold. Also at an increasing rate, now 850K Android activations per day.
  • Last month we learned that smart phones outsold PC’s.
  • And then we heard tablets are overtaking PC sales, driven largely by the iPad.

And that’s just tablets and smart phones. We’re also seeing innovative new devices like our partner FXI’s Cotton Candy, Seagate’s advancements in WiFi storage, the growth in NAS, smart TV’s, telematics and more.

Back to the new iPad announcement, Apple emphasized that iPad users will create more on the iPad; it’s not just a consumption device, as some people perceive — making it a viable alternative to the traditional PC. Indeed tablets are commanding more and more share of computing time. People are carrying their iPads out of the living room and bringing them to the work place.

It all heightens the need to have our own content easily accessible from any of our devices.

The personal cloud is the answer. Our stuff is all over the place, we’re amassing huge content libraries, cloud services won’t be the main storage. The smart solution is to connect distributed storage securely peer-to-peer (“file virtualization” for the techie readers). Sure a user or IT manager might decide to centralize on a NAS – or even cloud storage (we’re not completely bucking that trend, just think it’s cost-prohibitive and inefficient). The point is it doesn’t matter where our files are, we should be able to always access them from any of our chosen devices – irrespective of operating system: Mac, iOS, Windows, Android, Linux.

That’s the new expectation, and that’s Polkast’s vision.

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FXI Cotton Candy epitomizes the post-PC era

By Carolynne Schloeder on February 26, 2012   /   Blog   /   Leave a comment

When we say “post-PC era,” we’re not predicting the death of the PC, we simply see the computer as one of many connected devices. And FXI Technologies’ Cotton Candy is a perfect example of this exciting future. We ported our Polkast Android app to their prototype device to show at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. It’s a perfect marriage: they bring your computer to any screen, and we bring all of your content with you.

The Cotton Candy is a cool little device with full Android and Ubuntu OS (or virtualized client for Windows, Mac and Linux), WiFi connectivity, and a USB key on one end and HDMI on the other. You can plug in and take over any computer, netbook, TV or gaming device. The screen becomes your own computer, with all of your apps and content. Read more in the press release.

We’re excited to be working with FXI Tech on their innovative new product. Polkast is about connecting your devices directly in a secure personal cloud. And we’ll continue to partner with device manufactures to expand our personal cloud ecosystem.

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Polkast Android version optimized for the Kindle Fire

By Hong Bui on February 22, 2012   /   Blog   /   2 Comments

Recently I was lounging around with my new Kindle Fire, trying out new apps, emailing, googling, streaming videos, and catching up on work reading. Glancing up from my Kindle, I noticed that nearly everyone in the room was engaged with their mobile devices, including my 4-year old and grandma.  I experienced a small aha moment. The transition to the “post-PC” era is in full swing in my home, like many millions of homes around the world.

Only a couple of years back I’d be on my laptop and the others would hang around the TV. And now my 80 year-old mom can easily navigate through family photos and videos with Polkast on the iPad, and my 4-year old daughter enjoys the pre-schooler apps.

So I’d like to take a moment — again — to thank the man, Steve Jobs. Up until the arrival of iPhone and iPad, touchscreen devices were a novelty confined to a niche market. Steve and his team kick-started a new industry and truly made computing technology accessible to everyone.

Tablets and smart phones have changed everything. A million Kindles were sold per week leading into Christmas, and 15 million iPads were sold in Q4 — that’s a lot of people quickly adopting a new behavior. We’re living through a paradigm shift in how we feel about our content and our devices. We want to do anything and everything on our tablets, anywhere, and we should just be able to get all of our stuff without having to think about where the file is stored or get up off the couch to get it. That’s what we call cloud bending.

I’m happy to announce that a new Polkast Android version optimized for the Kindle Fire was released in the Amazon app store. Give it a try and tell us what you think and what else can we do to make your digital living easier, accessible, and more fun — without limits.

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Mac update!

By Carolynne Schloeder on January 26, 2012   /   Blog   /   3 Comments

Mac users, check out our latest software release. We’ve been in public beta while we enhanced our integration with iPhoto – a critical feature for almost all Mac users. iPhoto is tricky, and we have to extract the data to display in a way that makes sense. Now your photos and videos from your iPhoto albums are organized and easily accessible through Polkast.

Speaking of Mac users, I just read that iCloud has 85 million users – wow! Personally, I only use iCloud for calendar, contacts and bookmarks sync (it works most, not all, of the time). But even if you do use iCloud for files, Polkast can be complementary, for access to the rest of your files — the hundreds of gigabytes you have on your Mac. All of your photos, videos, documents, etc. would blow past the 5GB storage limit and take forever to upload to the cloud.

Polkast is also similar to Apple’s Airdrop, but we let you share files with anyone, even extending beyond your local network and outside of Apple devices. We’re cross-platform, so if you have a Mac you can still share files with people on Windows and Android. It’s especially great for large files.

Download the latest Mac OS version of Polkast here

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Seagate and ZyXEL show Polkast at CES

By Carolynne Schloeder on January 12, 2012   /   Blog   /   Leave a comment

We’re having a great time at CES!

Hong has done some video interviews with Scobleizer and techpodcasts. And a couple of very prestigious device manufacturers are showing off the future of the personal cloud with Polkast:

Congratulations to our friends at Seagate and Verizon Wireless – their prototype mobile wireless storage drive was a finalist in Best of CES 2012. Seagate is using Polkast for remote access and sharing on the device. Stop by the Verizon Pavilion in South Hall 3 and ask about Polkast on the Seagate protoype.

For the in-home entertainment network, we are showing Polkast running on ZyXEL’s Media Server NSA300 series. You may have seen our announcement. That’s also a pre-commercial version; we will launch with ZyXEL at CeBIT in March.

Media storage drives are a great solution for consumers who have large media libraries and want to share files across multiple computers and mobile devices. That’s way too much content to upload to a cloud storage service – it would take too long and cost too much. With Polkast, your media storage device becomes the center of your personal cloud.

Come see us at the Eureka Park Tech Zone, booth 74211, at the Venetian.

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PC-to-PC is Here!

By Carolynne Schloeder on January 4, 2012   /   Blog   /   5 Comments

We’re really excited to be announcing our Pro version of Polkast with PC-to-PC support. First we gave you direct access to your computer from your mobile phone or tablet. Now Polkast also connects your computers directly, so you can access files stored on your home computer directly from your work PC, and vice versa. That’s a big step forward in our mission to connect all your devices into your own personal cloud.

The PC-to-PC feature is available first on our Windows 7 version. That means you can view files on other computers — including Macs– from your Windows 7 PC. (We’ll upgrade the other versions of Windows and Mac OS X within a couple of months.) To get the PC-to-PC Access feature now, simply download the latest version of our Windows 7 software – no need to update your mobile app.

PC-to-PC is a great feature for users who like to keep their work lives and their personal lives separate. Instead of keeping personal files on your work PC in case you need something, our PC-to-PC product will let you simply access that personal file right from your work PC without having to download and store it. We’ll even save any changes you make to your personal file from your work PC back to your home computer. And because we create a direct connection, we give you access to all the files on your computer – not just the ones you remembered to upload to some cloud storage solution.

Another big plus is that you don’t need to store multiple copies of everything on each of your computers like with sync software, so you can be much more efficient with your storage space. And files can be previewed without having to be downloaded. So if you’ve already got limited hard drive space or you don’t want the hassle of syncing with a group shared folder, preview everything, download only what you need.

PC-to-PC is a great solution for anyone needing to share large files like designers, photographers and videographers. It’s a pain having to go through the time-consuming process of uploading files via 3rd party providers, then having the client download the file. Polkast lets you share the file with the client directly. The client can preview files without having to download them.

As a thank you for your support, all current registered users will be grandfathered into the service and will be able to upgrade to the Pro version for free, for life. Starting in February, new Polkast users can upgrade to Pro inside the Polkast application for $4.99 per month or $49.95 with a year subscription.

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Feeling less cloudy these days

By Hong Bui on October 4, 2011   /   Blog   /   Leave a comment

With the arrival of the Kindle Fire on the scene, my inbox is full of articles about how it’s a wrapper of all things digital in the cloud. Sure to follow will be another wave of articles about how all our digital content will be stored in the cloud. Concerns of privacy and security will also be highlighted and discussed. It’s clear it’s time to make the cloud truly useful.

Sure it’s alluring to free our digital living – once in the cloud, we can access our content from anywhere. Sounds great right? But from my experience, the cloud has a few shortcomings.

We constantly have to battle size limits. We can only store selected files. So we have to plan ahead and manage we want to take with us. And why should we pay for more storage when there’s ample space on our computers?

My favorite head scratcher of all is why do we need to upload our content to the cloud, store it, and then download it over a slow Internet connection when the two devices are in a same building, with a much faster, more reliable Wi-Fi between them? Siphoning our ocean of digital content through the straw of the Internet can be a time consuming pain.

With Polkast, you can have all the alluring benefits of the cloud but without the limitations. Have access to ALL of your files. Take security and privacy back under your control. Make syncing the old way, predating the iPad/tablet (topic for another blog).

So how do we do this? Polkast creates your own “direct cloud” dynamically, letting your mobile devices access your computers directly. Instead of uploading anything to somewhere, you can now directly and securely access ALL the files already there on your computers. It just makes sense.

Also, it’s a lot faster because we take advantage of super fast Wi-Fi connections when your devices are on the same network. You can fetch a video from across the room in minutes not hours.

Polkast frees you from planning. Now you can access and share any photos, videos, and files on your computers from anywhere. Don’t you hate it when you forget some file back in the office, and you can’t do your work.

And it’s cheaper because there is nothing to buy. It works with what you already have: your Wi-Fi, your computers, and your mobile devices, at work and at home.

In Jeff Bezos’s letter to the customers on the Kindle Fire’s announcement, he stated “There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.”

At Polkast we are firmly in the second camp too.

Providing more capability for less… well, actually, for free. Give it a try. Let us know what you think. We’re on Twitter and Facebook. We’d love to hear from you.

We do feel a lot less cloudy these days. You can too.


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