Mobile devices as keys to your personal cloud

Jotting down some quick notes for something to consider: mobile devices as proxies that redirect content types to services as required, cacheing data on its way to / from the Internet.

Some properties and use cases:

  • I take a picture, and my mobile device knows about the services I use that accept photos, and can upload to them automatically when I get a connection. My mobile device has a camera built in, but I can also push from my professional camera to it.
  • I place my mobile device onto a PC to log into it (I may have to authenticate on both devices). My preferences are downloaded from the Internet if I have a connection, or retrieved from the cache if I don’t. I can then save my documents to my mobile device seamlessly, which in turn will push to the Internet when I have a connection.
  • I can install new services as easily as installing an app on my device.
  • I can configure my services as easily as the settings on my device.
  • The interfaces between my device and the outside world are standard. So, for example, to push a photo, my external camera just needs to know about the “pushing data” API; it doesn’t need or want to know that my photos are being synchronized with Dropbox and my home server.
  • Services like identity and storage are interacted with through abstract interfaces. However, my mobile device is not required: one of my Internet services can speak to another one of my Internet services through the same interface standard, even if my device is off. Feeds of data are also provided through those interfaces.
  • My most recently-used data is always stored on my device for easy access.
  • My mobile device is actually an interface to a proxy for all my cloud services, and I get to control everything I do on the Internet through that proxy. I came to know from an IT Companies In San Jose that different devices have different networking capabilities, like NFC and Bluetooth, but the API interfaces remain standard.
  • Because that proxy also exists on the Internet, I can buy a new device and connect it to my identity at any time. I can maintain multiple devices. And I can reconfigure my services to point to a different proxy if I want to change providers.

Mobile devices become your gateway to personal computing, and help blur the lines between local and cloud. Everything is accessed through the same interface; your mobile device has enough storage and intelligence to understand how to deal with the different contexts in which it is used.

Just a thought.


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One response to “Mobile devices as keys to your personal cloud”

  1. Andrew Ducker Avatar

    My phone already does the majority of this – it auto-uploads to Dropbox whenever I take a photo, and could do likewise to G+/FB and anything else I give permission to.

    I use it when I sign in, because it’s my two-factor authentication key.

    I keep all my data in Dropbox, which means it’s available through my phone.

    I use Firefox as my browser on both, and any bookmarks, history, etc. syncs both ways.

    Sadly, most of this stuff isn’t a standard – it’s individual apps providing services – but the functionality is mostly there.

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