I'm working on an open platform for cloud storage. Imagine something like MobileMe, Microsoft Strata, or Carbonite, but without your data being trapped by a single vendor.
I've got the partner (alexkravets), now we're looking for funding to mitigate the risk of having no day job.
We don't have a write-up online at the moment, but we firmly believe in the "ideas are cheap; execution is everything" philosophy, so we'll answer any questions.
Question: how do you plan on making things sync as effortlessly as they do on MobileMe? I'm sure it can be done - look at Dropbox - but do you have any ideas on how to beat something that's built in to the system?
First we'll build the equivalent of an online mountable disk so it'll be a natural fit for online storage/backup and sharing.
Building applications on top of this storage layer such as photo sharing and syncing will be next.
As for how to compete, the magic sauce is openness on two fronts. Bandwidth and storage are commodities, and we want this storage tier to be a commodity marketplace as well. The storage providers will compete for end users while cooperating to store and serve up data. A user can switch providers and retain the same data in the system (cloud).
Along with an "open" system, most (if not all) of the software will be open source. We envision a small hub of centralized services (identity and such), a storage provider ring, and the end users.
So basically we'll beat the big guys by creating an open system with open software. Our company, then, will be taking a small slice of a big pie, rather than on these players head-on.
At the moment we are considering Celeste as the basis for this platform. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/celeste/
I've got the partner (alexkravets), now we're looking for funding to mitigate the risk of having no day job.
We don't have a write-up online at the moment, but we firmly believe in the "ideas are cheap; execution is everything" philosophy, so we'll answer any questions.