In our previous
post, written by John Milan, we explored the emerging world of "social business
applications" - where Internet-connected data is synchronizable and accessible anywhere,
online and offline. It's a fascinating article and I highly recommend you take the time
to read it, if you're at all interested in the next generation of Web technology.
The tie-in with this post is that Sharpcast is a promising new company building synchronization software. We wrote about it previously on Read/WriteWeb:
"In a nutshell Sharpcast enables you to synch your data across the Web, multiple PCs and your mobile phone. It's a real-time synchronisation engine and photos is just the first application of this - soon Sharpcast will be extended to all types of files. Indeed the platform was always intended to go well beyond photos."
Today Sharpcast released a further upgrade to their Photos app, making the sync functionality more powerful and offering a 5GB free account.
Screenshot of the desktop client
Sharpcast Photos is Web-connected desktop software, but with an online browser-based version too. It allows you to back up your web albums online, keep your photos in sync across multiple PCs, sync comments (called "Photo Chat"), and manage your photos offline. Sharpcast labels all this "continuous multi-way synchronization" - which is a fancy way of saying that it keeps your PC in sync with the web and optionally with your mobile phone. Said Sharpcast CEO Gibu Thomas in the press release:
“The future of all applications lies in the seamless integration of the desktop and the web so that your files and data are always backed up for you, and you can access them wherever you are, on whatever device you’re using and whether you’re online or offline. Sharpcast Photos is the first example of how powerful this type of universal synchronization can be.”
It's a lovely piece of software, but what's most interesting to me is the potential to use the syncing technology in business settings.
I spoke to Sharpcast CEO Gibu Thomas about their future direction. He's said previously that Sharpcast is using their Photos app to "nail the user experience before we extend it to other data types". So I asked him how far away are they from nailing it?
He said it's "more that the online/offline seamless user experience is not something that people are used to [...] it's an experience that people don't expect outside of a corporate Exchange environment." So with Photos, Sharpcast is trying to get people (i.e. consumers) used to the beauty of that seamless experience - it's an education process.
Gibu also told me they had to build a lot of the technology from scratch, so it's an ongoing and iterative process with the technology too. But he promises that by the end of the year the Sharpcast experience will be extended "beyond photos and to any type of file - basically Sharpcast for all your stuff."
Very exciting! I think Sharpcast is one of the more innovative web companies around currently, and so I'll write more about my talk with Gibu in a future post. For now, I recommend you check out the new Sharpcast Photos beta.
Comments
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I sense a lot of talk and not too much action here. It seems that they will sync your photos only if you use their desktop organiser and only between PC's. They will also sync it to your phone - if you have a Windows Mobile phone. Sync is _very_ hard to do across different devices but that is where the real power comes in. I have 2 macs at home (which I want iPhoto synced) and a PC at work which I want certain albums synced. I also want some of those photos on my N73 (Symbian Series 60v3 phone). If it can solve this type of problem then I think they have a real proposition.
Posted by: Glen Barnes | October 12, 2006 7:26 PMRichard, thanks for the article and for the kind comments.
Glen, I can respect your skepticism, but the problems you describe are precisely the reasons why we exist. Give us time and we will solve problems beyond photos, and for Macs and Symbian and other platforms.
As for iPhoto, I would love to power iPhoto with the Sharpcast experience more than anyone else, but we can't do it without Apple's cooperation in the absence of an open API.
Please feel free to email me directly if you have questions and I will be happy to answer them -- gthomas [at] sharpcast [dot] com.
Cheers,
Gibu Thomas
Posted by: Gibu Thomas | October 16, 2006 6:32 PMCEO, Sharpcast
You can easily and securely store all your important files, including your photo collection, and using IBackup. IBackup is like an extra hard drive right on your computer and it allows you to store your important documents and files securely online. It also protects you from data loss caused by system crash, drive failures, virus attack and theft. It also allows you to access them from anywhere using an Internet connection.
You can allow IBackup’s application IBackup for Windows to backup your personal collection of photos by just selecting them and then asking the application to back them up. Or you can schedule daily or weekly backups of images with the options provided. IBackup’s browser-based application ‘Web-Manager’ automatically senses the presence of these images and displays thumbnails of these backed up images under a link 'Media Gallery' when you login to your IBackup account.
In the Media Gallery you can shuffle between images and also watch a slide show of the images stored in a particular folder. You will find this useful for presentation of your business documents/images. You can even share an entire folder containing images with friends and family by creating sharable links and emailing them top others.
IBackup also offers multiple modes to upload your files and folders. Besides Web-Manager, you can use WebFolders to drag-and-drop files and folders via browser and desktop. You can also use IDrive, IBackup's network drive mapping application, to drag-and-drop files and folders. You can even schedule to transfer data to your online storage space using IBackup for Windows.
Posted by: James | November 7, 2006 4:22 AM