Cloud computing is no longer such a nebulous concept, with many major players in the industry pushing to make media convergence something of a priority, as the cloud content revolution takes off.
Not everybody, however, is aware of the potential the cloud has to offer, but an Irish company by the name of Newbay hopes to change that.
Keeping track of one’s social networking activity, texts, emails, voicemail and IMs – not to mention photos and documents – can be downright exhausting. But what if all that content could be accessed from one place and could all be accessed using different devices?
Newbay – with offices in Dublin, Ireland and Seattle, Washington – believes it can help to lighten the virtual load with its own personal cloud concept.
Believing that one day all content will be stored in the cloud, Newbay offers a content ecosystem by the name of ‘LifeCache,’ which the firm says enables subscribers to create, store, view and share their digital lives without all the hassle.
This type of system means content could potentially be pulled down to and beamed up from a plethora of different devices including cameras, smartphones, tablets, e-books, PCs and more. This would give people much easier access to their data, wherever they were and no matter what device they had with them.
Newbay believes telco operators are central to this idea and works to offer these firms the white label software needed to run such services.
Indeed, Newbay is responsible for services like T-Mobile’s myFaves and O2’s Bluebook, amongst other things. The firm already boasts 80 million registered users; 50 million of whom are active, and plans to extend its services to new carriers with the promise of being able to store 10 billion pieces of media content within its cloud.
The value proposition is clear; if all a person’s content could be stored securely in one place, people could then manage it remotely using any device, with the added benefit of a customizable GUI interface allowing drag and drop functionality, HTML 5, AJAX and other add-ons to make for easier use.
Nagappan Arunachalam, chief marketing officer for Newbay, told RCR “Lots of people tried to do this in the past. The biggest different now is the speed of the networks that can handle the data. It could never have been done in the dial-up world”.
Undeniably, the convergence of content across multiple screens is something consumers are growing to expect, with social networking becoming an ever more integral part of everyday life for some, so innovation in the cloud sphere is sorely needed.
It’s not just the end users that benefit from cloud computing either; telecom carriers can use the software for revenue, marketing a choice of products and services to their customers for greater value adds.
Arunachalam said Newbay was “defining what the world is doing in terms of APIs [Application Programming Interfaces] with some of the best minds at work.
“We will continue to drive the future development of digital lifestyles across the globe,” he said. Let’s just hope he doesn’t have his head too far up in the clouds.
