09.25.06

Take your PC/data with you

Posted in Technology Ventures at 5:07 pm by Ray Wu

RingCube, with its mojopac product, just got $4M of funding from NEA. It essentially allows you to carry your computer with you on a portable device. I think it is a cool idea. If you want to know more, Matt from VentureBeat has a good write-up on this.

In my mind, people have been and are trying to solve this PC/Data access issue from various angles and each one of them has its place in the market depends on what you want:

One approach is remote access from another PC. This approach is very useful if you don’t want to carry anything with you. All you need is another PC and some software installed on your own PC. I use this when I am on vacation. This is a somewhat establishing and crowded space with vendors like Citrix’s gotomypc.com and Webex’s PCNow.
If you have a cell phone or a PDA, then you have 2 options.
- One way is using remote access from your cell phone. This is great since cell phone does not have a lot of memory or disk space. It allows you to execute without having to worry about the computing infrastructure. There are quite a lot of buzz in this space. Vendors like Soonr or Avvenu are good examples of vendors trying to win here. Actually, Soonr just announced a $6M funding recently.
- Or you can use synchronization. This is actually not bad if you want to have a copy of the data somewhere else and don’t have to worry about mobile access infrastructure. This space is consolidating. For example, Intellisync just recently got bought by Nokia.
You can shrink your PC so that you can carry the PC with you since it is small and light. There are vendors like OQO or Pepper that produce small devices that is nice in form factor and have somewhat a regular PC power and performance.