Filed under: overview
To put it very simply: SupraSphere is a universal remote for accessing and adding personal data in the cloud. You can host all of your data in one place on one server, access it securely, and share it as you wish. It incorporates multiple message types including threaded IM, bookmarks, email, and rss feeds, as well as a full Mozilla based browser. But, let’s break it down more. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: development, most wanted
So I have fantastic news. And no I’m not talking the Microsoft drops Yahoo thing, but that was stellar in my book. :)
You all probably know that SupraSphere has a desktop client that is really robust and powerful as a web browser in addition to a multilayer communication system. I’ve been involved in testing it for getting close to a year, but in that time a lot has happened. In lieu of my last post, it’s pretty safe to say we’ve reached a huge landmark.
Meanwhile, server side, there has been a new development. Oh I can barely contain myself! The web version is out! What does this mean for us, and more importantly what does this mean for you? On our side, we are involved in heavy testing in a closed beta format. On your side: the wait is almost over!
~Andria
Posted on May 7th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
Filed under: review
So it seems I am a slave to Apple’s software. I’ve had my glorious 30GB iPod (in arctic white, no less) coming close to two years. In that time, my library went from a humble six cd collection to over 3,000 mp3s. However, my former laptop (aka Della) was bricked pretty much, so I reformatted and installed Ubuntu on it. My new laptop is a shiny Dell with Ubuntu factory installed, which made my day! Needless to say, iTunes does not function in Linux. Well, at least not yet.
I’ve tried Rhythmbox, I’ve tried Exaile, but only one program really seemed to work: Amarok. Sadly, it still pales in comparison with iTunes, especially with the new Last.fm server change. See, not only do I want to be able to sync my iPod, I also want to “scrobble” everything I listen to. Amarok recently quit scrobbling tracks, and even the Last.fm Linux client ceased working. So, in essence this started off as a weekend project just so I could get iTunes working again.
Low and behold, Lifehacker to the rescue! On Friday, there was a post waiting for me via RSS. *Light bulb*, “Run Windows Apps Seamlessly Inside Linux” was exactly what the doctor ordered. This article was featuring VirtualBox, which I had never heard of until now. Of it’s many features, it includes a ’seamless’ mode (to be discussed later) so it will run both OSs simultaneously. I’m deathly afraid of doing dual-boots on my laptop, so this seemed a viable fix.
So off to InnoTek, the awesome folks who built VirtualBox (who is now owned by Sun Microsystems apparently), I went. Although I am fully capable of grabbing things from the repositories, I decided to go with a .deb file right on the download page, currently hosed at Sun. It seemed like they had a version for every distro out there. After a very easy install, and a reboot for safe measure, I began.
My music collection is fairly large, it takes up about 22GB of space on my hard drive. So, using the wizard to create a virtual HD image was fairly simple. I went with a 34GB virtual drive, so I could easily transfer songs and still have space to work with. The whole process in setting up the drive took literally took about three minutes with setting up the RAM and disc space. Once that was done, I attempted to turn this new “computer” on, but I got a file permission error. To fix this I did:
$ gksudo nautilus
Going to the file that was required, I edited permissions, logged out of my computer, logged back in and booted the virtual drive. I had previously put my Windows XP Professional into my disc drive, and using the Devices>Mount CD-ROM, I performed a speedy install.
About a half hour later, I rebooted the XP virtual drive, and installed the seamless feature. Then, I opened IE, and grabbed the Firefox 3 Beta 4, and installed that. After I set that up to be my default browser, I installed all my staple programs: AIM, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, iTunes, and the Last.fm client. Then I shut down the drive.
While still in VirtualBox, I set up a shared directory/folder. I wanted to drag things from my “home” folder to my desktop in xp. This in and of itself was an easy task, but after I set it up, I had no idea what to do next. In the article it explained that I had to run cmd in XP, and enter this command:
net use x: \\vboxsvr\’sharename’
The sharename would be whatever you so chose, so that was easy to change. Then I simply went to My Computer and went to the shared network drive, (which was the directory I just mounted) and dragged my entire music directory over to my iTunes folder.
Getting iTunes to actually work was a bear, due to mapping of the USB drives. I found this site linked on the Wikipedia article: Get USB devices mounted on your Virtualbox XP machine in Gutsy. So thanks to the nice people there, and following their well-defined instructions, I was able to get iTunes working.
Wait! Problem! Honestly, I don’t understand why this was happening, or even really how to fix it. I kept getting these horrible write error messages from our good friend Windows XP. Sadly, I didn’t get a screenshot of it, but roughly it said “Write Delay Error: File [insert iPod file here] not written due to a network or hardware malfunction. Please save this file elsewhere.” *Sigh* Oh no. What did I do to compensate for it? I spent roughly 13 hours doing nothing else than transferring little more than 50 songs, disconnecting, waiting for a reconnect, and transferring 50 more. Instead of running in the really nice ’seamless’ mode, I opted for the full-screen mode with as little background tasks running in Ubuntu as possible.
Aside from my horrific iPod/iTunes experience, everything else seems to work fine. Well, to clarify, Yahoo messenger doesn’t transfer files all the time, only when it wants to. Web-camming leaves something to be desired, as it occasionally freezes or all-together disconnects, and I know it’s not my internet connection. And this whole ’seamless’ thing? Well, in very plain words, it enables you to run [insert OS here] directly on top of your current OS, sans the pretty desktop picture. That’s about it. Oh yeah, and iTunes cover flow doesn’t work. :(
On another, much more cheerful note, SupraSphere is available for different OSs, so I grabbed the latest build for Windows, and decided to log in in both the Linux build and the Windows build. Here’s a little treat! :)
I have to say though, this instills in me more that I love Ubuntu Linux, more than Mac OSX, Microsoft products in general, and everything in between. It just runs smoother, and I earnestly hope that someone at Apple will read this and move iTunes over to Linux!
Andria’s Score: ★★★☆☆
Posted on March 20th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
Filed under: economy, messaging, mobile
I recently got an iPhone, mostly because I have heard a lot of buzz about it, they recently released an SDK, and since I serve as a sort of personal technology consultant to a number of individuals and businesses, I figured it was time that I developed an informed opinion of it.
Well, it’s quite a different device than the Blackberry, but I can safely say that if you like your Blackberry, do not, under any circumstances, get an iPhone.
The amazing thing about the Blackberry is how transparent it is. It just gets out of your way. Much like SupraSphere, it becomes like an extension of your brain.
On the other hand, here are some of the problems with the iPhone:
I could go on about the negatives (like it takes way, way longer to connect to a network after returning from a place with no coverage, like the subway). The only thing that is much better about the iPhone is visual voicemail.
Now that I’ve been very specific about the iPhone and the Blackberry, I would like to move to a slightly bigger picture perspective with respect to the mobile web/internet and where things are headed.
First, I’ll start with some of the negative. Here’s a good article that lists some of the reasons why cell phone carriers suck. One of my mother’s friends swore never to deal with AT&T again after they messed up his credit over some sort of incredibly old bill where they had told him that they wouldn’t charge him for something but then did. Unfortunately, it’s not like there is any option that’s even acceptable, much less good. You’ve heard the stories of insane cell phone bills, including this one for close to $85,000.00! Sprint is hemorrhaging customers and considering a merger with T-Mobile, who I hate and think I am going to file a small claims lawsuit against just for fun. I was a loyal and dedicated customer of theirs for 7 years, and they wouldn’t make a change to my bill because I discovered one of their mistakes “too late”. Rebate programs are a complete and total scam (and in some cases more tedious than filing your taxes), and T-Mobile never sent me a single check for any of the ones I filled out. Actually, I once asked one of their sales people to fill one out as a favor so I could make sure there weren’t any mistakes. Same result. With Sprint, another friend of mine got charged two month’s worth of cell phone service for one month because he changed his plan mid-month, and instead of pro-rating it, they charged him for both plans! It was a more expensive option on top of it! Maybe Sprint and T-Mobile deserve one another after all. “SprinT-Mobile, You can’t blame us for trying!™”. Basically, pretty much all the carriers nickle and dime you over petty pricing schemes, roaming charges, text messages, overages, and random fees.
Cell phone companies should absolutely be completely banned from interacting with credit bureaus, not like the lobbies would ever let that happen. I suppose we should be happy we got number portability. That was probably the only concession that will ever be made.
However, that really only scratches the surface of broader trends. You’ve heard the all controversy about telecom immunity. Whatever. Whoever is fighting those battles, don’t waste your breath. You’re like one person trying to stop a avalanche.
Here are some other gems in the news:
FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
Is the government reading your email?
Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier — Congress Reacts
Here’s a very good, but surface analysis of why it’s all really stupid, totally unequal, and inherently unfair, no matter how good the hardware or how sophisticated the project. It’s not just that we are all counting on falafel to help catch terrorists, it’s that it completely misses the point regarding how completely backwards all of these approaches are to facing the emerging threats to society like terrorism. We are simultaneously missing a really big opportunity while we obsess over all the negatives, leaving no time and space for the positives to flourish. It’s not only that I’m jealous that the government already has the semantic web, I swear!
Without diving too deep into the utopia vs. dystopia false dichotomy, there are very few of us in my generation (as of now yet to be named, certainly not Gen X, but not what any of the marketers have tried to pin on us) who won’t have this image from the Matrix forever sketched in our heads. Do I have any semblance of autonomy, self-determination, rights in the digital age where there are so many shadowy organizations making all sorts of secret assertions about me, who all exercise individually, and especially considered in aggregate, a massively uneven amount of leverage, power, and control over me? They can ruin my credit, where I can’t even put a dent in theirs. I am not a conspiracy theorist at all (although they are often interesting mental exercises to debunk through comprehensive thinking and principles such as Occam’s Razor), but there is most certainly a confluence, not necessarily conscious coordination, of aligned interests in turning the end user into a highly predictable (no matter how irrational) slave to/of consumption and consumerism.
This is not just about privacy. The grievances are many and deep. It’s about the credit system and credit ratings and credit cards. It’s about identity theft and SPAM/SPIM, viruses, spyware, and adware. It’s about incomprehensible and unnecessarily long contracts and privacy policies that can be changed at any time, click-through-EULA’s, proprietary formats/protocols, software patents, and DRM. It’s about having to get fingerprinted to travel. It’s about our debt-dependent and driven financial system. It’s about obscene corruption in government and corporations. It’s about a general lack of trust in our institutions. It’s about every single organization who provides services (web or not) with the ability to pull the plug, or at least the rug out from under us at any time, who all exercise as much leverage and control as possible from every conceivable angle to squeeze as much money out of you as they can, even if they just slow play their hand. It’s like my friend Val says, “There is no burden greater than what the market will bear”.
So, the ideal mobile system would look like this. It would be open source, hopefully even with open hardware. It would run on an open, free, highly secure and private, distributed and redundant wireless mesh networking grid. It would have amazing social networking capabilities, with pluggable social protocols that could spread virally across regions depending on how effectively they normalize and harmonize within certain communities that adopt them.
When you take a picture, or record a video, it would be securely transferred back to your personal cloud, geotagged in the process. Your music would all be available for streaming directly from your phone. Your phone, being tethered to your own sphere and context, could store voice mail privately on your own server with virtually unlimited storage, with easy speech to text conversion. You could leave personalized voice or text messages for people when they call you, instead of having to call them and leave a message. Like what someone’s wearing on the train? Query their context for what they’re wearing. You could choose to let people query your context for your style and the brands that you are wearing or have worn, with an instruction for others to feel free to ask where you got it, which could actually be reported back to the place where you got it. While at the store shopping, you could call someone who recently purchased an item you are looking at for their opinion, and filter it by people who have been called already by someone else, who agreed to a rule that if they answer your call, you have to agree to write your own opinion afterwards and publish it in the context of the person you called so that other people who call the same person will have the aggregate opinion. This could also work for restaurants as well. With all of the social data available, and because privacy can be preserved, mobile search would actually work with all of the deep contextualization that can be applied to queries. Attributes of products could be stored, such as how far a product had to travel, the various organizations that “touched” it on its way, even with the ability to “search inside” any one of the companies at any level in the supply chain to understand attributes and opinions about each company both as the company presents them and within various spheres.
Synchronization would be totally automatic and transparent, where a change made one place would always be reflected in other contexts, simply because everything would be a query back to the individual’s own private context, with everything federated and centralized around the individual. You could use numerous different devices, like a Blackberry and and iPhone :), where they both read from the same data store for contacts and other information and you could choose which one you wanted to use, maybe just switching between them fluidly just for fun for a different experience or change. If you borrowed someone else’s device, or even traded devices with someone for a while, you could switch to your context and have the interface render and populate with your data.
Indeed, context would be king. Anywhere you went and listened to music or saw something interesting, your phone could query the system, and automatically save the music to your sphere. Your own geolocation would be intelligently managed. For example, it could be automatically published to your family or select contacts at all times, or with interesting rules such as “shared for 20 minutes before any meeting with all the individuals participating”, turned off completely or just masked in certain situations. You could walk around and listen to mini “podcasts” about an area (like those guided tour systems, just available anywhere), filtered according to various attributes, such as “historical”.
Don’t get me wrong. Things like this are cool and definitely a step in the right direction. Google Android is promising, especially when considered in conjunction with open social. But they don’t go nearly far enough, and no one has taken the plunge to take it to the next level, which is what it will take before people like us get really excited. One of my friends works for Google, and says that I shouldn’t be so sure that they wouldn’t be open to moving away from their pattern of trying to make people completely tethered to the Google Grid instead of giving people their own personal, private context. That is what we are doing, working to give individuals their own private grid from which they can individually, and collectively, cause any or all of the myriad of the organizations vying for control and influence to conform to the internal aesthetic of beauty as determined by the individual and their conscience, propagated intersubjectively.
My next post will detail how to get the level of cooperation and coordination from all companies and institutions necessary to bring about the mind-blowing opportunities and possibilities that lay dormant in mapping the social graph on our own, without any training wheels or hand holding.
Nothing described in the above is all that challenging technically and needn’t be that far out all, so I don’t mean to sound like one of those lame “visionaries” trying to say how things will be in the future. With all the buzz around “social networking”, the real challenge, not so ironically, is a social one after all.
“We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born — a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.” –Dee Hock, Founder of Visa International
Posted on March 9th, 2008 by David Thomson
Filed under: cloud, economy, sphere
I had an interesting meeting couple of days ago with Andy Lippmann of the MIT Media Lab. He had a hard time seeing the connection between the idea of a secure, private, “personal cloud” and currency, so I figure I have a lot of work to do if someone so esteemed as Dr. Lippmann does not see the connection as obviously and clearly as I do.
First off, there are different connotations of currency, many of which have nothing to do with quantification and numerical accounting, particularly in traditionally understood units and/or denominations. Most people have heard of the concepts of “social capital” or “political capital”, for example. In considering different ideas around currency, there is also a question as to whether currencies are “convertible” into dollars or exchangeable into other forms of currency in other communities and networks beyond those in which they originate. As an example, many people have heard of “Linden Dollars” from the video game “Second Life”, which do have an implicit conversion rate to US dollars. Compare them to World of Warcraft Gold, which, while it used to be purchasable on eBay before eBay explicitly banned the practice, has no implicitly set conversion rate.
Because of my background, I have a fairly good grasp of traditional money and how it works as a system. Most people know that SupraSphere has several installations in some financial services institutions, particularly hedge funds. This has afforded me a pretty in-depth look at how the financial system functions and how people who trade stocks and focus fanatically on increasing the amount of money they have actually think.
Everyone knows that money makes the world go round and is the bottom line. This is why I have been so fascinated by it. It’s more pervasive and prevalent, by far, than any single other psychological construct in the world. As a mindset, it far surpasses both television and organized religion combined in its ability to generate a unified and homogenized world view. So, having grown up in a fairly socially conscious and idealistic family, I was drawn to thinking of the structure and design of money as a particularly fun and challenging lever to pull in terms of changing the world. If there were one single underlying construct where changing its definition would have the single most substantial effect on the world, it would clearly be with money itself.
That said, banking and financial systems themselves are at the core actually very simple accounting systems that only really become complex by how people try to game them, all under the guise of “creating efficiencies”. You deduct from one place, you add to another. Transferring funds is really not that complicated a process. The overall point is that as it becomes more and more the case that money exists primarily a digital phenomenon consisting of overlapping interactions of accounts (in some ways actually a “social network”), how complex is banking really that people can’t have direct control over the overall process of issuing and managing currency? The most important thing to think of in this case is the creation/issuance of money and its underlying definition and value, which is already assumed when you get into the accounting stage. However, if people have their own set of servers (spheres) that can create intersecting relationships with other spheres (accounts), we might very well be able to enter into an era of “open source money”.
Before I get into specifics about how SupraSphere can help to “open source money”, I will provide some more perspective on my background for more context. I have long been a fan of free software, ever since I first compiled a Linux kernel on an old 386 at the Shiva Corporation in high school in the early 90’s. This was before Windows for Workgroups even, where DOS still ruled the roost and where Microsoft was just starting to enter the world of GUIs that Apple Macs had been in for 10 years prior. I had a simple thought. If DOS was more popular than Macs because it was more open, easier to tinker with and fix despite being ridiculously harder to use, then Linux would eventually be more popular than DOS for the same reason, which I incidentally think also applies to Windows NT.
While I loved Linux and tried to install it everywhere I could, my father absolutely hated how I couldn’t see that DOS and Windows were more important for business and that I was investing so much time in a hobbled platform with pretty much no important or critical applications. In fact, if you ask my two younger brothers, they would attest to how much my distaste for the Windows platform actually hurt my relationship with my father who would spend hours trying to lecture me into using Windows. The smart money went with Microsoft, but I didn’t care. It was too late. I had bought into this whole “freedom and openness” thing and was still a bit too isolated from the real world of bills and mortgages to think that I was potentially compromising my future earnings.
Instead, I started to think even more abstractly in terms of currency, value, and exchange. I thought it was really spectacular that GNU/Linux, when considered together, represents the largest collaborative engineering project ever undertaken by humanity, and was being built at the time mostly by volunteers who believed in a common cause of creating a better system than Windows. I know Linus has said that he has never wanted to destroy Windows and instead only focuses on making Linux better, but those of us who adopted Linux as a platform were drawn to a common cause that there simply had to be something better than Windows (particularly because we were the ones who had to fix it for all of our friends and family), not to mention that we hated the idea in principle of a company’s making computers intentionally incompatible or hard to work with, given how hard in general it is to get them to work right in the first place.
So GNU/Linux is a system comprising attributes of emergence, self-governance, anarchy, evolution, openness, freedom, and now with some Ubuntu thrown in. But, there is no real business model for it. There are some awkward ways for businesses to make money off of it, usually involving support and customization, but those have their own problems. Imagine instead if the profit motive could be directly aligned and intertwined with open source software production.
Another area that has no proper business model is digital music. Despite the success of iTunes, I have never bought a single song on it. I hate the idea that I could lose access to what I have paid thousands of dollars for just for moving to a different computer, not to mention that it doesn’t even run on Linux. My mother can’t use it in Hong Kong and many people don’t have access to it around the world. Why would I endorse such a thing as the “proper” solution to how music should be considered in the digital Internet age? Not to mention, I have used better systems, such as AllofMP3 and OINK, which were both actually better than Napster ever was, IMHO.
I think in both cases, GNU/Linux (and other open source systems, including suprasphere) and digital music, we need to think differently about money itself in order to come up with a solution to the problem of how artists will get paid and how to ensure freedom while still being able to make money on software. The key is to think of “creating money” instead of “making money”. Given that two gigantic forces are on a collision course, the financial system on the one hand, and the Internet, which comprises digitally distributed music and video, collaboratively developed free software, the web (both 2.0 and 3.0) ;) on the other, which would you bet will come out on top?
The truth is that the transactional efficiencies and network externalities of the web put the entire financial system to shame. There were hints of this back in the web 1.0 bubble days of the “new economy”. People thought that Internet companies didn’t need to conform to old concepts of “revenue”, “profit”, and “cost of goods sold”. Eyeballs were the new currency of the day. Well, I don’t think it’s as far from what the truth could be, assuming that people allow that the nature of money itself (as opposed to just the application of it) can actually be changed. Even as people talk about a new bubble, and people wonder how companies like Facebook will ever live up to their valuation, I think we can take steps to move the entire financial system on to the architecture of the Internet and the Web, and make it open source on top of it!
In fact, I have numerous times heard the semantic web referred to as an “information bus” (TechnicaLee Speaking), and we are starting to see the convergence of the semantic web and the activities of general financial services companies such as with Reuters Calais. What else is the financial system but a global information bus? Why else would financial services companies want to integrate instant messaging into the kernel of an operating system?
Even as suprasphere contains pretty amazing technology and is a very unique and innovative application, we are not proposing as a vision something that isn’t already happening. Instead, we are trying to suggest clearly what it all adds up to, and certainly hope that suprasphere serves as a reference point outside of just giving us some credibility to suggest this broader vision.
So, here we go. What if, each time an individual or group invents a new concept in a unique semantic namespace, a currency (stock) account for that unique new namespace was also simultaneously created? Such a namespace could represent a new music album, website, Linux module, or just about any project. As other people linked to that unique namespace, downloaded from that namespace, collaborated around that namespace, the stock of of that entity would automatically rise as more people used it and interacted with it. The more interest in the creative output of the group responsible for the project, the more interest would accrue in their account. This even has analogies in the “peer to patent” proposal for how to reform the patent system.
So as currency accumulates in an account/sphere, it can be spent just like with “normal money”, but every time it gets spent (on things like clothes, food, cars, etc.), it must get spent as a proportion of the interest and the principal. As soon as the principal is gone, it can no longer accrue interest. Perhaps if it’s invested in somebody else’s sphere as both interest and principal, it can accrue interest on both. There might be an expiration point where after accumulating interest for so long, the namespace itself becomes public domain.
Or not. That was my freestyle idea of how it might work, but the exact model and details are truly open for debate and dialog, which should at the very least feel exceptionally empowering in and of itself. At this point the details of how the system can work are not as important as achieving consensus around the overall premise, where we can start to set in motion the conditions where the exact attributes can emerge and evolve. Just like the financial system (and the credit system for that matter), one can’t design and manage it centrally in a command-and-control fashion, but we can set in motion the idea that people can be in true control over their own bank account and concept of “net worth” and allow a new system to emerge in true chaordic fashion.
I realize that this is in many respects a crazy idea. I have not only been thinking and talking along these lines for a long time, but also working extremely hard each and every day to help bring this about. However, every day that goes forward the greater the intellectual risk as I spend more social capital to keep the dialog open and the greater the possibility that someday I will wake up bankrupt, not just in my bank account but in the lack of people who care enough even to have a conversation about these concepts. I have sacrificed many, many years pursuing this core idea, and ask that you forgive the raw and unbaked nature of my presentation, and instead of only finding fault and poking holes and dismissing this outright, please give it a chance. We are at a tricky time in the world, with crises and problems of seemingly insurmountable proportion everywhere we look, and as a result I think we deserve the right to think openly and freely about the nature of money, and seize the opportunity to fashion it along lines that will support each of our grandest goals and ambitions.
Posted on February 27th, 2008 by David Thomson
Filed under: blogging, cloud, sphere
The New York Times recently published an article about Adobe Air and the blurring of traditional web and desktop application development:
Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web
and there is a nice FAQ from Adobe on the differences and advantages of the Air approach:
I feel that we have a fairly deep perspective on the differences and advantages of desktop applications vs. web applications. SupraSphere, being first and foremost and new kind of web browser, is obviously a desktop application since it doesn’t necessarily make sense to think of a web browser as an AJAX application. ;)
However, we do have a web-only AJAX version of some of the features of SupraSphere, particularly some of the search and collaboration features. Desktop applications have a few distinct disadvantages, around management of updates, stability, and often privacy, where many people have gotten burned by desktop applications infested with spyware and adware. Furthermore, web applications are quite often much easier to use since all you can really do is click. The richness of certain interfaces, whether in Flash or on the desktop, often make it harder to use the applications because people often have a hard time learning new interfaces. Browser applications are often popular because it provides a “paradigm sandbox” where you can click and go back, often can’t “right-click”, and can’t bury too many options too deep in menu structures. Most people can figure out Flash navigation on a website, but as soon as you start developing applications in Flash, people are going to start to get lost.
As far as Adobe Air, it seems that the major innovation is that Adobe Air allows an application written with web technologies (javascript particularly) that uses a RIA Flash runtime, but that can operate on local desktop data, which also implies offline access. This is definitely interesting, but we have taken a different approach to unifying the web and the pc.
Our goal is to create a “personal cloud” (see the reference to “kevincloud” in the NY Times article). Ideally, this would involve multiple servers (or virtual servers) configured as peered instances, where all data is replicated across instances hopefully across data centers. This would provide automated backup and redundancy so that a person’s entire data environment is not dependent on any given provider, and we might look into a default configuration being an encrypted disk (with only one service on one port running to provide suprasphere services), so that if a virtual machine instance was “lost”, it wouldn’t be as huge of a privacy concern.
Then, all devices (including personal computers) would provide a view of the data stored in this “cluster” of personal servers. In addition, these systems will not be single-user. They are inherently network aware and multi-user, making it possible to collaborate inside with other individuals or groups, but where the underlying architecture will be distributed.
Essentially, rather than trying to move web applications back to the PC hard drive in order just to provide richer interfaces and private data access, we are trying to provide the equivalent to the PC hard drive that “lives in the cloud”. This should provide all of the attributes that people associate with cloud computing, such as data reliability and high availability, API’s for services integration and re-purposing, and multiple views of data from different interface mashups. In fact, it should accelerate these trends by providing a starting point for web services that are private to the individual and highly personal.
Posted on February 26th, 2008 by David Thomson
Filed under: messaging
Well, since I am a complete geek, I love being able to IM my friends. The problem though is that I can’t ever seem to find the important stuff they say while instant messaging. Often my conversations get garbled up because we’ll be talking about something and go so fast that we are actually discussing more than one thing, and we reply, but not fast enough. It’s the trouble with living in constant fast forward. :D
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying SupraSphere is an Instant Messenger, *but* SS incorporates and improves on IM. How is this even possible?
Well, first, let’s travel back in time to 1996, the birth of the modern message board. Back in the day absolutely everyone used message boards, because they had and still have some really great features. Threads were started and then replied to. Even though everything was organized, conversations were not held in real time. The problem was that we’d reply, but never fast enough keep up with the constant stream of communication. The meaning of what we replied was then lost to a swarm of other comments.
Ah, remember the days of chat rooms? Chats took the form of IRC and web based rooms where it was *almost* instant messaging. Good luck trying to reply in a room of 10+ people, as inevitably an entire page-worth of nonsensical multi-colored words were thrown down in literally a few seconds.
Now we have GTalk, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, ICQ, and other instant messaging services. Mostly I use mine for a more social aspect, considering I really don’t think it’d be appropriate for a co-worker to see my awesome new icon of the day :P or to see what my status says. Certainly these clients have 
more useful aspects of them, including SMS messaging, file transfer, image sharing, and direct to email capabilities in some, but these are lost in the over-all “web toy” feel they give off.
SS improves on all three of these forms of communication, with something we like to call “terse messaging”, which is easy and intuitive to use, but somewhat difficult for me to explain. :) It’s reminiscent of a web forum given that it’s threaded. Terse also reminds me of instant messaging and IRC seeing as how it’s real time and can be addressed to more than one recipient, so the meaning of messages is not lost. It provides a much-needed way to communicate the same message to different people, while still allowing you to expound on other trains of thought with other recipients; it could be said that it is “chaordic“. Essentially, I’m saying that SS becomes like an extension of our brains! ;)
Posted on February 15th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
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Posted on March 24th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
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