Yesterday, while listening to Marketplace on NPR, I head a story about an interesting joint Israel-Palestinian tech start-up called g.ho.st. I found this interesting for two reasons: first, that the company consists of both Israeli and Palestinian employees. The fact that you have both people working together to create something is a great sign and something that their governments could learn from as a means of creating a more lasting peace in the region.
Second, that the service they are creating, a “global hosted operating system” is essentially the concept of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for the masses. While VDI has classically been used by enterprises for their internal desktops, the idea behind g.ho.st is to extend the reliability of VDI to the consumer. Imagine moving not just your data but your entire desktop into the cloud. And then being able to acess that desktop from any web browser (or cell phone?)…that’s the idea behind g.ho.st.
While it’s not a solution for everyone (I doubt a power user like myself will be moving their desktop up to the cloud anytime soon), the general idea does have value to many computers users today. This is something that will take some time for users to adopt, even longer than cloud based apps in my mind, but is what I believe to be the wave of the future.
I’ll try to take a closer look at g.ho.st in the coming weeks and post more more thorough review based upon what they have in their current alpha state.
Just not sure how the privacy laws would apply to this. The law is always the lagard in technology innovation like this…
If I’m not wrong, then you are talking about the following on air radio program
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/popup.php?name=marketplace/pm/2008/12/01/marketplace_cast3_20081201_64
They talk about G.ho.st in min 10:00
The idea behind g.ho.st is that the world is going digital. Nowadays, all the people are caring about their data, licenses, updates, administrative,… G.ho.st is penetrating the walls by providing each human being a free web operating system with 5GB storage and 3GB emails. You can download your files to your G.host Virtual computer. Moreover, you can edit and create document using Zoho, open your Google Docs, watching youtube, access multiple chatting messengers,… This operating system is accessible from any browser from any point on the earth. Just you have to have an internet connection and a browser. Even if you are not able to find a nearby computer, you can access your g.ho.st computer via your mobile, where you will find your emails, data, everything.
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Thanks for writing about us 🙂
As regards your question on privacy, we of course follow best practices and publish a privacy policy. Actually this is important to us and gets careful attention. Please see http://g.ho.st/ for the details.
On the practical side, we are using Amazon (their Amazon Web Services – AWS S3, SimpleDB and EC2) to store all our users data, which many see as one of the best.
Hope this helps.
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@ Gilad:
I didn’t mean to imply that g.ho.st has lapse privacy policy. I actually never even looked at your privacy policy.
My reference to the privacy laws is with regards to laws (at least in the United States) that are applied differently to data stored in the cloud versus data stored on your own computer. Most people are not aware of this until the effect of this law comes to bear on them (or their data). See James Urquhart’s Cloud Computing and the Constitution post. This is one of the silent challenges facing cloud computing with regards to the enterprise and could have a huge impact on cloud computing for consumers if a few more public cases further eroded protections consumers assume they have.
Regardless of the quality of a cloud service, there are legal ramifications of using these services that a lot of consumers are not aware of and which the media has not been focusing on.
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