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…