While Apple’s iPad might be fogging up everyone’s view, a smaller silicon valley firm by the name of Funambol has unveiled its own cloud-based digital locker by the name of MediaHub – accessible from any Internet connected device.
Redwood City based Funambol believes tying a cloud down to a particular device or OS, is about as useful as capturing raindrops in a leaky bucket and analysts appear to agree.
“People increasingly have data and content in multiple places and it is becoming more important to easily access it across disparate devices,” said Bob O’Donnell a vice president at IDC.
MediaHub is open source and white label, meaning carriers and device makers could easily brand it and offer it to customers as either an extra or value added service to store all their rich media (e.g. videos and pictures), files and PIM data (e.g. contacts and calendars) in just one place.
Funambol also says MediaHub can be licensed for deployment behind a firewall or hosted by the firm itself on behalf of customers, which could make for quicker time to market.
“MediaHub is like iCloud but for all devices,” said Amit Chawla, Funambol’s CEO, adding his hope that the product would enables carriers, device makers and other mobile service providers “to increase revenue and customer loyalty by syncing, storing and sharing user data and content across diverse devices.”
Chawla believes it could also offer carriers an edge when competing with other over-the-top competitors.
For customers not keen to wait until their carrier offers them MediaHub sometime in the future, the medialocker can be accessed from the myFUNAMBOL Portal, where it offers 150MB of free storage.
For developers, the firm says it has also extended its Cloud API to support video and files that will enable them to create apps that sync and share rich media across a wide variety of mobile and connected devices.
