Forecast: Cloudy. In fact, A lot of different clouds. The "clouds" have been here for a few years already and some major players are offering services around both consumer and enterprise segments. Especially in mobile domain, iCloud and Google Drive have major ambitions. Amazon - the pioneer in many ways - is already strong with their compute engine (which Google now introduced as well). And there are many others (3rd party app developers included) who are building services on these clouds, or even building some other clouds.
How do these clouds help mobile users? Over the past few years, there is a proliferation of multiple mobile (or just portable) devices per person. It is not just 2 device issue (Desktop PC and a smartphone) any more. Many users have tablets, connected cameras, gaming consoles, storage devices, watches and some other wearables. Even in-home devices like connected thermostats will proliferate quickly. Clouds certainly have helped users reduce the perpetual "keep them all in sync" problem of the past. All your pictures, media, content is available from them all no matter what device you used to create it. Think pictures from your phone, tablet or camera. or your purchased media. But now the problem has shifted to "whose cloud" you have signed into. All Apple devices use iClouds, All Google devices will use Google Drive and so on. This is not an issue for you if all devices in your household are tied to a single ecosystem. (iOS or Android) but a big problem if they are not. Or if you do not want them to.
That's where Device to Device technologies can address the need. Proximity-based device connections can share content with each other "while you are around". The storage remains on the source device and the other device is merely "sharing" it. You are sitting in your living room and you can make your tablet interact with your TV or phone or set top box. No matter what OS they each are running. The media in this case will stay on your phone and the TV is merely offering its large display to watch it. There are a few options available here: You can use one of the proximity based RF bearers like WiFi Direct (now that WiDi future is bleak) or Bluetooth. And make your apps smart enough to handle these bearers. or All of them come together and form a standard to share based on proximity. Qualcomm has tried to make this interaction easy with their AllJoyn protocol (which is open source) so essentially any OEM or app developer can implement and support this. There may be more initiatives coming here.
Thus the question is: Are these 2 two technologies (clouds vs device-2-device) fundamentally going in different directions for any single ecosystem to consider? Is there a way to use them both to complement each other?
How do these clouds help mobile users? Over the past few years, there is a proliferation of multiple mobile (or just portable) devices per person. It is not just 2 device issue (Desktop PC and a smartphone) any more. Many users have tablets, connected cameras, gaming consoles, storage devices, watches and some other wearables. Even in-home devices like connected thermostats will proliferate quickly. Clouds certainly have helped users reduce the perpetual "keep them all in sync" problem of the past. All your pictures, media, content is available from them all no matter what device you used to create it. Think pictures from your phone, tablet or camera. or your purchased media. But now the problem has shifted to "whose cloud" you have signed into. All Apple devices use iClouds, All Google devices will use Google Drive and so on. This is not an issue for you if all devices in your household are tied to a single ecosystem. (iOS or Android) but a big problem if they are not. Or if you do not want them to.
That's where Device to Device technologies can address the need. Proximity-based device connections can share content with each other "while you are around". The storage remains on the source device and the other device is merely "sharing" it. You are sitting in your living room and you can make your tablet interact with your TV or phone or set top box. No matter what OS they each are running. The media in this case will stay on your phone and the TV is merely offering its large display to watch it. There are a few options available here: You can use one of the proximity based RF bearers like WiFi Direct (now that WiDi future is bleak) or Bluetooth. And make your apps smart enough to handle these bearers. or All of them come together and form a standard to share based on proximity. Qualcomm has tried to make this interaction easy with their AllJoyn protocol (which is open source) so essentially any OEM or app developer can implement and support this. There may be more initiatives coming here.
Thus the question is: Are these 2 two technologies (clouds vs device-2-device) fundamentally going in different directions for any single ecosystem to consider? Is there a way to use them both to complement each other?
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