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Personal Grid Computing

<![CDATA[Luc Julia, the founder and CTO of Orb Networks has engaged me in a good-natured dialogue about my posting last week saying that the coverage his company is winning is setting it up for a promise to the consumer it can’t keep. He says I need to see the technology work to believe it and […]

<![CDATA[Luc Julia, the founder and CTO of Orb Networks has engaged me in a good-natured dialogue about my posting last week saying that the coverage his company is winning is setting it up for a promise to the consumer it can’t keep. He says I need to see the technology work to believe it and so I must, but I also found out more that should be put out for consideration.
The “streaming live TV” demo touted by the company and by AlwaysOn’s Tony Perkins—the crux of my concern that the company is over-promising because it is dependent on too many network hops out of Orb’s control—requires a Media Center PC and works with a PC with an unsupported Hauppage tuner card, but it is more or less the fluff on what is a meaningful system for sharing media and handling DRM issues. The demo described by Tony Perkins did take place over a 44 Kbps wireless network connection from Cingular, according to Luc Julia.
As I’ve explained, there are other players moving into this market, some with service ambitions similar to Orb’s and others with the goal of being acquired by a Cisco that wants to build media sharing services into their products.
I also made the point, which Luc Julia agreed with, that describing this system as “distributed computing” is somewhat problematic, because Orb’s server does play a role—both as a sort of router and providing key management services that can allow secure access to subscription content. The Orb network offloads encoding of audio and video to the user’s PC, but that is not truly distributed computing because the system doesn’t work if Orb’s server isn’t available.
Here’s where I think we are going with all these systems: Personal Grid Computing. All the computational devices we own will work in concert with a conductor to orchestrate the process (Orb’s server plays that role here) of allocating processor cycles to specific tasks, such as calculating optimal screen dimensions, bit depth and encoding the file to get a video file from a PC to a handheld.
As I’ve written here and here, this is a market that will quickly commodify and I wonder about Orb’s business model. But as Luc Julia said, it’s not likely the first business model at any company will exactly right and I’ll give him that. Just don’t hang the business on live TV streaming, there’s so much more to what a personal grid computing will do. And keep an eye on this business, because it will grow—both in terms of the number of competitors and the amount of money invested—during 2005.]]>