Mobility and cloud computing

After dotcom boom the technologists are touting cloud computing as the next big thing in the world of internet. But the potential of cloud computing is not limited to only internet based PC applications. This is the era of mobility and almost each and every PC based application is now has a mobile version available. Does this suggest that cloud computing could add a new dimension to mobile computing? The answer is yes. A recent research suggested that the mobile cloud computing market is expected to reach $9 billion by year 2014. Will the market be able to reach this point is in the womb of future, but this figure clearly showed the potential of the technology.

Now lets see how this technology is going to impact the future of mobility. At present all the feature rich mobile applications are meant for high end smart phones only. The market share of such phones is increasing but they will not be able to capture majority of the share in next 3-5 years; majority of the mobile handset market will still be dominated by low end and mid segment mobile handsets. Handset manufacturers, mobile operators and other third party developers want to sell their applications and services to all of their customers irrespective of the type of handset their customers own; and here comes the role of cloud based mobile services. The cloud will act as a platform for feature rich applications, which otherwise, are incompatible to run on low end mobile handsets.

I should talk about mobile computing for smart phones and low end phones separately. First I talk about smart phones, how the user of smart phones could be benefited out of cloud computing. I start with gaming as an example; at present users are able to play single player games on mobile and the entire game is installed/saved on the phone itself and if there is any upgrade/bug fix of the game available from the provider s/he needs to download the full game on his/her device; but with cloud computing in the picture the entire game is on the server and as per the user’s request it would be downloaded to his device and the state of the game will be saved on the cloud or on any other server accessed through cloud server. It is very much similar to the games we are familiar playing on gaming sites and social networking sites like facebook etc. Multi-player games would become a reality for all the phones. These cloud services would be accessible through a very small client which would access the catalog of services from the cloud. Imagine your PC calender which could be synced with your mobile calender and you are accessing your office collaborative MS project file through cloud services and updating it through your mobile while outside your office without actually opening your laptop machine and using remote login to organization’s server. With the advent of mobile cloud computing it would become possible to have entire desktop of your office PC to be available on smart phone’s screen without installing any third party software on your mobile handset.

Lets come to low end handsets and mobile cloud computing in general.  A low end handset user doesn’t have a picture editor or spreadsheet viewer on his handset but with cloud as a platform to such services will facilitate not only viewing but also editing of a spreadsheet through his/her mobile. Live beaming of TV channels would become a reality for low cost handsets. With cloud services user would be able to able to capture picture/video from his mobile and upload it to the sites like youtube and flickr simultaneously. Imagine a scenario where your are having a DTH (direct to home) set top box at your home and your children are at home and you do not want them to watch TV as their exams are near; you just access the DTH provider’s cloud services and bar the TV programs and/or in another scenario you just forgot to instruct your DTH set top box to record your favorite TV show and now you access the cloud based services of your provider and instruct set top box at your home to record your program.

In a nutshell I would say that a plethora of services will be available at our finger tips without caring about the memory capacity of our mobile handsets. With such services in offing the mobile cloud computing is having a future for sure. The above mentioned scenarios are just show the potential of cloud computing in mobility domain. It is just the tip of the iceberg. Just wait ans let the cloud bring the rain of services.

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Disclaimer: This blog post is an entry to Intel’s contest – My India App Story

Technology Convergence

Here on this blog I will write about the various technology on which I worked and I learned during previous years. Since I have worked on variety of domains like; mobility, POS, web applications, cloud computing, home automation, digital entertainment, telecom etc. so here I would explore these all and would write how all/some of these technologies could be converged into one and what could be a possible outcome of convergence. Some of the above mentioned technologies have already been converged. I won’t be suggesting a revolutionary technology of the future but I would write if some of these are converged then how it is going to affect a common man’s life.

This post is just a preface to my upcoming posts. Soon you will see more posts on this blog.

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