A personal cloud

Transcript

Yes, hi, thank you for letting me talk to you.

I'm going to talk a little bit about personal clouds, but first off, I would like to start off by talking a little bit about the situation today. Today, we have a lot of smart devices: phones, computers and stuff like that. Most of these devices come pre-configured to connect to various cloud services like Samsung or Google or something like this. This is of course a way for them to get your data for free while pretending that their services are free to use. One solution to this would be to use a personal cloud server in this case and take your data home.

Woah. That's still there, sorry.

And what is a personal cloud anyway. I think it's a bit different depending on who you are talking to. Some would say like the Indie Camp guys that it's a publishing platform for you to make your voice heard without having to prefix every writing with Twitter or Facebook or something like that, while others would say that this is a way of not getting exploited or spied upon while doing your day to day internet web browsing. And finally, I think that some think that this is a solution to keep the internet a fair and equal place for everyone to act on.

What is characteristic for a personal cloud solution in this case. Well, for start-off, it should be really simple to use. It should be no harder to use this device than signing up for any of the normal cloud services in this case. Information should always be under your control. This means that you most likely would like to keep that information at home in your own device, then you're absolutely sure that you are in control. If nothing else, you can take the unit away, unplug it from the internet and keep on going.

Information stored on the device should be safeguarded against data theft and loss in general. This means that you should encrypt all data on the device. And furthermore, you should make sure that there is more than one copy of the data to talk about, so you should have an efficient back-up. And that's where we come into play. We've developed OPIH, or Open Products Information Hub. This was a small, electronic device that you plug in at home, connect it to your broadband service. Our ambition with this, with OPIH, is that it should be a cloud drop-in replacement, replacing the normal services, and our goal is that everyone should be able to use this; we want to lower the bar for running a personal server as much as we possibly can.

What does OPIH do in this case. Well, it handles your contacts; it handles your emails, your calendars, your personal files and photos, what we would like to call your personal data that you really care about, the data you want tomorrow as well. And what does OPIH do in this case. It helps you handle your communications between your computer and your various devices; smartphones and tablets and stuff like that, and makes sure that they're organising. It lets you stay in connection with the rest of the world, and furthermore, it safe-keeps your information by doing daily back-ups automatically, and encrypting everything and that includes storage and communication.

Our main design goals when developing OPIH was that it would be a plug-in solution. You shouldn't have to do anything, you shouldn't have to install any software or configure it. You should have to do no maintenance; it should upgrade itself regularly, automatically, without your intervention, and when we need any configuration, it should always be at minimal sub-set; only what's necessary to get things running, we have to have some form of configuration.

Furthermore, OPIH's designed as an open system or free system perhaps, I'm not sure what you call it. We use only open source software components when developing the platform; all code that is written by us is also open sourced and freely available at a GPL licence. And this means that anyone who's interested in what OPIH does can browse every single line of code that is running on the device. They are also free to modify it and do their own spin of it if they would like. Our business model is in selling hardware and services, not anything else.

Let's move over and talk to OPIH in the day to day life. How do you use this unit. Well, we can start off by imagining a work day in my life in this case. I get up in the morning, having breakfast and while doing so, of course I have my tablet with me. I start off by reading my emails that have arrived during the night. Some of them I answer directly, other ones I leave for later on. I check my calendar, make sure what is going on today; maybe I have a lunch meeting or something like that.

After that, I'm off to work. When arriving at work, I sit down and pick off where I left on this morning. I start by reading the emails that I hadn't had time to do this morning, answering them. After a while, let's say my wife sends me an email saying that she has written a shopping list for the weekly shopping of groceries. I check it up and I add some entries and leave it at that, and a bit later on in the afternoon, we discuss at work if we should have an after-work summit or something like this, and I immediately check my calendar on my smartphone in this case to make sure that the slot is empty, and book it.

On the way home, I stop off to buy some groceries. Once again, I pick up my smartphone and use the shopping list we have entered together earlier on and make sure that I get everything.

Well, I can say that this is no unusual day; this is how most people go on with business on the day to day basis. The only big thing in this scenario is that during all the day, we have never, ever been directly in contact with any third party cloud providers such as Google or something else; everything has been synchronised using our private cloud server, in this case OPIH. So I would say this is a good way of getting out of sight of the big cloud providers.

That was that. Thank you!

(applause)

I forgot to show the nice box.

Thank you, so I was going to say…where is it?

I should be here.

Where is it. Can I pick it up?

Yeah, I can show it to you.

It is a thing, and we haven't seen it, so let's see it.

I just showed the pictures of it.

It exists?

It exists. There we go. A little device you plug in…

It's beautiful. I love it. This is really nice. Is this for me?

You can just…

Thank you, Tor!

Thank you.