14 DAY TRIAL // The MeshMobile, a pet project of Ori Amiga, principal group program manager of Microsoft’s Live Mesh, is an illustration of the still-untapped potential of the company's cloud platform. Live Mesh, which continues to be in Beta stage, is designed as a synchronization, sharing and remote connectivity service spanning across desktops, laptops, mobile phones and macs. However, the cross-device capabilities of Live Mesh truly come to life as the Amiga's Porsche gets transformed into a mobile computing platform.
“I spend a ton of time in my car. I'm kind of a motoring guy,” Amiga explains. “I wanted the experiences I have with software at home with me in my car. The idea was bringing the goodness of the Mesh into the automotive environment to see what we could do.”
The MeshMobile can be considered nothing more than a prototype of Microsoft's vision of a digital lifestyle, a vision in which music, documents, Internet, but also additional types of information are available at any time, independent of location or device. Of course, Live Mesh is just a small part of the strategy of the Redmond company to embrace the Cloud.
In fact, Live Mesh is integrated into Live Sercices, which, in their turn, are a key component of the Microsoft Azure Services Platform, intimately connected with the Windows Azure Cloud OS. Just as it is the case of Amiga's MeshMobile Porsche, Windows Azure will end up bridging the gap between data, devices, applications, and ultimately people.
“Live Mesh (and Live Services) provide so many opportunities,” Amiga says. “Really, it all boils down to data. Data, data, data. You have devices that produce data and devices that consume data. You take a photo with your digital camera, and you want to render it on your mom’s digital picture frame halfway across the world.” Microsoft’s new cloud applications let you do that. They help break down what Amiga calls “digital islands.” From anywhere, on an array of devices, you can access anything you want.
