“The drawbacks of syncing were not lost on Bertrand Serlet, the former senior vice president of software engineering for Apple,” Casey Newton reports for The Verge. “Serlet spent eight years at Steve Jobs’ NeXT and 14 more at Apple following its acquisition, and in those years Apple made a cautious, then enthusiastic embrace of cloud computing. And while iCloud improved vastly on the failures of MobileMe, Serlet thinks he can do it one better. Upthere, a company he founded in 2011 to do just that, is emerging from stealth today with a big idea: syncing is dead, and in the future we’ll save all our files directly to the cloud.”
“The company says it has built a new way of saving, storing, and organizing files, and done it in a way that takes advantage of the cloud,” Newton reports. “It pays special attention to metadata, enabling faster searches. ‘There was no one who did what we envisioned,’ Serlet said in an interview with The Verge. ‘So we started from scratch.'”
“Today you can sign up on a waitlist to try Upthere’s first two products, which are now in beta on iOS, Android, and Mac,” Newton reports. “First is Upthere Camera, which saves your photos directly to the cloud… The second product is Upthere Home, which organizes all the documents you have stored with the service so you can browse them. On one tab you can view your photos; on another you can listen to the MP3s you have stored; on another you can view (but not edit) work documents like Word files and PDFs. Here the appeal is a little clearer than with the camera: you can stream your entire cloud library to any device, without having to download or sync any of those files to a new device.”
More info in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck, Mr. Serlet. We’ll give the beta a try.