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EMC remixes Decho and the Funnymen

Connecting a Hoover to a personal information bank

From this report we see that Smart Desktop runs on a PC and automatically groups content - either local or accessed web pages - on it into projects, based on existing organisational structures set up by the user in Outlook or a browser (bookmarks and bookmark folders maybe). Content is then assigned to projects using the topic of the content, metadata about email or an activity's context. One aim of this is to have a single view of all the content pertaining to a project wherever that content came from.

This seems to be a kind of folder analogous to but distinct from a file system folder. Users could create new projects in Outlook and Smart Desktop will add (tag) all relevant emails and documents and web pages etc to that project as they come in or are created. Project content will be capable of being viewed with a historical timeline.

Personal information bank

Okay, so we have a picture of Pi software running in the front-end consumer/knowledge worker device, mining content for metadata and using the Mozy Hoover to backup information and metadata to the cloud for safe-keeping and sharing.

EMC chief technology officer (CTO) Jeffery Nick, said more in this video when he talked of a next-generation information infrastructure platform for cloud computing. It needs (SmartDesktop) technology to index and classify information in our personal workspaces and derive metadata associated with the tasks we are performing across disparate applications. It federates the information into views that are relevant to the projects we are working on.

There has to be the ability to ingest this into the cloud (Mozy) for personal data storage, protection, isolation, privacy and secure sharing. You will be able to access it on your PDA when you are away from home or work. The vision is of a personal information bank which is not locked or tethered to a home PC or office desktop or server and which is based on a multi-petabyte, enterprise-class data centre with enterprise quality of service, protection, security, disaster recovery, indexing, classification and metadata capture, all made accessible to millions of people through the cloud.

Pi, then, will combine consumer and knowlege worker (Smart Desktop) original multi-sourced content - photos, documents, financial records, contacts, correspondence, professional portfolios, mail, music etc - indexed and classified using AI techniques to provide metadata to deliver timelined task or project-oriented views of the content from the cloud with that content and metadata stored (Mozy) in the cloud as our own individual personal information bank.

Simple really. The Mozy hoover will become a Pi Dyson with a transparent dust (data) container into which you can look through a variety of different views for data automatically grouped into different projects. This software may appear next year. ®

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