Company Focuses on a Seamless Link
The bits that make up our digital lives are increasingly spread over a growing number of gadgets, such as cellphones that snap pictures, hand-held computers that play music and a growing number of PCs that do all the above and more.
But amid all this connectedness, something has been left out: a seamless way for all the gadgets and all the computers to stay current with all the information captured, created and edited on other devices.
“Big companies have talked about doing this a long time, but we haven’t seen anyone deliver it yet,” said Gibu Thomas, chief executive of Sharpcast Inc.
His 20-person start-up company is hoping to do just that.
For more than two years, it has been quietly working to come up with a way to enable behind-the-scenes synchronization across programs and devices.
Sharpcast’s service acts as a go-between among devices. If a file is created on a desktop PC, it’s seamlessly saved to a remote server, which other devices then access. Changes made to the file by any other device also are instantly synchronized with the others as soon as they’ve connected to the network. The latest file also can be accessed over the Web and can be tagged for private use or public sharing.
“Depending on what it is you’re moving and how much of it you can move, it could really be the next killer” application, analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said. “It could relate to everything, from how you move movies, how you move music and how you move your pictures.”
Palo Alto-based Sharpcast will unveil its first product -- a photo organizer -- at the DEMO ’06 tech show this week in Phoenix. It will share the stage with nearly 70 companies that will each give a six-minute demonstration to showcase what it hopes will be the next big thing.
At a presentation at Sharpcast’s office, Thomas imported pictures into the program and they immediately showed up on his Internet-linked cellphone. When he tagged the picture with a caption on the phone, it appeared instantly on the PC. When he snapped a picture with the camera phone, it instantly appeared on the PC.
“Any changes that I make are kept in sync in real time,” he said. “The idea is that you should be able to pick up where you left off, regardless of what device you’re on.”
Sharpcast plans to offer a basic free service and a paid one that would allow greater storage or bandwidth. Pricing hasn’t been announced, and it’s expected to be available this year.
The photo-organizing tool is just a start. The company hopes that the program and service will draw wider interest in the underlying technology.
Eventually, Sharpcast’s platform could be built into applications from other companies and support other operating systems. For now, it runs only on PCs running Windows XP and hand-helds or phones with Windows Mobile, though content posted on the Web through Sharpcast can be viewed through most any browser.
If Sharpcast gets broader reach, users could stick with their favorite imaging programs, where they’ve already worked on organizing photo albums, rather than adopt Sharpcast’s own program. In fact, the underlying service should support any type of digital documents.
“Ultimately, for this to work smoothly, they have to get a tremendous amount of support from other application vendors,” said Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin. “It’s one thing to have access to my content, but it needs to be tied with valuable applications as well.”
Over the years, there’s been no shortage of tools to harmonize PCs and mobile gadgets. BlackBerry e-mail devices and others like them are very good at synchronizing e-mail, contacts and calendars -- data of interest to business users.
Some people also have resorted to e-mailing documents between home and office, while others use remote access tools to grab files off a PC. Most makers of mobile gadgets offer some mechanism for transferring data to a PC.
Nothing, however, is quite as seamless, ambitious or consumer-focused as what Sharpcast hopes to do, analysts say.
“More importantly, they’ve done it in a way that seems to be fairly understandable by consumers so you don’t have to have a whole IT department in your house to make this stuff work,” said Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research.
Sharpcast received its first venture funding -- $3 million -- in August, and another round is in the works. Finding investors could prove to be the easy part of the venture.
Sharpcast is more easily demonstrated than described. If customers find it and like it, they still have to be persuaded to pay for the ability to sync more files than they could with the free service.
