First, let’s take a little time to investigate some of the offerings.  At the high end we have systems like the  Macbook Air from Apple.  While the Air might not have the smallest form factor, it is slim, sleek, and nearly weightless compared to most laptop computers on the market today.  One of the reasons it can be so small is that Apple has moved the CD/DVD drive out of the laptop, allowing for a much thinner base.  On the high end version we also have a tiny, energy efficient, 64GB solid state hard drive.  You can think of the hard drives in an iPod for comparison.  The reason that Apple knows it can get away with such a small hard drive is that they offer their me.com as an alternative to your storage needs.  Me’s storage is built into the Mac OS as the ‘iDisk’ and it looks just like any other hard drive on an Apple.

Dell has released their version of a netbook with the Inspiron Mini 9.  It is small by any standard, the screen is 8.9″ compared to the 13″ display on the Macbook Air, but the draw here is not just its small form factor, but also the small price.  Where the Macbook Air comes in two flavors, from $1799 to $2598, the Inspiron Mini 9 is only $349 for the Linux powered model with 4GB of hard drive, and $399 for the Microsoft Windows version sporting an 8 GB hard drive.  Those low prices could drive the market to adopt the Mini 9, from parents grabbing them for the tweens, to the college crowd snapping them up for the perfect laptop for the party/study/travel/social computing platform.  By the way, the gang at NotebookReview.com did an excellent review of the Mini 9, and you can find that here.

Besides the native Linux operating system offered on the Mini 9, another feature that has attracted me to this netbook is that it comes bundled with Box.net’s online storage solution.  Dell is offering 2GB of free online storage with every Mini 9 they sell, and you can easily up that by spending a little extra at Box.net.

I spent some time with Sean Lindo from Box.net this afternoon.  I had some questions about where Box.net’s cloud storage stood today, where they are headed and how they will handle the growing adoption of online storage in the market.  The following is part of our exchange via email.

MW: With more hardware providers offering online storage solutions as real-time storage alternatives, will we see the reintroduction of a network based computer, like the one Oracle offered a decade ago?

SL: Most definitely. We’ve already witnessed a host of truly web-oriented computers come to market from the most established players in the business. As an example, Dell recently partnered with Box.net to provide Inspiron Mini 9 users with our online file storage and collaboration services. When Asus introduced the Eee PC, many thought it was a nice toy for the gadget crowd. But then HP introduced the Mini-Note, and Dell’s come out with the Mini 9, which looks like a fantastic product. And let’s not forget, while it doesn’t play in the same price range, Apple’s MacBook Air is a computer that relies heavily on accessing data and content via the web and wireless networks at home and on-the-go.

I think the difference today is that the industry is providing consumers, both in the home and the enterprise, with a more complete solution than before – web connections are accessible wherever people go, sleek and powerful web-based applications are in place to help people access their data wherever they are and online storage has become more secure, reliable and inexpensive. Of course, there’s more work to do. But because of these trends, PCs don’t have to rely so much on data stored on a local hard drive. It can simply tap into information and applications that are reliably hosted online.

In addition, I think open standards have really helped move this notion of a network-oriented computer forward. More consumers can take advantage of innovative solutions from so many companies out there. Box.net, through our OpenBox platform, gives consumers the power to use files stored on Box.net with applications they like. We make it really easy for third party developers to write apps that seamlessly access data our customers store on Box.net. It’s a very user-centric approach we take pride in promoting.

MW: How is Box.net planning to scale in the coming years as we shift from a desktop based storage society, to the Internet cloud based, storage seeking society of the future?

SL: Box.net has been successfully scaling its service over the past 3 years we’ve been in business. We have a competency around managing large amounts of data, while ensuring that data is stored redundantly and securely. Our growing base of 2 million users reflects how well we’ve been able to keep up. We’re certainly excited to see this massive shift of users to web-based storage, and we’re ready for it.

MW: Do you personally see storage becoming a commodity in the new computing paradigm? By that I mean will storage become less of a thought in our minds when we think of computers? With online storage being a cheap and ostensibly limitless alternative to local hard drives, will we cease to worry about how big our hard drives are, knowing we can simply rent more storage as needed?

SL: Yes. In many ways, online storage on its own is already a commodity. Box.net has been successful because it’s never been about storage for us. The company was founded to address a problem, which is how can people access and collaborate on all their data wherever they are, in the simplest, most reliable and secure way possible.

While I couldn’t use the entire conversation in this article, I wanted to include most of it because Sean’s words are foreshadowing where we are heading in many ways. Sean tells us that it has never been about the storage, and that makes complete sense.

How soon until the computer on my lap has GSM built in and offers me a history of where I have been?  How long until I can record every conversation and store it online for later retreval?  Soon, all of that and more, especially as the price for storage falls into the basement.  Google gives me 17 GB just because I use a lot of their services.  It just makes sense to offer me free storage so that they can show me ads wrapped around the services I like to use.

As soon as the industry realizes that storage is like good coffee in the diner, you just give it away so that people eat the pie; then we will see a huge explosion of applications that thrive upon large data sets.  We already have some WiFi in major cites, Starbucks, Panera Bread and even some McDonald’s with hotspots – so your online storage is accessible when you are getting coffee or lunch, but we need WiMax before this makes sense for most of our data.  If you store the majority of your documents on the cloud, well, then you need the cloud all of the time.  It isn’t enough to have your Internet connectivity just at home, the office and the occasional public hotspot, we need the wireless carriers to blanket the nation with fast, reliable Internet connectivity.  And I want it now.

Lastly, let’s not forget that we also need some killer apps to usher in the need for more cloud-based storage.  Maybe Twitter will offer me a couple of gigs worth of storage so that I can automatically store any document someone sends me on the service.  They don’t allow that yet, but they will.  Maybe an application that Perhaps an application will offer to catalog all of your media, and then give you a social network of people who like the same movies and music? Techno Mule is doing that to some degree already, but there is more on the way.  A lot more, I hope.

Matt
twitter.com/mattwilliamson

 You get a short amount of words to explain your current situation. Tell people where you are, tell them how you feel and why it matters.

See, all that, and I still had five characters left over, too. Why is this important, and how is it changing the Internet?   Okay, so here goes: These tiny blurbs are streaming across the ‘Net on web sites, phone applications (SMSs on older cell phones), and even on giant LCDs in Times Square and downtown Tokyo.  The blurbs, micro-objects really, are not intrusive, because you have to subscribe to a user to see their posts in your stream.  But if you want to see the entire flood of messages on a system like Identi.ca, you need only go to the home page and watch it flow past you. (Like this stream on Rejaw: http://rejaw.com/everyone or this one at Jaiku: http://jaiku.com/explore)

The majority of these micro-blogging systems are built to utilize the XMPP standard, which has been around since 1998 when the Jabber project hatched it.  XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which is an open, XML-like protocol, that is a decentralized alternative to the centralized, corporate-owned, anachronistic instant messaging systems like AOL and MSN.  While I have nothing against corporate-owned systems per se, I am all for the decentralized platforms that take advantage of the cloud structure that the Internet is rapidly adopting.  From the open source Laconica server, which is written in the open source PHP language, to the Linux, Apache, Python, and MySQL-driven code of Pownce – open is good.  Nyet?

This cloud-like structure is amazing for a lot of reasons, but we need to focus on something that is maybe only a few months away.  Imagine your workday when your gadgets, calendars, emails, co-workers and even your car can send you XMPP messages when needed.  For these short, to the point messages, you wouldn’t dirty your email inbox; but rather they would flow into your XMPP stream as needed.  An impromptu meeting is taking place and your CTO needs you… chirp.  Your iPhone battery is complaining because you forgot to charge it last night when you collapsed in the hotel room… chirp.  Even better, your Gmail account sends you a message that it is getting close to being low on disk space… chirp.  Tivo wants you to know that the original Planet of the Apes is on tonight, chirp.  Ooh, I love this one, your refrigerator sends you a message like this one: If U want ur cereal in the AM, U betr get some milk!

If we look at XMPP like this, then we can see that there are countless uses for micro-messages.  In the corporate enterprise environment, I would like to see more integration between our CRM and ERP tools, an XMPP application could easily facilitate this for us.  A work flow would instantiate itself when a predefined criteria was met on the CRM side.  Perhaps a marketing campaign has just terminated itself and now we can evaluate the ROI.  So, the CRM dips into the back office data to scour all sales for the period the campaign was valid.  The CRM finds all coupons redeemed, slices those down to the coupons of interest for this particular campaign, runs the sales and gross margins, as well as what we might have lost for the shipping we gave away.  Once all of this is complete the CRM sends a micro-message to the ERP system.  The ERP system takes these numbers and updates the Manufacturing system, as well as the Supply Chain Management system. A predefined plan executes to spin up production on the items which sold best in the last campaign. Neat, huh?

It sounds like there is a lot of work to do, and there is, but this is a great time to be in the trenches.  So many possibilities, so many tools, and so many problems that we might be able to solve with technology — where before we have been using disparate systems, brute force, and the Sneakernet.

Links:

• Identi.ca
• Jaiku (Google owns this service)
• Laconica
• Pownce
• Rejaw
• Twitter
• XMPP server platforms
• MarkMail search on XMPP

Matt
matt (at) technologystory.com

p.s. I didn’t even get into the rich-media side of micro-messages in this article.  Sites like 12seconds.tv are pushing this faster and faster still.