Orb now has APIs - yet another piece of the infrastructure is put into place
I originally reported on Orb as a sexy Home Media server platform, and I kept my mouth shut whenI heard about their announcement of going open source and their Sprint deal. I even reported when Russ Beattie started to grok them.
Orb has lots of fans - and this one could just make it!
Now I’m here to tell yah that there are APIs in place for Orb, so we now have a virtual file system in place - which can leverage our own Home Media LAN - with as much storage as WE wanna put onto it.
The Orb platform not only gives us access to TiVO and Windows Home Media Center live streams and recorded TV shows, but also acts as a general purpose media server. So we can write DLAs that access your personal media collection - whever it resides on the net.
Orb navigates it’s way through your personal Firewall and NAT crap, and gives you access to all your files - anywhere you travel on the web.
Orb takes care of down sampling the media to adapt to your mobile phone, but scales itaself up for better bandwidth and devices - if that’s what you got. So I could view live TV or recorded TV shows from my high speed bandwidth connection at work, and get at the same programming at mid-band resolution from my hotel room and lo-band resolution on my cell phone.
Sprint is using it for it’s Personal Media Link service and now we all can build this functionality into OUR software. I’d say that’s a pretty important piece of the puzzle.
As long as Orb gives away their server software - we’re in like flint. The EULA says we gotta call them up - if we wanna distribute the server code ourselves - but I’ll give yah Ted’s phone # if any of you wanna do that.
By making Orb open source, and by giving us APIs - Ted and his company are providing us both a gateway into our Home LANs, but also connecting us to our Media devices.
Thanks Ted - and thanks Orb - for doing the right thing.
One of the developer’s challenges is still having to host an application somewhere on the Internet to make it accessible to users. Orb makes the user’s own home machine into the server. So a developer can build an application and deploy it directly to the consumer — then Orb makes that application web-accessible from any device.
In the first phase the API is all about personal access to content or applications. But in the second phase (later this year) we will also start exposing a collaborative framework… developers will be able to leverage all of the functionality of orb to build mobile collaborative applications and deploy them to the marketplace through P2P infrastucture. This is what Web 2.0 is all about.
This just stone rocks the house.
Russell Beattie will be happy. And Simon Grice - too.