The Future is E!

In my very first blog post, I announced that one of my hobbies is anything related to technology (computer technology). I am very much a lover of the idea of integrating computer technology into the home. It has been talked about for years about homes becoming more digitised and “e” but it is taking off very slowly, I think there are a couple of main drivers behind this. The main one I believe is infrastructure.

For an e-home to function, there needs to be a good infrastructure to support it. What do I mean by this, well my idea is that homes basically need a smaller version of the technology that enterprises have in their corporate networks. Looking at your average (my) home. I can see bits and pieces of technology making advances, for instance, mobile devices such as laptops, phones, e-readers, tablets and consoles to name just a few are all getting more and more hungry for information, almost universally in the form of internet access. And all this data is supposed to be piped through your BT home hub? Aye right that will work well! It might be for me living on my own, but when you start getting to your average family – mum, dad, two, three or four kids and each person has their own set of electronic devices – you are really starting to hit a data flow problem.

So my first point is that the physical infrastructure needs to exist. So my idea is an effective network consisting of a core spine of ultra-high data-rate networking with branches to allow connectivity into that spine.

On the same theme as enterprise infrastructure, the infrastructure needs to support the actual management of data. One problem that I have in my house is that all my devices (I have a laptop and two desktops represent 90% of my work) have different “scraps” of data across them and it can be frustrating when I can’t remember which PC has a piece of data on it that I need. So what I want, and what I believe homes need is a data management system. In my mind, even a small family home needs a centralised data archive that anyone, anywhere in the home and ideally anywhere in the world can access.

As an example, if you look at Windows 7 onwards, you can set up what is known as a HomeGroup. It is basically a limited file sharing system between PCs. You can read data from very specific directories (My Documents for instance), and have access to some of the other PCs facilities too, such as printers. Which is very good. But the limitations of it are quickly apparent.

Further building on the management of data, there are two sub-themes in this. Data redundancy and data backup. These are subtly different problems to be solved and I will do this after I first try to define them:

• Data Redundancy, in the event of a limited amount of failure of equipment and / or problems I am still able to access my data
• Data Backup, in the event that my data is corrupted, I am able to restore the data from historical archives.

I believe that the e-home needs to have data stored centrally that has a direct link into the infrastructure for easy and rapid data access. But even more important is to address the two bullet points above: you need to have some resistance to failures / problems so that data isn't lost easily. But you also need to address the situation that if you do lose data, you can recover it (mostly typically).
One way I've seen this kind of addressed is the use of Cloud Storage solutions by providers such as Dropbox and SkyDrive. They look after most of the above mentioned issues to some degree or another.

In a very round-a-bout type way I've tried to introduce some of the areas that appeal to me and that I will talk about more in the future.

That's all for now folks. Ciao for now!