Mobile Media
Media on the go can be a challenging subject: how do you get it in the first place? Once you've got it how do you access it in a way that makes sense?
So how do you sync your computer(s), your home stereo, your phone, your portable media player, and your car - so that the music you love is always with you and at your fingertips? Well that's a question we're really interested in here at R|F!
We're looking into combining ethereal cloud-based services with tangible, physical hardware (like Bluetooth A2DP devices, and solid-state storage) to bring all your stuff together - never out of reach!
Architectures to amuse and horrify you
We are currently playing around with some cool new ideas on top of some really old ones - like AFS - the distributed filesystem written by IBM and Carnegie Mellon University in the late 80s - the funny thing about some technologies, is that despite their age they're still pretty awesome. So, we put a bunch of media in it - about 1.2 TB worth to test out if something like AFS could act as a good, reasonably network-transparent starting point for a media sync service. As it turns out, it's not so bad. Throw a UPnP translator on top of it (specifically a VM running a DLNA server which exports a particular AFS mountpoint) and now you have your TV/Roku/GoogleTV talking to the same media store that mounts as a hard drive on your computer, anywhere you have internet access.
Syncing with mobile devices is a bit tricker, and ultimately, may require moving to a different backing store - but we'll let you know how this project develops - it's only just begun!