Angling to be the Switzerland
of mobile operating systems for businesses, TransMedia has tailored its Glide
3.0 operating system for Apple's highly anticipated new 3G iPhone.
TransMedia Chairman and CEO Donald Leka
wouldn't tell eWEEK how he got his hands on the brand-new gadget, announced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs June 9 in San
Francisco, to port the new Glide 3.0 platform to the gadget.
"We have a good sense of what's involved with that and I can't say too
much other than to say that it works really fast," Leka said.
Does Leka have a 3G iPhone prototype? "I can't really speak to
that," he said.
He did discuss how Glide will make the iPhone into its own mobile computer
thanks to a number of synchronization and collaboration utilities that can't be
found elsewhere. Glide works with the first iPhone, launched a year ago, but
Leka is excited because the 3G iPhone is much faster, allegedly sporting the
speed business users want.
Originally announced at the D Conference in May, Glide 3.0 includes the
applications associated with a productivity and collaboration platform,
including e-mail, word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, Web conferencing,
calendar, photo editor and contact manager. And now, users can leverage these
apps on the new 3G iPhone (and 75 other phones).
Specifically, the software allows hundreds or thousands of people to work
together on video, music, documents and photo files via bidirectional
synchronization with version control capabilities and seven levels of
permission rights.
These include rights management for the number of files that may be viewed,
number of file downloads, the amount that can be uploaded in megabytes and
gigabytes, what files can be transferred where, what files can be modified, and
group rights management.
Glide 3.0 identifies the device and operating system accessing a file and
converts it to the supported format. So, if a user has a QuickTime movie on an
iPhone and wants to share it with a user of a Windows Mobile smart phone, Glide
will convert the QuickTime file into a Windows Mobile file on the fly. If the
Windows Mobile user wants to share a Windows Media video with the QuickTime and
iPhone user, Glide will convert it to QuickTime.
In a business case, a manager working on a project can assign various rights to
the collaborators on a project. Glide 3.0 keeps track of what could be a
staggering number of versions, or updates, to the various projects. Click a
button called, simply, "versions" and view any version of a file
created by group participants.
Vendor-neutral
In the interest of reaching as many users through as
many platforms as possible, TransMedia is synchronizing files for Glide 3.0 not
just between the iPhone and Mac computers, but also between the iPhone and
Windows, Solaris and Linux machines.
The idea is to enable people to communicate and collaborate seamlessly across
any mobile device and computer, regardless of brand and code base.
To that end, Glide 3.0 will also synch between the 3G iPhone and smart phones
such as RIM's BlackBerry, Palm's Treo, Microsoft's Windows Mobile devices,
Nokia's Symbian-based phones and Google's Android gadgets as they roll out.
"In contrast with what Apple does, which is create a lot of proprietary
barriers and restrictions, we're completely eliminating those now," Leka
said. "The disruption here is cross-platform."
Such cross-platform interoperability is a boon to mobile workers tired of the
lack of consistent functionality for sharing files between disparate mobile
devices.
Leka admits that breaking down the barriers the incumbent mobile operating
system providers have worked so hard to erect makes TransMedia and Glide a bit
of a nuisance, but he and his team insist on remaining neutral.
Glide 3.0 also boasts a feature called Spider, which, as the name implies, is a
file location tracking system that pinpoints the location of all copies of a
file and who has access to those files. This tool can also immediately change
or revoke access rights.
Glide 3.0 works with all mobile carriers and users can sign up now to receive 5
free gigabytes of online storage or almost any mobile device from TransMedia.
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