Could a personal avatar juggle our cross-platform lives? - blumejoad1947

Hewlett-Packard researchers are developing a cloud-based "avatar" to manage all of a user's mobile devices and wireless networks.

Their melodic theme is to give individual users an identity that transcends the many smartphones, tablets, and other devices they may carry, as well as all the Badger State-Fi and cellular networks they use in different situations. HP's avatar would cream the prizewinning combination of ironware and network for each site and automatically dress up and take down connections, said Horsepower Beau Paul Congdon, World Health Organization works in the company's Networking & Communications Lab.

For employees and consumers, acquiring the avatar might be as easy American Samoa downloading a mobile app, but the backbone of the system would be a cloud-settled software platform that H.P. could offer A a help to enterprises and carriers. The construct, called Racy Personal Power system, was one recent development that HP researchers presented at a media event most recently week.

Help for network managers

The avatar could help enterprises administrate BYOD (bring your ain device) policies and make life easier for mobile users who want to stay online in the quickest, cheapest way possible, according to HP. Today, a lot of the effort up to my neck is manual.

Paul Congdon HP — Paul Congdon, an HP Fellow

"Thither's so much burden that the user has today to get linked to the network," Congdon said. Mobile Personal Grid is fashioned to ease that headache. "This is automatic ad hoc networking," he said.

By collecting information from mobile devices and applying cloud up-based intelligence, including data depth psychology by HP's Autonomy software, the Mobile Personal Gridiron could always sympathize the user's context, Congdon said. Context could include remaining battery life, available networks, Wi-Fi and multicellular signal strength, location, and what the user is doing. The avatar could even check over a user's calendar to get set finished correctly for upcoming events. All of those factors, along with preset policies, could help determine the best conformation, he said.

Horsepower demonstrated several examples of what the avatar could do to manage devices. In a place setting with no near wireless LANs, a Wi-Fi-only tablet could get online by tethering to a smartphone. If that earphone's battery started lengthwise forward and the substance abuser had another one, the pill could switch o'er. Once a Wi-Fi network came into though, whol the devices could shimmy onto the LAN to save battery life and cellular data charges. Wholly the changes would happen automatically.

Talk to the avatar

Because the back-end software runs in the cloud, there's no need for all of a substance abuser's devices to coordinate with each other ace on unity, Congdon said. Neither devices nor networks would need special receiving set protocols to communicate with the user's avatar, because that communicating would take place in the back death, over the Internet. HP envisions offering APIs (application computer programing interfaces) thus carriers and other third parties butt participate in the data flow, Congdon said.

HP researchers are talking with early groups in the company about how to turn the avatar technology into products. HP's services group may offer it in conjunction with BTO (business technology optimization) software to help enterprises handle mobile use of their applications. The company is also interested in delivering Raiseable Personal Grid on a PAAS (platform as a service) basis to mobile operators, WHO could run it happening HP's swarm simply offer IT under their own brands, Congdon said.

The company doesn't have a figure for when its mobile avatars will become available, though. There are still issues to be worked out. E.g., if an enterprise put a mobile avatar for an employee and that same employee got unrivaled from a carrier, those avatars might non make the same decisions. It's not yet clear how to forbid this "dueling incarnation" problem, Congdon said, though in that location are mechanisms for avatars to communicate with unity other.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Servicing. Follow Stephen on Chitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's electronic mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com