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Ask HN: Feedback for our Chromebook competitor

projectmeadow.com

13 pointscolinsidoti9 comments

There is essentially no information there other than 'it saves your stuff to the cloud'. You also mention that it runs MS Office, which leads me to believe this is either a windows laptop or a linux distro with WINE embedded. Neither of which makes me terribly excited.

But, all this is conjecture, as there is essentially no information. If you want feedback, give us something to assess.

There is no feedback because you have shown us nothing.

Back in 2007, I co-founded a startup to do something similar to this. Check out "System 7" @ http://www.kylecherry.com/ for what it looked like (I can't find examples of the software.)

We didn't succeed for non-technical reasons & died before getting to market. But here's my advice:

- go with Linux or BSD, not Windows (maybe WINE or something similar if you must run Office) - prototyping and fabrication is non-trivial - we worked with iSuppli and it was worth every penny

Hey Keith,

Thanks for your note, would you mind dropping me an email (my address is in my profile)? I'd love to have a brief chat about your experience and hopefully avoid any obvious mistakes, we're in the midst of making early decisions on hardware.

Thanks, Colin

Email me at {my_username} @ gmail.com. I couldn't find your email in your profile.

So the only difference between this and a chromebook is that it runs office?

That depends entirely on your vantage point.

As the average end user, yes one key difference is that the system can actually run one of the three applications that you use on a daily basis. We also allow the user to continue using a file system that she is comfortable with, making adoption easier. Other differences are by design transparent.

From the perspective of a more security aware user, they will immediately notice that their data is cleartext _only_ when they are using it locally and only they have the capability to access their cleartext data.

As a developer, you may appreciate the underlying integration with your system. But this of course remains to be seen (as others have pointed out, we have not yet made any code public).

i) Skyline sounds scary

ii) Software is stored locally. How do you prevent users from saving documents locally too? And how do they know that is synced to the cloud?

> i) Skyline sounds scary

Despite the obvious phonetic similarities between skyline and skynet, skyline's first priority is the integrity of your data. Your data is encrypted locally and it is encrypted pre-transmission to the cloud.

> ii) Software is stored locally. How do you prevent users from saving documents locally too? And how do they know that is synced to the cloud?

There is no need to prevent user's from saving data locally. This behavior 'saving' is simply integrated as an event, which leads to the proper syncing behavior.

User's are notified when their systems are synced. If they would like to manually confirm the consistency of their data, they are free to use our API which includes methods to compare your local and remote data.

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