The upcoming LyveHome makes me miss CES
OK. I'll admit it. I miss the days of attending CES in Las Vegas. The endless number of booths and press releases. The countless number of products being launched (or relaunched). The hours of talking but mostly listening (and pretending to be interested at times). The enormous amount of SWAG (nowadays mostly just USB keys, phone cases, and of course your requisite t-shirt).
OK.. so maybe I don't miss it all that much but if you're a gadget fiend (geek) like myself, then CES is absolute heaven. Damn the sore feet. Damn the long lines for buses. Where else are you going to see the latest in upcoming hardware? Yes it's a gadget lover's wet dream.
I'm reminded of all of this after coming across this article over at the new recode.net (they were formally the editors of AllThingsD if you're not familiar with the site). The article talks about the upcoming Spring release of the new LyveHome - a $299 device that promises to be the solution to sync all of a person's media. From what I can gather, it's basically a multi-terabyte box that syncs your media (photos, videos) across your devices - whether they're on computers, mobile devices, or online storage services. It promises to maintain at least two copies of the files across various platforms/devices. Finally, there's a touch-screen that shows the health of the system.
To make this work, you install Lyve apps on your respective devices and the apps will automatically sync your media to the LyveHome device at home. It's an interesting concept which if executed correctly could be a great solution for the average consumer. It probably wouldn't work well for me given how much media we have here in this household. (I'm currently the owner of a Synology 5 bay DS1512+ with 12 terabytes of disk space - most of which is filled). Yet - I might be interested in it for a subset of my media - in particular my photos. If there's one thing I treasure the most across all of my terabytes of ridiculousness, it's my photos. I suppose it's because I can be nostalgic at times and it's nice to go back to images from yesteryear.
No word on pricing or storage capacities.. or really any major details. The market's certainly packed when it comes to NAS's and backup solutions but when you think about it - there's no automatic, fullproof solution out there. Time Machine comes close but that's really about backing up machines. What we need is a simple, easy to use, idiot-proof media backup solution that just works in the background. Here's hoping Lyve will fulfill that come spring 2014.
And this my friends is why I miss CES.