Why trust GreenbotAfter offering a closed beta for a few months, novo has opened for public preview its Reach consumer cloud service, which is a “cloud-desktop” service through which applications can be launched without downloading installing them locally on mobile devices s.
Users can sign up for the service at novo’s Reach website or through a Reach application for mobile devices. The service functions almost like a virtual desktop but is geared for the cloud, with b services like Netflix Hulu us running through a hosted interface.
An “Application Selector” in Reach allows users to select relevant b services or applications, which are then added to a tiled user interface. Initially novo is offering access to only the most popular b services through Reach, which will also store passwords for the b services.
For example, clicking on a Netflix tile in Reach provides access to a browser-based HTM version of the video streaming service. Users will be able watch a movie through that version of the Netflix service, the quality of video streaming should be similar to a locally installed app, novo said.
“You can create an experience once access it from any device,” said Bryan Thomas, director of software marketing at novo.
novo wanted to offer more than just a file- multimedia-syncing service, Reach provides convenient access to applications in a single interface across devices operating systems, Thomas said.
Reach adapts applications to the screen size of the device on which they’re being run. The cloud service also supports Flash applications, Thomas said more applications streaming services will be added in the future.
Coming features
The cloud service comes with 5GB of free hosted storage provided by SugarSync. In the future novo wants to aggregate hosted services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive Drive through a feature called Cloud File Explorer. It will be available next year will mean users won’t have to remember where files are if they use multiple storage services, Thomas said.
Future goals for Reach also include the ability to read files stored in the cloud via Zoho so productivity applications don’t need to be installed locally. novo is also planning b-based multimedia streaming services.
Reach is available for download on Android, an iOS version of the app for Apple’s ids iones is in the approval process, Thomas said. The service is also available for ndows.
For now Reach works across platforms, but in the future some parts of Reach could be tuned to work uniquely with homegrown devices, Thomas said
“ see this as an opportunity to potentially differentiate,” Thomas said, adding that the service could sway buyers to buy novo products when upgrading.
Cloud services are an important ingredient with hardware, that has helped device makers like , Apple Amazon sell more mobile devices. novo already offers a cloud service for its enterprise products, but Reach is targeted at consumers. ndows Android device makers like Acer Asus have added cloud services that uniquely work with their mobile devices s.
The service is initially available in the U.S. Canada, will be exped to other countries at a later date.
