Gliding Into the Future

By David Em

July 17, 2006

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A lot of major players--Microsoft and Google in particular--believe the future of software is online. A small New York company called TransMedia has taken a big step toward turning this concept into reality with Glide, an ad-free subscription-based web environment that incorporates multimedia tools, social networking, security, marketing, and mobility.

Film editors and animators who require beefy dedicated workstations won't be doing their primary work online any time soon. But for the rest of us, both professionals and consumers, being able to access, update, and synchronize your calendar, music, and images, plus chat and blog from any computer or handheld device in the world is certainly appealing.

Floating Media

Glide's desktop front end's called Glide Effortless. The Glide Mobile variant works with handsets running Windows Mobile 5.0, including the Palm Treo 700w, Motorola's Razr, Sony Ericsson's Smartphones, and Nokia's 60 and 90 series.

Several of Glide's components, such as device-independent online email and media sharing, are already in common use. Glide takes these capabilities, including storing images, photos, and videos, and adds simple image editing (cropping, inversion, and the like), slideshows, emailing, calendaring, and personal web site and blogging software.

A sophisticated multimedia-savvy word processor called Glide Write that exports Word, HTML, PDF, and ZIP files. A presentation tool called Glide Presenter is on the way. You can set Glide to automatically sync and back up your images, contacts, and calendar from your personal computer. It sends upcoming calendar date reminders to your email. I suspect the Microsoft Office team is following these developments with great interest.

There are some very practical benefits to online storage sharing. For example, when you send a Glide e-mail with photographs to a friend, you don't send the images themselves, you send links to them, so you don't wind up blowing up your friends' mailboxes even if you're sharing several gigabytes worth of images.

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