

 Ask HN: Feedback for our Chromebook competitor - colinsidoti
http://www.projectmeadow.com/

======
mmanfrin
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.

------
zyang
There is no feedback because you have shown us nothing.

------
keithba
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

~~~
colinsidoti
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

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

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

~~~
burrows
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).

------
DanBC
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?

~~~
burrows
> 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.

