Your new post is loading...
“Client-aware cloud” is one of the buzzwords that Intel was pushing at IDF 2011, and despite the chipmaker’s ulterior motive for wanting to see synergy (read: “vendor lock-in”) between (x86-powered) cloud clients and (x86-powered) cloud servers, there’s definitely something to larger idea that the cloud should know something about and tailor data for the clients that are connected to it. HTTP proxies like Amazon’s Silk and Opera Mini before it (not that these are the same thing) are part of this client-aware cloud trend, as is Skyfire‘s new Rocket Optimizer 2.0 service.
Skyfire is probably best known as a maker of mobile browsers, and specifically as the company that snuck porn Flash onto the iPad via some clever transcoding and a proprietary browser. But in an echo of Google’s 411 strategy, in which the search giant launched a free directory service in order to gather the voice samples that would later power Android’s voice recognition features, Skyfire has been using the data that it gathers from its 10 million iOS and Android users for a larger R&D project.
That project is Rocket Optimizer, the 2.0 version of which launched on Tuesday. Optimizer is aimed not at consumers but at wireless carriers, where it takes tower- and mobile device-specific data and uses it to transcode and optimize video data on-the-fly to fit users’ screens and network conditions. As with Silk, all of Rocket’s real-time video transcoding and resizing is done in the cloud.
