Patent Issued for System and Method for Personal Cloud Computing

Grazed from Adobe. Author: PR Announcement.

A patent by the inventors Peercy, Mark S. (Cupertino, CA); Loh, Danny D. (Menlo Park, CA), filed on May 29, 2009, was cleared and issued on October 23, 2012, according to news reporting originating from Alexandria, Virginia, by VerticalNews correspondents. Patent number 8296763 is assigned to Adobe Systems Incorporated (San Jose, CA). The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: "Description of the Related Art":

"The computing, information, and communication industries are undergoing a massive transition with the rise of low-cost, high-performance devices, high-bandwidth communication infrastructure, and the Internet. The personal computer (PC), once a stalwart of information technology, is in rapid retreat, its value being drained away by innumerable large and small players offering solutions to problems that overlap the offerings of the PC and often extend well beyond them. Unfortunately, although users have been offered a dramatically wider array of options than before, it has come at a very real cost: data and applications are fragmented across heterogeneous and often incompatible devices and the Internet, device management has become extraordinarily complicated, and devices and Internet services come and go at an astonishing rate. Chores that were complicated for some users, even when they had just one PC to manage, have become significantly more difficult…

"Cloud computing promises to alleviate these issues by restructuring the way that users engage with their information. With cloud computing, instead of installing and maintaining applications on every device in order to interact with data that may be spread across one or more of those devices, data is encapsulated in applications that are hosted as services on servers and delivered from those servers to the devices as clients. Typically, cloud computing services in the ‘public cloud’ are hosted on the Internet, managed and maintained by third-party providers. The equivocation between data and applications in cloud computing mitigates the heterogeneity problem by using Internet communication and protocol standards, which can be supported on almost all connected devices, to provide services at any time and any place. It also mitigates the sustainability and maintainability problems by allowing its services to be amended, upgraded, and augmented by the service provider with minimal demands on the client.

"Private clouds, becoming in vogue in the enterprise arena, are currently targeted at the data center, with scalable servers running heavyweight applications and handling massive amounts of data. These servers may scale to extremely large numbers of simultaneous users while running applications in one-to-many or many-to-many topologies. The private cloud reinforces a thin client-thick server usage model, where inter-device sharing pivots through the cloud. As a result, the private cloud (like the ‘public’ cloud) has a strong asymmetry between client devices and the cloud infrastructure, and it requires expertise to manage both the devices and the cloud. Rather than having corporate data and applications residing on servers maintained and hosted by a third party, this model simplifies the process of building ‘clouds’ to a point that the cloud computing infrastructure can be assembled and managed by a business’s internal IT team. Private clouds can be constructed to interoperate with the public cloud, for example to balance loads during peak utilization."

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent, VerticalNews journalists also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: "A system and method for providing Personal Cloud computing and for hosting applications and/or content may in some embodiments employ a network attached storage device on which various logical devices and virtual machine monitors may be instantiated in memory. Each of the logical device instances, referred to herein as ‘Ts’ may be created by one of the virtual machine monitors, referred to herein as ‘T-cups.’ Each executable logical device instance may in various embodiments include hosted content, one or more application modules (e.g., a root module, one or more other core modules, and one or more user modules), a server module (e.g., a Flash.RTM. Media server) configured to host the one or more application modules and the hosted content, and an interface module (e.g., a Flash.RTM. player) configured to provide access to the one or more application modules and/or hosted content in response to detecting an authorized key. In some embodiments, the hosted content may be accessible only by one of the hosted applications. In some embodiments, the hosted content and hosted applications may be resident in local storage allocated to the corresponding T.

"In some embodiments detecting an authorized key may include detecting that a storage device is coupled to the system and determining that a logical device (e.g., a second T) instantiated in memory on the storage device is associated with a device identifier included on a list of device identifiers authorized to access the application module(s). In some embodiments determining that the second T is associated with a device identifier included on a list of device identifiers authorized to access the application module(s) may include communicating with a name server coupled to the system and configured to maintain such a list of device identifiers. The list of device identifiers may in some embodiments indicate an association between each device and the modules each device is authorized to access and/or may include information indicating an ownership group to which each device belongs, a space that the device is authorized to access, and/or other authorization information associated with the device.

"In various embodiments, the storage device serving as a key may comprise a computer system, a digital camera, a digital photo frame, a mobile phone, an audio player, a video player, an installed storage device, or a portable storage device. The storage device may in some embodiments, and in some cases, belong to an owner of the logical device that includes the application module(s) to which access is sought. In this case, the storage device may serve as an owner key. In other embodiments, and/or in other cases, the storage device may belong to a guest of an owner of the logical device that includes the application module(s) to which access is sought.

"In some embodiments, the second T may include one or more other application modules (e.g., another root module, one or more other core modules, and one or more other user modules), another server module (e.g., a Flash.RTM. Media server) configured to host the one or more other application modules, and another interface module (e.g., a Flash.RTM. player) configured to provide access to the one or more other application modules in response to detecting a key configured to enable access to the one or more other application modules.

"In some embodiments, the network attached storage device (sometimes referred to herein as an ‘Iron’) and/or various storage devices serving as keys may be configured to communicate with a name server (sometimes referred to herein as a ‘switchboard’) in order to authenticate Ts, define T ownership, and/or establish friend-to-friend networks between Ts. For example, each T may include a list of contacts, each representing another T, and a given T may be configured to send a request to connect to a second T represented on its list of contacts to the switchboard. If the given T is included on the contact list of the second T, the switchboard may be configured to return location information associated with the second T to the given T. In response to receiving the location information from the name server, the given T may be configured to establish a direct communication channel between its server module and a server module of the second T.

"In various embodiments, the methods described herein may be implemented as program instructions, (e.g., stored on computer-readable storage media) executable by one or more CPUs and/or GPUs. For example, they may be implemented as program instructions that, when executed, implement a switchboard, a virtual machine monitor (T-cup), a logical device (T), a server module, an interface module, various hosted applications, or other components of the system described herein to provide Personal Cloud computing."

URL and more information on this patent, see: Peercy, Mark S.; Loh, Danny D.. System and Method for Personal Cloud Computing. U.S. Patent Number 8296763, filed May 29, 2009, and issued October 23, 2012. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=12&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=552&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=20121023.PD.&OS=ISD/20121023&RS=ISD/20121023