Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

Walt Mossberg has a review today of Sharpcast sync service.  What sets this service apart is that no only will it sync with PCs, it will sync with your cell phone.  Specifically, Walt used a Treo 700w for his tests.

Now, a small Silicon Valley start-up called Sharpcast is introducing an impressive, free service that synchronizes data among PCs, phones and a Web site at lightning speeds. I tested Sharpcast for several weeks, and found that it works really well.

The service is limited to photos right now, which means it's more mashed potatoes than gravy:

With Sharpcast Photos, any change you make to an album of photos on one of your devices is replicated within seconds on your other devices. If you add a photo to an album on your PC, it shows up within seconds on your phone and on your Sharpcast Web page. If you rotate a photo on the phone, the same photo is rotated within seconds on the PC and Web page. If you delete a photo on the Web page, it's immediately deleted on the PC and the phone. And if you take a photo with the camera on your Sharpcast-enabled phone, it will show up in seconds on your PC and your Web page.

It's not a huge leap from instant replication of modified photos to instant replication of spreadsheets, Word docs, etc. 

You can also share your albums with other Sharpcast users, and receive shared albums from them.

Sharing = collaboration.  MS's next version of SharePoint will be mobile enabled, but there's a large buy-in and overhead, not to mention connectivity issues.  Instead of sharing a photo album, imaging sharing a project folder.  By the time your plane lands, you have the updated files on your phone, and will get them as soon as you connect your laptop to the Internet.  Sweet!  And, probably with less overhead.

Planned improvements include sync of contacts, appointments, etc.  Not such a huge issue for me, since we have an Exchange server, but very useful for a lot of people I know.

Full story at http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20060713.html.  The possibilities are exciting--this is definately a company to watch in the near future.