Well, it appears that billions of dollars from Obama’s stimulus package will be going towards making broadband connectivity more prevalent.  But I’d be willing to bet it will be a long time before I’m truly “always connected.”  I still find myself unable to access the Internet now and again from my laptop and smart phone, and it’s hard to believe this will change overnight.  To address this reality, we architected ZumoDrive to work well with whatever connectivity you happen to have: Wifi, 3G, EDGE or, God forbid, nothing at all.

First of all, when you access content, Zumo will intelligently adapt to your current connectivity and use.  For example, if you play a song on your iPhone while you’re on edge, we’ll transcode the song to a lower bit rate.  Similarly, if you’re viewing pictures in a browser, we don’t download the entire 6MB image. This is not rocket science, but when done right, it makes all the difference in the user experience.  You don’t have to sit around waiting for downloads to finish.  Also, those of us who have to pay for bandwidth will save a few bucks.

ZumoDrive also caches your frequently-used content locally, so the next time you access the content, you need not touch the network. So after awhile, even if you’re disconnected, you’ll usually have all you need.  Cody Overcash describes this well in his ZumoDrive review.

Going forward, we are going to make the cache “predictive.”  Since ZumoDrive is installed across devices, it can observe when you play a song, view a picture, read a file anywhere and use that information to proactively move the most important files to your many devices when connectivity is good and cheap.  So on a netbook, if Zumo is configured to just take up just 2-GB of storage capacity, we will move up to 2-GB of the stuff that you have recently accessed to the netbook. That’s actually a reasonable amount of space if you’re using it wisely.  That way, you’ll usually be accessing files locally, which really helps when you don’t have the luxury of wifi.

We call this architecture Hybrid Cloud Storage, and its key value is to deliver a superb use experience while minimizing bandwidth limitations and costs.  Many other cloud-based services assume you’ll always be connected and won’t care about how much bandwidth you’ll consume.  For some people that may be the case, but we wanted to do something for the rest of us…