ITGumbo: spicing IT up

News:
Last week, Europe had its 4th annual LeWeb3 conference focusing on technology in Europe. During the conference, Israeli Web-based operating system, G.ho.st received third place in a competition among the most promising startups that had been showcased.

Background:
According to the G.ho.st website,

"G. ho.st (“ghost”, the Global Hosted Operating SysTem) provides a free and complete Virtual Computer (VC) service, including personal desktop, files and applications, available from any browser. G.ho.st is the world’s first and only true open Web Operating System (Web OS), working seamlessly with leading third-party web applications. The G.ho.st VC delivers a mature computing environment to every person, which is free of charge, available everywhere and admin-free."

Analysis:
G.ho.st is getting a lot of positive feedback and comments from the media and blogosphere. While, G.ho.st, which is open source, is competing against dozens of other web-based operating systems, most people seem to be impressed with its functionality, easy user-interface, and its stability -- factors that surely led to G.ho.st being chosen as a startup to watch at LeWeb last week.

According to KillerStartups.com, "the service is ideal for people that travel a lot, or students that frequently use community computers." With its 3 gigabyte of storage, it seems like the perfect replacement for the USB storage drive that individuals and companies embrace.

Aside from business travelers, G.ho.st's VC also has significant potential to impact the enterprise market, which is currently being overtaken by open source and software-as-a-service (SaaS), as a whole. Although some of the biggest players in the field, Google and I.B.M., use the term cloud computing instead of WebOS, the basis for both is distributed computing on the Internet.

While Google's online collaboration and office applications are ultimately G.ho.st's biggest threat, Google will also help define the future of the field as it will be the one that will take the hit or bask in the glory when its services and other WebOS services, such as G.ho.st, start to really take business away from Microsoft's Windows and Office sales and the software giant is forced to retaliate.

Of course, any G.ho.st role in the enterprise will depend on how companies receive it in the workplace. Such a virtual desktop has the potential to offer significant pros and cons for employees and companies alike. It also might blur the line between the line of work and home and create a new security threat for IT departments to address.

However, before that point, as previously mentioned, G.ho.st is one of dozens devoted to a universally web accessible desktop, and a close eye on their progress should be kept. On this level, it seems that G.ho.st's most immediate threat is Jooce, which has several similarities and differences to G.ho.st.

Additional Resources:
Interview with the G.ho.st - Zvi Schreiber
Can G.ho.st scare Microsoft?
G.ho.st Crunchbase profile
Mashable review
G.ho.st on TechCrunch
LeWeb recap