StarOffice creator Marco Boerries is to unveil his new venture, a device- and OS-agnostic system intended to allow wide ranges of appliances to communicate with each other, and across the Internet. Boerries company VerdiSoft, which he founded last year after leaving Sun, believes that for at least the remainder of this decade most people in the developed world will be using more than two non-PC appliances connected to the Internet every day. Hence CrossPoint Server.
If VerdiSoft is right, then it"s likely to be substantially more than two. The count will include mobile phones, PDAs, cars (a complicated and expensive Internet appliance, but one nevertheless), set-top boxes, games consoles and of course those net-enabled fridges and microwaves. As VerdiSoft says, "there will be a huge demand to keep all the applications executed on such devices and the associated preferences up to date to reflect the changing requisites and behaviours of every human being."
CrossPoint is intended as an infrastructure sold to service providers, who will in turn use it to offer subscription services to their users. These service will be available on all of the devices the user has, and they"ll be kept in sync, and up to date. You could maybe think of it as what mobile phones did next. The initial platform is Unix, Solaris specifically (so no hard feeling there then, Marco?) but will be portable to to other carrier-grade hardware, which usually is Unix anyway.