A Startup A Day

For more information about the Y Combinator Challenge, check out this post first 

18. The WebOS. It probably won’t be a literal translation of a client OS shifted to servers. But as applications migrate to servers, it seems possible there will be something that plays a central role like an OS does. We’ve already funded several startups that could be candidates. But this is a big prize, and there will probably be multiple winners.

My Idea – Cloudix

Whew, almost didn’t make this one.  Looooooong day. 

There are a few core pieces to tackle on this one.  A drop.io-dead-simple virtulization service is one.  An extremely basic core OS that is capable of doing nothing but run a browser off SRAM is another (Arrington himself might fund this one).  Some sort of Mesh alternative might be another.  The idea I settled on is nothing too creative, but something that has the potential to be pretty huge for anyone who can overcome the major challenges associated with building out a p2p cloud OS.

The basic idea is a set of services similar to Amazon’s S3, EC2, and SimpleDB.  However, instead of a mega data center controlled by a single corporation, this system would allow individual users or smaller hosting companies to share their spare CPU cycles or hard drive space up into a shared pool of resources. For developers taking advantage of this service, they would interact with an abstraction layer that would be similar to the interaction model of the Amazon Web Services.  The cost to devs would follow the same on-demand pricing model as AWS, and that money would be used to pay the users who are sharing their resources. 

Any thoughts on this one?  I kinda phoned this one in – if anyone wants to detail out any must-have features or point out some glaringly obvious flaw, please go for it in the comments below.