Perhaps the most intriguing thing about myApollo (@My_Apollo), a new social media start up from Hamilton, Ontario is not how it manages to share media and data between computers and wireless devices, or how it cherry-picks and improves upon the most innovative features of its soon-to-be rival services, or the unleashed potential for a new and dynamic e-commerce platform, but how it manages to be so many things at once. If, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the medium is the message” than the message myApollo seems to be conveying would be one of seamless customization that adapts to the needs and desires of each user. In short, it’s the power to take a little slice of the Internet and transform it into a personalized intranet, all through features you’ll recognize from other social media services, data-sharing protocols and web applications applied in an innovative new way. The most exciting thing about myApollo is not necessarily how the user interacts with it, but what is going on in the background to make it all possible, and this is why the developers at Arroware Industries believe that their product could be the future of media hosting, data sharing and social discovery.

For storing your documents and media between devices, you can use Dropbox, which stores these files on a remote server and allows you to access them from synced devices. To maintain a network of professional contacts, you might use LinkedIn, which shows your relationship through a “six degrees of separation” model to people you might not know personally. To distribute big packages of data across the internet, you might make use of the Bit torrent protocol. To watch a video, you could use YouTube. To share it, you could do this through Facebook. What if there were a service that allowed a person or business to fulfil all of these functions nearly effortlessly? The myApollo mobile/web application and the protocol that serves at its backbone were designed to make this possible, while surpassing the aforementioned services and offering potentially limitless storage space.

“We’re trying to give real meaning to the term ‘cloud storage’,” says Arroware President Harvey Medcalf, “how can it be in the cloud if it’s really just been taken from where it was created and stored again on a hard drive in a Data Centre? We have a wealth of technology around us, and it is growing every day. That technology forms the real cloud”

I see what he’s getting at, but even for a tech-savvy fellow such as myself, it’s hard to wrap my mind around what this sort of digital infrastructure would look like, let alone how it would actually work. Most people know that data isn’t stored in some nebulous cloud, but requires an actual physical location.

“We all carry around a laptop, a smart phone, with gigabytes of space that many people don’t even use. We offer the potential for limitless syncing and streaming of files by transforming the network of devices into the storage medium itself.”

Here’s how it works: a user wants to access their movie collection located on a home computer from an office computer or a desktop at their cottage. MyApollo allows them to do this. But what if the original files are deleted or inaccessible?

“That’s where the ability to create networks come in,” says Harvey. “Our users can create networks of trusted devices, and the files they create on those network devices are instantly sync’d (in the form of lightweight reconstruction data) to the entire network of devices, the moment they are created.”

“Our servers don’t have to store the data, they can just play matchmaker and coordinate the traffic flow across our network. We’re here to point users in the right direction and facilitate the sharing of the data, not to function as a glorified storage locker.”

In fact, once myApollo has a wide enough user base, the development team believes one day they could allow the network to manage itself, with a persons min-social network of trusted contacts, friends and those who follow them acting as the support.

The result is a form of file sharing that is not only reliable and legitimate in the eyes of the law (because users choose what they keep private, send privately, and share publicly), but unbelievably fast from the perspective of a user. During my brief demonstration, Harvey showed me a Blu-ray quality video streaming over the myApollo network via a 3G antennae, through the studio Wi-Fi and onto his iPhone. The picture and sound were crisp and flawless, but what impressed me the most was how Harvey was able to skip to any point in the movie instantly. No buffer bar, no pausing a moment to synchronize, no lag or finding that the audio and visual were out of time after fast-forwarding. The myApollo protocol is so specific that it allows a user to jump around a high-definition media file, stored remotely across multiple devices on other sides of the continent, in real time, as if you were watching on the TV in your den.

The potential applications for myApollo go far beyond just sharing high-definition media content, however, and open up new vistas for big and small business alike. For artists in the entertainment industry, myApollo will soon offer an e-commerce platform for users to sell content they create direct to other myApollo users, and can do so without the expenses of paying for hard-drive storage and bandwidth transmission of the files being sold. This represents the ultimate work-around of the music industry for up-and-coming performers.

“Everything can be done through their own network on myApollo. Artists can charge what they want to charge, or give their product away for free. It makes no difference to us.” says Harvey.

He went on to explain that myApollo has a plan to monetize its services at no cost to the average user through a combination of ultra relevant targeted advertising, as well as taking a small slice of any transactions made through the application. There are also plans for premium accounts in the works, which would enable additional functionality for small businesses and power-users. The development team also hopes for myApollo, like Facebook before it, to become a platform for developers and programmers who design customized plug-ins, allowing the service to be used in new and exciting ways.

MyApollo is aiming for a “soft launch” in June followed by a more general launch in the fall. The service is being rolled out in stages. Apps for IOS, and Android, in addition to a Windows and MacOS standalone and a web client are ready and waiting, and a continent-wide marketing campaign is in the works. The excitement and energy coming from the creative team and its management is almost infectious. While myApollo’s only web presence to date is vague, the promotional video released last month does the product justice. I truly believe that this service has the potential to change not only how data is stored in the cloud, but how it is transferred between devices and experienced by end-users in a manner as radical as 3D Printing will one day be to physical manufacturing, representing the next step in cloud data transmission and a synergy of social media concepts that facilitate it. For their part, the myApollo’s creators feel that they are living up to the adage of “give a man a fish, feed him for a day…teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”

“We’re not the ones who will determine how myApollo will be used,” says Harvey confidently, “that’s the users, the businesses, the artists, who will do that. We’re laying down the pavement for a new kind of highway, the people who use that highway will get to determine what kind of car they drive on it, where, and how fast.”

Colin Mitchell is a freelance journalist and editorial consultant living in Hamilton, Ontario. He is currently studying as a Paralegal candidate and is extremely excited about the future of myApollo. Follow him on Twitter @colly_mitch

Public Relations Contact

Natalie Polanski

Arroware Industries Inc.

npolanski@arrowareindustries.com