Omnipresence, from Omni Group, is potentially a very good answer to the need for a Personal Cloud system. I don’t see the term Personal Cloud being hijacked by anybody yet, as far as I can tell, so I am laying claim on it.
The ability to synchronise data across all your devices is a clear problem these days. Omnipresence is addressing the issue from the perspective of Omni Group’s users, but you’d ideally want it for every kind of file. Conceptually it’s a sort or private cloud solution, but I’d rather avoid that term here to make my point independently of vendor terminologies.
The fact that you can roll your own web service is a net benefit for the user, compared to the existing solutions from Dropbox and others. Apple’s iCloud hasn’t yet solved this problem in the way that I’d want it (see my post that mentions this subject, a while back), the big players (Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Amazon) would tie you into their own infrastructure. Aside from the catchy and quite spot-on name, Omnipresence goes in the direction that power users would appreciate more.
One potential drawback is that you’d have to raise your game in terms of Internet security. Deploying a web service (WebDav based) without hardening it is potentially disastrous, this should be done by security conscious people.
It’s too early to tell how this is going to fare, but I like the approach.
Here is a link to the original announcement article: OmniPresence document syncing