Using Moka5
There are so many uses for this product. Too many of us must travel. Today’s PCs and high bandwidth seems to bring us past promises of pervasive computing. Imagine these scenarios:
Scenario One: Gameful Recreation
You like games. You build an image with your favorite game, similar to the Quake2 image available on the website. After a rushed day, you go to get a latte and some time away from the coffin-sized motel room. You configure the Moka5 image to let you make changes to it, which allows a running score.
Scenario Two: The Traveling Salesperson Show
Many companies create canned presentations for their sales forces. Think of life insurance projections, for example. Updating them in the field can be difficult. They might be governed and reviewed by governmental agencies, so updates are mandatory (and pretty predictable). As a company, you want a consistent presentation, high-tech appearance with caveman-skills ease-of-use, and so on.
With Moka5, you can create an image with the best presentation and tools, both encapsulated in the image. The night before the presentation, the salesperson can update the image while playing the games in Scenario One. Yes, you can work with multiple images at once, depending on the PC’s hardware and memory capacity.
Scenario Three: Company Remote-Access VPN Engine
VPN clients suck. They conflict with the IP stack at times, and they love to conflict with each other. Remote access technical issues suck. Once you use your company’s network for Internet access, in most cases, your browser settings must use the corporate proxy server. The answer? You might issue your employees a portable USB storage with Moka5, which enables the employee to travel with a plug-and-play VPN access. They can use a browser you include, a browser that has your company proxy server configured already.
There are also clear security benefits to this design. All temporary files (such as browser cache, sales documents, and so on) remain on the USB device. They’re never stored on the PC at the Internet café; they stay with the employee. Indeed, configure the image with drive encryption or encrypted folders, and you have an easy-to-use VPN package that won’t cause panic if the left in a taxi.
And if the employee picks up a virus from the host PC, who cares? The next image start will remove the virus as it returns the image to your corporate baseline.
Would a keyboard logger capture keystrokes typed at the physical keyboard while working with a virtual session? Is the network interface sniffable? Not sure on either of these points and would love to hear your opinions or review your traces.
Scenario Four: Customer Presentations
USB storage is cheap and is delivering higher capacities for less money. At the same time, today’s customer wants a high-touch, media-rich sales experience. As an architect, do you leave a major client static models and paper drawings? Or do you give them a VRML representation, something that can be updated in real-time at each viewing, without another visit or without converting a professional into an IT Download Jockey?
Okay, sounds a bit far out? Include some Digital Rights Management (DRM), and now books are multimedia-rich info-repositories that never publish an errata page. Editors don’t exchange static files, with some poor soul being the replication consolidator. They get from the Net what they need at the right time, with the latest content.