Signpost
The cloud is a (mostly) always available service that can be seen by all devices. Without this, it is difficult for individual devices to find each other. Signpost is building “personal cloud” infrastructure to let your devices all see each other without requiring complex configuration
Peer-to-peer services are notoriously hard to use due to the prevalence of firewalls and NAT middleboxes that prevent all of our devices from seeing each other. Consider how difficult it is to obtain a display from work into your home PC, or vice versa. Many cloud services have sprung up to assist with this, such as GoToMyPC, but they all require you to give access to your home infrastructure to an external third-party. Why is it so difficult for our devices to be networked without these services?
Signpost addresses the problem by probing connectivity and using DNS updates to provide a constant “pointer” to your devices. In addition, it also understands the internal structure of networks (e.g. the home) and can directly redirect devices that are on the same network to each other without going via the Internet.
Stay tuned for an alpha release of this project around Easter 2012.