How Live Mesh saved the day at Le Web

I’m back from Europe and Le Web in Paris!  It was an interesting conference that had it’s fair share of problems, from heating to lack of internet connectivity.  It’s been well documented how many of the exhibitors and startups were unable to demonstrate their web applications and Europe’s premier web conference and whilst somewhat ironic leads me to how for the startup Colaab, Live Mesh saved the day.

You see they developed their rather nifty collaboration application and deployed it as a Live Mesh app which allowed not only easy sign on and access user’s Live profile, Live Messenger buddy list, but also more importantly at Le Web, an offline Web app. Yes that’s right a web app that doesn’t need connectivity to the internet. 

Launched direct from the desktop Colaab was happily running away despite the internet connectivity problems! Live Mesh powered the offline instance and storage for the app and then – when the internet did come back on – synchronization (the really hard stuff to code yourself) so all data goes back up to the cloud so that any changes made in the offline state were seen online.

And how much development effort did the offline scenario cost Colaab? Absolutely nothing, they developed once for the Web, and got the Live Desktop and offline desktop versions for free.  Nice!

Danny Thorpe – the “Architect of Disruption” is giving a talk on Mesh enabled Web Apps on Wednesday at the Bay.net user group meeting – should be good.  Fortunately, he’ll be landing his app in Live Mesh so he won’t have to worry about internet connectivity at his venue either.

I’m thinking about making the trip down – hopefully see you in San Fran on Wednesday night.