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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | Ramallah & Jerusalem (2006) |
| Headquarters | Ramallah & Jerusalem |
| Key people | Zvi Schreiber, Tareq Maayah, |
| Website | G.ho.st/home |
Introduction
G.ho.st, prounounced ghost, is the trading name and URL of Ghost Inc., a competitor in the newly emerging Virtual Computer space. Ghost is an acronym for Global Hosted Operating SysTem which captures the key idea that the operating system is hosted in a data center and available globaly through any browser, in contrast with traditional operating systems which are installed locally on a specific computer.
The main benefit is complete portability of the operating system - a user can access their desktop, applications and date from any computer with a browser and Internet connection. Another benefit is collaboration - given that everything is online there are increased opportunities for synchronous communication, streaming information, sharing data, applications or even entire desktops.
Because of these benefits, now that broadband Internet connectivity is ubiqutous, some analysts believe that hosted operating systems will gradually take over from local operating system (like Windows, Linux and Mac OS over the coming years.
History
G.ho.st was founded in the summer of 2006 and first went live on November 2, 2006. The company is located in Ramallah, Palestinian Authority, and in Jerusalem and is a collaboration of Palestinians and Israelis.
Product
The Company's only product is a Virtual Computer (VC) running in the browser. It is free to the end user.
Key current features include:
- Hosted desktop
- Start menu
- Task bar
- Quick launch menu
- Widgets
- Services (which run in Windows)
- Settings
- Persistence for the desktop and the Services and Widgets on it
Promised roadmap features include:
- Virtual file system
- Object sharing
Technology
G.ho.st uses Java and the Spring Framework on the server side and OpenLaszlo compiled into Flash (and in the future DHTML) on the browser (client side).