Imagine a Google News search engine indexed on your mobile phone that you can access anytime and anywhere, even when out of network range.
This is what Cohesive Data, a start-up formally launched at CommunicAsia on Tuesday, promises.
The Sydney-based firm trawls the net for your favorite news feeds and saves them all in a compressed form on your mobile phone.
Normally having an offline news feed on a handset would require lots of storage space, but Cohesive Data says it can reduce the space required by up to ten times.
Said Raymond Wong, the pioneer researcher at Cohesive Data: “An entire month’s worth of Reuters news feed takes up to 3GB of space. With our software, we can reduce this to about 300MB, and this includes photos.”
The trick lies in Cohesive Data’s data compression algorithm, which allows users to consume content without decompressing the compressed data.
Although the algorithm works on any computing platform, Cohesive Data chose to target the consumer telecom space.
“The mobile space is where bandwidth and storage are the most limited,” explained Wong.