Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Event: Linksys By Cisco Media Hub

February 6, 2009 – 2:26 am | by Daryl Tay

Earlier tonight, about ten bloggers were invited to a Linksys event at the Hyatt to check out their newest product, the Media Hub. At first glance, the Media Hub sounds like a normal external hard drive, but it does have certain differences. For one, users can access items stored on the Media Hub remotely anywhere in the world and can be synced up with all your devices to keep files and media in one centralised space.

The Review
As an average home user, I was a little skeptical of the need to buy a relatively expensive external hard drive just to be able to access it remotely. I asked why I’d pay money, when Dropbox and Hordit are free, and got the relatively satisfying answer that not everyone knows how to sync their items up in the “cloud”, and it can be more intuitive to have everything on one single drive. Given the recent issues with helping my mum get all her data into one external hard disk, I can certainly see how this is an advantage.

Personally, between my family of four at home, we easily have 10 or more drives that each contain pictures and videos, and it would be ideal to be able to sync all our drives centrally, and then be able to access that at any time.

Linksys Media Hub Demonstration (5th Feb 2009) from Daryl Tay on Vimeo.

The Communications Challenge
The challenge for Linksys is to convince the average, non-tech savvy consumer, that this is not an overpriced external hard drive, and that it can make data storage and portability more intuitive than before. I could certainly see the benefit of such a system when I have a spokesperson explaining it to me and demonstrating the capabilities face to face, but for the average consumer passing it by on a shelf, $499 for 500GB can seem steep, especially since you can get 1.5TB for $300+ these days.

While the positioning seems to be geared to the normal consumer, I think there’s potential in the small business market too. I’m part of a media club in school dealing with TV and radio, and the capability to sync all our databases and then access them remotely, securely and wirelessly would be a huge plus. I suspect there are many other student clubs and small business that would similarly benefit.

Social Media Communications
There were a few things I really liked about the approach to this event.

Firstly, the bloggers had their own session, and mainstream media had their own session in another part of the day. This meant we could ask questions that were more important to our personal niches, instead of catering to the cookie cutter mass media questions.

Secondly, the press release had links to Facebook fan pages (Digital Cribs) as well as their forum page and even the Media Hub video on YouTube.

[edit: WordPress is giving me issues while I'm trying to embed the video, so check it out here]

Finally, the press release had suggested tags for us bloggers at the bottom and a cd with the hi-res product pictures, which I found to be very useful to me. As a result I have the tags, the pictures and the video used one way or another in this blog entry.

I think it would be a fair assessment to say the Media Hub is a pretty good effort for a version 1.0 launch. There are features that I personally will be looking forward to like multi-user access (for club usage) and a HDMI cable for direct hookup to my TV.

Note: There is seemingly a subscription required for the remote access. The fee is not announced at the time of this blog post.

Tags: cisco, cloud, consumer, digital media, digital storage, dropbox, hard drive storage, hdmi, hordit, linksys by cisco, media hub, NAS, network attached storage, positioning, remote access, small business, storage, sync, video