InfoEther announces indi Beta

Rich Kilmer has just “blogged”:http://richkilmer.blogs.com/ether/2006/02/getindibaby.html about a limited, invitation-only Beta program for something called “indi“:http://www.getindi.com. It’s still a little unclear exactly what all indi encompasses, but what I can gather so far is that:

• One of the fundamental goals is to “give you your digital independence by freeing you from specific computers, operating systems and applications.”
• The software is small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive, so that you can take it with you and use on any computer. No software is installed on the host computer that your thumb drive happens to be plugged into.
• Your personal data is stored with the software (i.e. on the thumb drive) and not on InfoEther’s (or anyone else’s) remote server. Rich’s post suggests that it’s a response (at least in part) to Google’s expanding ownership and control of our online lives.
• You can synchronize personal data (such as appointments in iCal, or Address Book contacts) between indi and the native applications on your computer.
• The software is based on a lot of the technologies that InfoEther has supported for the last few years, including “Ruby”:http://www.ruby-lang.org/, Adode’s (formerly Macromedia’s) Flash and Jabber.

There’s also some talk about using indi for shopping and playing games, but that’s not of immediate interest to me. One of the reasons that I carry around a “handheld computer”:http://www.palm.com/us/products/handhelds/tx/ is this desire for “digital independence” that indi seems to promise, so I’ve added myself to the waiting list to join the Beta program.