Interview with Jennifer Castillo on Cognitier HomeWeb Service

In the first part of this series, I examined Cognitier HomeWeb service in detail. In an exclusive interview to Learnxpress, Jennifer Castillo, Chief Executive Officer, Cognitier shared more information about the recently launched HomeWeb service.

HomeWeb Monitoring Requests

Learnxpress:  Who is the target audience for the HomeWeb service?

There’s a wide range of target users.  Home users will enjoy the speed and simplicity of accessing files.  Anyone who has a cloud storage account will also have use for a HomeWeb account.  Business users will take advantage of the ability to run ad hoc queries against their fleet of laptops in the field.  Developers will use the ability to write their own commands to extend the service.

Learnxpress: What are you doing to secure participating computers against hackers?

Accepting commands from the internet is an obvious security concern, and that’s why security was the first consideration when we designed and built every aspect of the service. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, separate authentication information is required to access the personal web site and the participating computer, and every action is audited. Once a user is authenticated, the range of commands they can send to the target computer is strictly limited.

Learnxpress: Why use Microsoft Jscript.NET for defining new commands?

We wanted to give non-developers a simple scripting option for creating custom commands. The code ultimately gets compiled to a .NET assembly.  Professional developers are free to write their commands in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio. Once the new commands are written and plugged into the HomeWeb software, developers can actually re-use these commands from other .NET applications – as well as Java and COM-based applications.

Learnxpress:  Can you share with us the future roadmap for Cognitier?

We’ve put together a solid platform for delivering commands to the network of subscribed computers. What we’d like to do now is to attract the development community to write great applications on top of this platform. There’s a tremendous amount of developer talent to be taken advantage of now that we’ve cleared this networking hurdle. In particular, we’d like to get involved in the area of home automation.

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