A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the @pogoplug device I had been sent by the kind folks over at Cloudengines to take over to SXSWinteractive for a bit of a road test. It was a simple install and if you would like to see what I thought when I set it up in the office, the post can be found here...

All was well with the office install and I duly squeezed it into the geekbag, along with a million camera bits, batteries, tapes and I must say very few clothes...  I ran out of space for clothes and toiletries, just had to resign myself to having to buy those things as soon as I arrived in Texas.

The plan was to plug it in, in the hotel room, but unfortunately ( as cool as I thought the Motel 6 Austin was, and it was...) there was no hardline access to the net in the rooms, only WiFi.

Fortunately the lovely guys at Heart of England who we were there filming for managed to get us a hardline run to the exhibition stand in the SXSW conference hall. Pogoplug popped in and ready for action.

It very quickly became an invaluable tool for sharing things between the office and the convention. One of the things it helped get over the most was the "time difference". With us being able to pop our memory sicks or usb drive in at the end of our working day and leaving it plugged in overnight ( overnight for us, but morning office hours back home) it meant that Adam and Julia had full access to the pictures, audio and video we had gathered during our working day at their convenience, rather than us having to try and arrange a time that we could be online at the same time to swap the days media.

Installing the pogoplug iPhone app allowed me to have instant access to the files on the drive as well so I was able to pull up any file to show the delegates or the Heart of England team without having to go back to the stand to retrieve them.

As I said in the previous post the web interface is somewhat clunky once you get a lot of files on the harddrive or stick, having to search through pages of material to find the right bits. Until an improved interface is launched it just means putting things in folders makes for easier navigation.

All in all the pogoplug has quickly become an invaluable part of our teams working practice. In the next few weeks we will be moving all the files usually kept on our dropbox and moving them onto our pogoplug drive. Once the swapover is complete we'll load the mac desktop app that allows you to mount your device as a "drive" on your desltop. More about that later...