The explosion of data generated by location-based and real-time applications has created new problems for application developers. Data has been fragmented in silos, stored and duplicated across multiple locations, which is difficult to access, ineffective and expensive. There is a large opportunity to harness this distributed data by building a common storage platform with shared access and costs. In this session, Bret Piatt will lay out a vision of common storage platform, including how the cloud, specifically an open cloud framework, is the best place to bring this data together. He will also discuss the value and risk to application developers, real-world use cases and even societal implications on how we are able to gather, process and access data across multiple locations in real-time.