When it emerged back in June that for­mer Apple exec­u­tive Tim Buch­er was assem­bling a killer team of tech wiz­ards for his new Sil­i­con Val­ley start­up Black Pearl Sys­tems, any savvy prod­uct man­ag­er could tell you that some­thing excit­ing was in the off­ing. But what, exact­ly, that some­thing was remained a mys­tery – until now.

Solv­ing unsolved problems

Black pearl Sys­tems has just come out of stealth with a new name – Lyve Minds – and a new prod­uct, Lyve­Home, which helps users access and back up their per­son­al videos and pho­tos whether they’re at home on their desk­tops or on the hoof on their smart­phones. Ini­tial­ly, Buch­er and his team were, well, stealthy about what they were devel­op­ing, but GigOM jour­nal­ist Janko Roettgers helped sate the curios­i­ty of intrigued prod­uct man­agers by work­ing out that the new firm was build­ing mobile-media shar­ing tech­nol­o­gy for the Android OS and that its like­ly name would be Lyve.

Buch­er has now revealed that Lyve Minds aims to solve a hith­er­to unsolved prob­lem: how to let users store and share as many videos and movies as they like on their mobile devices. Only a small num­ber of peo­ple back up their per­son­al media to the cloud, not least because it tends to get painful­ly expen­sive (and tedious­ly slow) when peo­ple want to store a col­lec­tion of real­ly big pho­tos and HD videos.

The cloud in your liv­ing room

So here’s the bit that intre­pid prod­uct man­agers will want to know about: Lyve Minds solves the prob­lem by recre­at­ing the cloud in people’s liv­ing rooms. Its apps enable smart­phones, tablets and com­put­ers to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er, access­ing any of the per­son­al media on each one. Upon its launch in spring 2014, the prod­uct will sup­port not only Android but iOS, Win­dows and Mac OS.

A core com­po­nent is the Lyve­Home device which offers enough stor­age to let users store lit­er­al­ly mil­lions of pho­tos. But it’s not real­ly accu­rate to describe it as a net­work-attached stor­age dri­ve or a media shar­ing hub. It’s not at the heart of the net­work; instead, it’s sim­ply an addi­tion to dis­trib­uted archi­tec­ture whose job it is to copy and repli­cate pho­tos and videos across dif­fer­ent devices.

The prod­uct will be on dis­play in Jan­u­ary at the Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show.