Posted online: Apr 19th, 2011

A Carndonagh man, now living in Mexico, has been making waves around the digital world after developing a “multi desktop cloud computer” that allows users to access their data from any location.
Dermot Doherty, from Churchtown, is the founder and creator of iSpaces which he described to the Inish Times as “a virtual computer that provides you with multiple desktops to better organise your windows and computing life.”
The product has been receiving very favourable reviews and feedback from experts around the world, something the local man, who is the son of Donal and Anne Doherty, is delighted about.
The former Carndonagh Community School student is married to long-time successful business woman Sunne Justice, the president of iSpaces and a former director of Vogue magazine in New York.
She is also the previous owner of Burts Bees, the largest natural skin care company in the world. They have one daughter, Kyle, who is an actress and works for iSpaces digital marketing.
After Carndonagh Community School, Dermot studied Business and Law at University College, Dublin, followed by a distinction in the Masters degree in Computing and Information Systems at University of Ulster, Magee, Derry.
He then went to work in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom and taught Advanced Web Applications at the University of California, Berkeley.
Now living in Mexico, after his wife was told to move there “in meditiation” while living in Panama, Dermot explained how the idea for iSpaces came about, what brought him to Mexico and his hopes for the product.
He said: “While living down in Panama we were moving around a lot.

iSpaces came about because of my own desire to have all my data available to me, no matter where I was on the planet.
“We call iSpaces a multi-desktop cloud computer, which essentially means that it is a virtual computer that provides you with multiple desktops to better organize your windows and computing life. iSpaces saves your data and the state of your user interface to the cloud (Internet) so that even if your laptop got lost, stolen or damaged, you would not lose any of your work. You could just pick up another laptop and continue working where you left off.
“It has a web-browser and thus takes advantage of the miriad of new web-applications that are being built right now like Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps and Twitter etc.
“iSpaces also has office tools like a word processor and spreadsheets, and a web-based telephone with many more applications in the works.”
He revealed he was “relieved” with the positive reviews and feedback it had been receiving and it had justified all the hard work put into it.
“When you put something out into cyberspace, you don’t know how it will be received. You really put yourself “out there” when you release a digital product, so to have received such great press is gratifying and justifies the two years of working 24 hours a day.
“There is a lot of buzz surrounding “the cloud” right now, so the timing could not be better. The knowledge required to build iSpaces was gained from the Internet itself, so, in a way, iSpaces is giving something back to the Internet.”
Dermot outlined his aspirations for the future of the product, revealing his hope is that it “simplifies people’s digital lives and frees people up from being tethered to their computers.”
“With iSpaces, your data is stored out on the cloud and is instanly accessible to you from any computer. People can now log into their iSpaces desktops from any computer and continue their computing where they left off.”

He concluded: “In the future, I would like to continue building the Irish Dictionary Online which I build between 2001 and 2003, and is the number one resource for English-Irish translations on the Internet.”

If you’d like to check out iSpaces for yourself and sign up for your new, free cloud computer, log on to www.iSpaces.com.