

HN: Feedback on my laptop recovery service - sigfrid
http://www.melezi.com/
Think "lojack for laptops." Sign up, download/install client, and if you mark it as stolen you can recover files, delete files, see the IP, take pics, etc.
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huhtenberg
You have zero implementation details on the website, so based on this fact
alone I am going to assume that client-side beacon is something simple, like a
system service or daemon running under the OS control.

If that's true, then it is quite lame compared, for example, to
<http://absolute.com/products-computrace-products.asp>. These guys went into a
trouble of standardizing _boot-level_ beacons, entering partership agreements
with HD manufacturers, etc. and that's why their beacons survive all but the
low-level HD formatting.

That's pretty much what you have to do for the tracking service to have any
value. If the beacon can be wiped out with a simple OS reinstall, your phone-
home-after-the-incident rate is going to be close to zero.

In other words, there is very sophisticated and mature competition, and your
service doesn't appear to live up to it at the moment. That's assuming I am
right about the implementation approach.

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tstegart
It looks good. I would charge for it though. It almost seems strange/shady if
you don't charge for it, especially if the recovery data is hosted by you. I
suggest not using what a lot of other companies use, which is charging per
month. For some reason, I really hate that. Maybe per year, like $20. You
should do some sleuthing, see what people might pay. (I understand if you're
not charging because you want people to check it out).

Also, on the marketing side, I want to know more about how it works and what
it does. Some people might not be as literate. I assume it doesn't "phone
home" if the thief never turns it on or connects it to the internet, or
immediately formats the drive. You should explain that somewhere. Also, what
files can you retrieve and where? If the thief is using it at the time you're
trying to retrieve files, does the thief have any indication something is
happening? You don't need all this on the home page, but maybe under a "learn
more" button.

Using the term beacon implies that you can tell your customer where their
laptop is located (i.e. a physical address). Also, what help would you give to
someone once they get the IP address. What do I do once I know the thief's IP
address? Honestly, what would you do?

~~~
sigfrid
Thanks much for the input.

I was planning on charging like $15 a year or so to recoup server costs once
I'm sure it works and such. If a free product doesn't work people get mad, but
if a pay product has problems they get really mad and so does their credit
card provider.

About the IP address, I would probably find out the ISP and then email the
ISP. Realistically, I think that's the best you can do in many cases. The
police have better things to do than track down the odd stolen laptop.

~~~
jonknee
> About the IP address, I would probably find out the ISP and then email the
> ISP. Realistically, I think that's the best you can do in many cases. The
> police have better things to do than track down the odd stolen laptop.

You don't seem fairly motivated to recover the laptop (nor even have a real
plan), that's not a good quality for such a service. There are plenty of other
competitors in the space and they are very enthusiastic about working with the
police. A few great success stories are priceless in marketing value.

In general, you should be very very specific about what your software does and
what you'll be able to do in case of a reported stolen laptop. It's
essentially spyware, so you need to be very up front.

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gstar
Also have a look at Adeona (<http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/>)

Its a similar free product that goes to great lengths to anonymise the
tracking data from the laptop and de-centralise the storage - mostly by
leveraging OpenDHT (<http://www.opendht.org/>)

I also agree with the other commenters about people being wary of centralised
control, and the security risks that a compromise of your server could
potentially cause (downloading of arbitrary files on all your users laptops by
an attacker!)

Your added value here is file recovery, which I haven't really seen done
before - perhaps you could expand the Adeona concept with that - and while
you're at it wrap Adeona with something more friendly to install and
understand.

huhtenberg has a valid point with the beacon survival, but callings yours
'quite lame' was a bit harsh!

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dandelany
A small design annoyance: the icons on the left are transparent GIF's, and
they're resized in the browser using the image tags.

Resize the images themselves so that they are the same size as they appear on
the page, this will get rid of the jaggedy non-anti-aliased resized look.
Also, make them JPGs with the blue background color. If you absolutely must
make them transparent GIFs, use Photoshop to set the matte background to the
blue color so they don't have a white halo around them. This is a small thing,
but it'll go a long way towards looking professional, I promise.

