

Space Monkey Dropbox Competitor Wins Launch, Has Already Raised $750K - FluidDjango
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/space-monkey-launch/

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ezl
There seem to be several companies in the "Dropbox competitor" space. A few
have been funded by VC heavy hitters, so clearly there's something to this.
But I don't really get it.

Can someone help me understand this trend? What makes a company feel like they
can win here?

It seems like the benefit these companies are offering largely fall into these
categories:

    
    
        1. peer to peer/distributed storage
        2. "value" more storage at cheaper prices
        3. anonymity / better security 
    

While those all sound good, what I'm trying to figure out is how you make a
business out of this. For the sake of argument, I'm going to take the "ugh,
don't do this" side.

These aren't pain points for Dropbox users. To each point above, in turn:

1\. Most users don't care about how their files are stored, they just want
them to be available. It doesn't matter to them that they're distributed or
that its peer to peer. They just want them to show up whenever they click
their shared folder.

2\. This doesn't seem like a winnable race by selling more storage capacity.
98% of dropbox users don't use the free 2GB. 2% of them happily pay for more
space. Sure "twice the amount for the same price" sounds compelling, but the
only people you are going to reach are either (a) users who are unhappily
paying [small subset, and the friction of switching services is still high],
(b) users who would otherwise go over the free barrier but don't want to pay
[small set, again, very high friction of switching services], and (c) people
who are not Dropbox users and are comparing the Dropbox vs Space
Money/BitCasa/etc side by side and decide to go with the "more space" option
[hard to win this initially because Dropbox has rave reviews and you're
unheard of, you have to be as good as Dropbox at reaching out to everyone, you
probably won't have Dropbox's dead simple UI]

3\. Anonymity / Better security -- Also something that sounds good, but not a
pain point for the majority of internet users. The class of users for which
anonymous file storage or next level security is an issue is (a) very small,
(b) overlaps heavily with the "I'd rather implement this myself" computing
class. This market isn't big. Again, there's a fighting shot when a user with
no cloud storage compares both services side by side, but you still have to
match Dropbox's reach.

Dropbox was selling EASE. They have a really easy process, the product "just
works", they are better at reaching their potential customers (more
practice/lots of raving fans), support more platforms (I've been waiting for
beta access for Linux for one of these for BitCasa for months), and most
importantly: _for the huge majority of internet users the additional benefits
are irrelevant_. Dropbox's win is serving a huge class of users and making
most of them extremely happy. Another note is that the type of users who want
to use these services for "infinite storage" are also very expensive users to
support. If you're building a business you should prefer to serve the largest
base of users who cost you the smallest amount of money but are willing to pay
the same amount. Not, "a highly specialized, expensive user class that is
highly price sensitive".

750k isn't going to be enough to overcome these hurdles. The only rationale I
can come up with for VCs is that they are essentially writing it off as a
lottery ticket in their portfolio.

~~~
bhousel
_> 2\. This doesn't seem like a winnable race by selling more storage
capacity. 98% of dropbox users don't use the free 2GB. _

This is exactly the difference between Dropbox and SpaceMonkey. a few GB vs
1TB. People use Dropbox only for syncing a few files because the space is so
limited. Dropbox is essentially a replacement for your USB flash drive.
SpaceMonkey is positioning themselves as a replacement for your media server.

So I don't think you can't dismiss the storage space point by saying that "98%
of Dropbox users don't use all the space". Because people would use Dropbox
for other things if you could store your entire digital library in there.

Personally I'd love to replace my external TB hard drive that holds all my
music, photos, videos, etc. with a magic box that keeps it all backed up
securely in the cloud.

~~~
ezl
I don't disagree. I've been waiting for Bitcasa, which I intend to use as my
media drive, but its not competing for Dropbox dollars for me. I guess maybe
i'm just saying "Distributed large data storage is not a dropbox competitor"
(the article and other instances I've heard of position these services as
Dropbox competitors)

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mikecane
As much as I love the idea of a turnkey home server, I can't help thinking
that will be Apple's next move. Some of us just won't use iCloud due to legal
issues. If the gov't suddenly has an exigent need for, say, photos taken on a
certain day, time, and place, their snooping won't be limited to plucking
those from iCloud. They'll grab _all_ the photos stored and sort through them
afterwards. And that without legally having to serve search warrants to each
individual user. I don't want my privacy and rights violated like that. So I'd
like "iCloud for the Home," with a Mac mini that is where I put it and where
the gov't needs to serve _me_ personally with a warrant to access the data.

Also, despite this company's assurance about encryption, hell, the way
Anonymous has cracked open things out there, I'm not about to trust anyone
with even fractions of my data, especially since I think many Anonymous
members will scoop this up and get busy hacking it.

[typo edit]

~~~
k-mcgrady
As far as I can tell all data is encrypted before it is sent out on the
network and the decryption key is only stored locally. Nothing is perfectly
secure but SpaceMonkey seems to do a good job.

~~~
spindritf
If the key was only stored locally, you wouldn't be able to restore the data
in case of hardware failure. I would guess that Space Monkey itself has access
to the key and the data.

~~~
dfc
> _"Each file is encrypted with a user’s private key using industry standard
> encryption primitives including AES-128 and RSA-4096 encryption.

> Your data is still accessible even if you are outside of your home and your
> home ISP experiences an outage."_

In light of the RSA reference it seems like they encrypt every thing with a
user pubkey and a company pubkey. Without the company pubkey there would be no
way to access your data when you were not at home.

~~~
spindritf
Maybe they could use a key derived from your password but you're probably
right.

~~~
dfc
I'm not sure I follow?

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trotsky
A great example of how positioning is everything. It's hard to believe that a
startup saying "we lease an inexpensive NAS box running crashplan for $10/mo"
would be winning events or getting press like that.

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dmn001
Given that it's P2P, I'd expect there to be extra bandwidth and storage cost
that is reserved for other users. If it is wholly P2P, then I would assume
that possibly only 400GB (1/2 + redundancy for network failure) of that 1TB
can be used for your data, if they have centralised backup servers then more.
For the former this system would only be reliable if the data is used as a
backup for files that don't change that often, and that other peers have a
fast enough upload rate.

This service does not seem any different from the other handful of P2P backup
solutions [1] except for the included hardware. Maybe the difference is as a
standalone network drive it would more difficult to restrict upload rate or
switch off the program when you don't want to upload data.

Also it is uncertain whether multiple drives are needed for the thing to work
in separate locations, e.g. transferring files from office to home.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_ser...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services)

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naner
Huh. This reminds me of the FreedomBox[1] effort.

I was always under the impression FreedomBox would never catch on because 1)
they don't know how to make the software attractive and enticing and 2)
requiring users to have some specialized hardware acting as a server is a big
hurdle for most people. Also, and perhaps this is the biggest problem, the
alternative centralized and cloud services are good enough for the vast
majority of people.

Space Monkey looks cool but I'm not sure they're cool enough to overcome these
obstacles. Also peer-to-peer provides its own weird drawbacks (similar with
Skype) in that your home network is now being used as someone else's
infrastructure. For a backup service data usage is going to be very high.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox>

~~~
amirmc
I can imagine a world in, say 10yrs time, where parents warn their kids of the
risks of social networking the way I was once warned about 'talking to
strangers' (or this generation about 'strangers on the Internet').

Perhaps in that world, families can simply plug a box in the wall at home and
that's how they deal with email, photos, shared calendars, with different
(private) profiles for each family member. Family members can 'graduate' to
their own private box when they leave home (eg Uni) and simply take it all
with them.

I can also imagine a world where people don't do any of the above. We won't
really know until we get there, but I'm pleased that there people trying
different things to find out.

------
uptown
This sounds exactly like what CrashPlan does, only you don't need to buy a
special drive to use CrashPlan, and if the remote drive you're backing up to
is a friend or family member, you can do it all for free.

While I'm not saying there's not room in the space for multiple companies,
CrashPlan sounds like a more-attractive alternative than being required to buy
a special hard drive or pay a monthly fee to use this type of service.

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StacyC
I am a satisfied Dropbox customer with the 100 GB service at $20/month. Having
my files hosted with this one vendor carries with it enough concern about
security. The prospect of having my files spread across a P2P network landing
who-knows-where is another matter altogether, and not appealing to me in the
least, assurances of encryption notwithstanding. This particular ‘cloud’ model
elicits a _no thanks_ from me at this time.

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mikecane
Sorry for adding another comment here, but I just wondered about Pogo Plug.
Weren't they offering people basically this, but using their own hard drive?

~~~
yabai
While it is slightly different - it is not dramatically different than Pogo
Plug.

All of these similar solution always beg the question, "why does dropbox need
to be changed"? It is simple, and just works. This makes it attractive to the
masses.

While I don't necessarily subscribe to "if it 'aint broke, don't fix it" I
wonder how any company can dethrone dropbox by offering such a similiar
service. It will likely appeal to the tech crowd...but the masses? They will
have to convince the masses that they are missing something using dropbox. Is
this not one of the reasons that sites like Identica will never be as popular
as facebook (maybe Identica has never had such lofty goals).

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verelo
My favorite product, in concept, recently has been the wireless Time Capsule
(however reviews don't look so great on the Apple site)

If this product could be used for my time machine backups (ideally with a
wireless connected to my laptop), and then be sync'd to "the cloud"...i would
pay for it in the blink of an eye.

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thesash
In order to truly compete with Dropbox, they'd have to crack the (extremely
tough) frictionless syncing as elegantly as Dropbox has. Anyone know if that's
something their software does, or are we just using Dropbox Competitor as a
blanket statement for any company offering backup services?

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herval
"we'll totally revolutionize the storage space! Now click here and buy an
exclusive 240 usd device that has no release date, but is very exclusive"

Seriously, am I missing something here?

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adityab
I like how they have an impress.js-enabled site.

~~~
Gmo
Running Firefox 10.0 on Windows XP, I get this message :

"Your browser doesn't support the features required by impress.js, so you are
presented with a simplified version of this presentation."

So I have to say I'm not too impressed by impress.js

~~~
shanemhansen
We had to turn off impress.is for Firefox because their css3 transitions were
so slow.

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yelloweye
How spacemonkey is different from TonidoPlug (www.tonidoplug.com)? They also
provide dropbox like sync that can host yourselves.

