The Death Rattle For Blackberry: Once Again, Markets Change Very Quickly

from the from-dominant-to-dead-in... dept

There's plenty of attention going to the news of Blackberry's awful financial performance and massive layoffs, with many people declaring the company at death's door (meaning it's likely someone will buy off the pieces sometime soonish). Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about the similar effective death of Nokia, highlighting just how much the mobile ecosystem had changed in just a few years. We showed the following chart from Asymco to make the point about just how much the market had changed, and how far Nokia had fallen in just a few years:

That same chart, obviously, applies to RIM as well. Though since RIM (which became Blackberry) had a rather different business model, it's not as noticeable when you're just looking at profit share, which that chart shows. Instead, the Washington Post shows an even more telling image, just looking at mobile OS marketshare:

The shorthand: markets change. Often in big, surprising ways. A few years back, if you looked at corporate America, it would be almost unfathomable that anyone would unseat RIM/Blackberry. It was everywhere in the corporate market. You could talk to people who referred generically to all mobile phone devices at "Blackberries." That's how ubiquitous the brand had become.

But, then, a variety of things changed. It wasn't because of any anti-trust efforts. It was because of basic competition, which resulted in a somewhat surprising change in how things worked. First, the iPhone came on the scene, and that was a really compelling device. No, it didn't have the nice keyboard, or certain features that Blackberry users loved (liked BBM), but it was really great in so many ways... so people started to want to just use that for both personal and work purposes.

And then the magic shift. As Tim Lee notes, it was the bottom up demand from users in the workplace that completely changed the market.

But the pace of innovation in the consumer smartphone market was so rapid that employees became dissatisfied with their BlackBerrys. And eventually, the advantages of iOS and Android devices became so obvious that corporate IT departments were forced to capitulate. They began supporting iPhones and Android devices even though doing so was less convenient.

BlackBerry eventually realized that it would need to compete effectively in the consumer market if it wanted to survive. But building consumer-friendly mobile devices wasn't its engineers' strong suit. And by the time BlackBerry released a modern touchscreen phone in 2010, three years after the iPhone came on the market, it had a huge deficit to make up.

Folks who study the Innovator's Dilemma will likely recognize this as a classic case of that in action. You have a new upstart, that gets mocked and pooh poohed by the existing players. In the business world, very few people took the iPhone (or Android) seriously. After all, RIM totally dominated the market, and it was entirely top-down, with companies purchasing huge contracts. Plus, the Blackberry had so many features really focused on the business users that the iPhone felt like "a toy."

But that really is the secret to tremendously disruptive innovation. The first versions are almost always mocked as "toys." It leads the dominant player to ignore them or mock them. And then the bottom up tidal wave takes them by complete surprise. The "toys" get better at business tasks, and even if they're not as good as the Blackberry, they're good enough for most business use cases, and the pressure mounts to ignore the top down process and have companies support iPhones and Android phones. And, by the time Blackberry tries to catch up, they're way, way behind. It's the same story of disruptive innovation that has happened time and time again.

This pattern is almost undeniable. In retrospect it always looks obvious, but companies almost always miss this. They tend to think -- incorrectly -- that they can "spot" the disruptive innovations ahead of time. Or, barring that, they believe they have such a dominant position that if something appears to be disruptive, they can just copy it and "catch up" leveraging their position in the market to do so. But that's rarely the case. Almost every time, by the time they realize what's going on, it's way too late. When they finally get to the market, they're seen as also-rans, way behind the times. They're often going after a moving target. The successful early innovators have already adapted and changed and innovated some more, while the big entrants are still trying to compete with last year's model.

It's happened before and it'll happen again. It's the nature of innovation. It has nothing to do with patents (RIM's got tons of those and has used them aggressively at times -- look where that got them). It has nothing to do with antitrust issues. It has everything to do with the nature of innovation and competition.

Filed Under: antitrust, bottom up, innovator's dilemma, markets, patents, smartphones
Companies: blackberry, rim

Awesome Stuff: Reclaiming Classic Culture

from the it's-about-time dept

For years, we've talked about the importance of not letting historical cultural artifacts die out. Unfortunately, today's copyright law has a way of making sure that certain classic cultural works are locked up and hidden away (which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what copyright is supposed to do). Similarly, in some cases mere adherence to tradition and pretension is locking up culture as well. So, for this week's awesome stuff post, we've got three projects about reclaiming culture.

• First up, we've got the latest Kickstarter project from the folks at Musopen, Set Chopin Free. If you've been following this space for a while, you've probably heard of Musopen, whom we've covered before. The organization actually was a super early adopter of Kickstarter, focusing on raising money to record incredibly excellent recordings of public domain music, and then setting the recordings free as well (quick copyright lesson for those unfamiliar: anyone can record/play public domain compositions without licenses, but there's a separate copyright on any sound recordings that come out of it -- so most recordings of public domain music are still under copyright for the recording, if not the composition). After an early false start, Musopen had one of the first high profile Kickstarter successes, and now they're back for more. From the title, you can probably tell that the goal is to record all of the works of Chopin and release them for free. They went with a fairly ambitious goal of $75,000 to do this, which was even more than Musopen raised last time, though that was in the early days of Kickstarter, before so many people were used to it. The campaign is almost there with still over a month to go, so they'll end up surpassing the goal by quite a lot by the time this is done.
• Here's a somewhat different one, where two guys in Italy are trying to buy up two rare mystery novels by J.S. Fletcher, with the plan to scan, ocr, correct, proofread and then release to the world the works so other scan read them. Of course, those works, "The Borgia Cabinet" from 1930 and "The Matheson Formula" from 1929 are not actually in the public domain in the US, though they are in much of the rest of the world.
  
  Unfortunately, it appears that this campaign hasn't been able to get any attention at all, as it's raised a grand total of nothing (with a goal of $600). It doesn't look like the team behind this has really done much at all to promote it -- there's no video with the campaign (generally considered a necessity) and even the project description is very short and without details. It's too bad, because you'd think with a little imagination, they could convince people to support the project. Also, they don't offer anything for most of the tiers -- just a thank you. Part of what tends to make crowdfunding campaigns work, even when people are convinced to support a larger ideal, is that they get some unique benefit for doing so.
• Tragically, those appear to be the only projects on either Kickstarter or IndieGoGo (or a few other smaller crowdfunding platforms I checked out -- though there may be some elsewhere) that were attempting to make the public domain more accessible directly. However, for the third project, I thought this fit into the spirit of the above projects. It's a documentary called What Would Beethoven Do?, that takes a look how orchestras and classical music arts organizations, that have struggled to remain relevant (especially with younger audiences) are starting to learn how get beyond the stuffy reputation of classical music, and embrace new technologies, new media to become relevant again. I highly recommend the pitch video, which is quite well done: On the funding side, unfortunately it looks like this one is lagging a bit. The filmmakers are looking for $22,000, but they've raised less than 20% of that with about two weeks to go. It'll be a challenge to make up that difference. I was a bit surprised to see that the cheapest level to actually get a digital download of the film starts at $50 -- which seems a bit on the steep side. I wonder if they would have been able to grab more backers with a more reasonable price point.

Either way, it's good to see people looking to make important cultural artifacts relevant and accessible again. It's too bad we don't actually see more of those kinds of projects these days.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, chopin, classical music, copyright, culture, public domain

Twitter IPO Reminds Us That What Starts Out As Trivial And Pointless Can Turn Into Something Amazing

from the that's-how-innovation-works dept

I'd been meaning to write something on this topic for a while, but with the announcement of the Twitter IPO, and Mathew Ingram's reminder of how it started as a "harmless distraction" before turning into something much, much bigger, it's reminded me once again to talk about why the constant fretting about entrepreneurs doing trivial things is a pointless pastime. First, as Ingram noted, the early days of Twitter had the site being frequently dismissed and mocked as nothing important.

By now, most of us have grown accustomed to thinking of Twitter as a key player in the world of real-time information, a crucial tool for politicians, celebrities and dissidents alike — and even armies — to get their message across. But when Om first got a look at what was then called Twttr in 2006, he thought it was a waste of time, and he wasn’t alone. That perception dogged the company for years, as people made cracks about how “no one wants to know what I had for lunch.”

However, as Chris Dixon pointed out a few years ago, big innovations often start out looking like a "toy." And Twitter is no different. While there are some, of course, who still mock it, many have realized that it has become an amazingly powerful tool. It's a method of real-time communication, conversation, reporting and broadcasting that has tremendous power. It's been useful in all sorts of unexpected ways.

And yet... as always, we still have people who like to mock new innovations for being trivial or unimportant, in part because they often lack the vision to see what it might become. Just a few months ago, there was a widely publicized and discussed article in the New Yorker by George Packer, which mocked the innovative spirit of Silicon Valley by complaining that so many of the entrepreneurs appeared to be working on trivial ideas that were really just toys for young rich kids. The key part that got discussed over and over again was this:

A favorite word in tech circles is “frictionless.” It captures the pleasures of an app so beautifully designed that using it is intuitive, and it evokes a fantasy in which all inefficiencies, annoyances, and grievances have been smoothed out of existence—that is, an apolitical world. Dave Morin, who worked at Apple and Facebook, is the founder of a company called Path—a social network limited to one’s fifty closest friends. In his office, which has a panoramic view of south San Francisco, he said that one of his company’s goals is to make technology increasingly seamless with real life. He described San Francisco as a place where people already live in the future. They can hang out with their friends even when they’re alone. They inhabit a “sharing economy”: they can book a weeklong stay in a cool apartment through Airbnb, which has disrupted the hotel industry, or hire a luxury car anywhere in the city through the mobile app Uber, which has disrupted the taxi industry. “San Francisco is a place where we can go downstairs and get in an Uber and go to dinner at a place that I got a restaurant reservation for halfway there,” Morin said. “And, if not, we could go to my place, and on the way there I could order takeout food from my favorite restaurant on Postmates, and a bike messenger will go and pick it up for me. We’ll watch it happen on the phone. These things are crazy ideas.”

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.

Imagine if this had been written just five or six years ago, when Twitter was first catching on, and you could bet that the same paragraph would include something about the pointlessness of updating your friends about what you're eating on Twitter. It's easy to dismiss these things when they're young, because it's impossible to see what they've become. Today, however, Twitter is used by world leaders, activists, celebrities, families, religious leaders, communities, friends and all sorts of other people to communicate, to connect, to empower and to do amazing things. That was more or less impossible to predict early on because it was a a toy -- a trivial thing designed to be fun for a group of twenty-somethings. But scratching an itch for that group can create something with the power to change the course of human history, and that's kind of amazing.

Even with the things that Packer more or less mocks in that section, he seems to miss how they can have a wider impact. For example, he seems to mock AirBnB and Uber for being useful for well-off 20-somethings, but seems to be ignoring the flipside of that equation. Those two companies are also great examples of new services that have enabled many people to build new careers or just earn some extra cash in ways that they couldn't have not so long ago, such as by renting out a room or your apartment. I've met a bunch of folks recently who have talked about how using AirBnB to make some extra cash has been empowering.

Innovation can be a funny thing, and the truly breakthrough innovations are almost all mocked in their early days, in part because of the basic innovator's dilemma, in that the new thing isn't "as good" as the old thing, but even going beyond that, because sometimes we just don't know how people will use something, and how it might empower something new and amazing. This is why it's important to have a structure and society that lets innovative experiments flourish. Too often, innovation policy focuses on trying to get a "certain type" of company to get started. We see this all the time where a government decides it's going to invest in a particular area, rather than figuring out a way to encourage experimentation to see what comes out of it.

Twitter has become something powerful and amazing because, over time, more and more people realized how useful and powerful a tool it was -- something that very few of us (myself included) realized at the beginning. So, the next time you want to mock an innovation for being trivial, remember what people said about Twitter in the early days.

Filed Under: innovation, ipo, trivial
Companies: twitter

Awesome Stuff: More Crowdfunding Attempts At Private And Secure Communications

from the creating-a-market dept

Back in July, we did one of our weekly awesome stuff crowdfunding posts about a variety of new crowdfunding projects designed to keep communications and activites online private and away from snooping governments. That was only a month into the NSA revelations. Last month, we wrote about a few more projects that would help people keep their data private, including the mail service Mailpile, who was back in the news this week. We've suggested that all these revelations would lead a number of individuals and companies to look to build more secure and private systems, so we're back this week with two more crowdfunding projects that put security and privacy at the top of their lists.

• First up, we've got Trsst, which is more or less a distributed secure RSS-based platform that can be used to effectively create Twitter/Tumblr/blog-like features for public posting, but which also allows encrypted posting via public key encryption. There's an uphill battle to get adoption, as with a variety of other similar attempts (something the team here acknowledges), but they put forth a pretty compelling case why they can actually deliver something useful, and why it also doesn't depend quite as much on getting tons of people to adopt it to make it useful (thanks to RSS). They're about 2/3 of the way to their goal with a week to go, so check it out.
• Next up is Mailelf, who, like MailPile, are trying to build a much easier to use encrypted email system. There are a few things in the description that leave me scratching my head about what exactly it is they're building, and frankly, the fact that it's not entirely clear is a bit of a strike against the whole system. Is it local client software? Is it more like Mailvelope? Unclear. But it's still good to see more attempts at making encrypted email much more user-friendly. While Mailpile had a bunch of notable names behind it, and got a lot of support pretty quickly, it seems that Mailelf hasn't been able to attract the same level of attention, and it only has a tiny part of the funding it's seeking at this point, with three weeks to go. It seems highly unlikely that it will make its goal, but perhaps they'll try again with a clearer explanation of what they're actually building, and with a bit more marketing effort.

It's definitely good to see more projects with this sort of focus, though it feels like we need a few more big projects, perhaps from larger companies that are much more focused on true security combined with ease of use before it really takes off.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, email, encryption, privacy, rss, security

Microsoft Buying Nokia Reminds Us That Dominant Tech Companies Can Disappear Quickly

from the bye-bye dept

So, yes, everyone in the tech world is talking about Microsoft finally buying up the key parts of Nokia for $7+ billion a couple years after Nokia basically wed itself to Microsoft anyway. There's all sorts of good analysis about why Microsoft is doing this and plenty of snark as well about two also-ran companies trying to come together to revitalize damaged brands (including some folks pointing back to the infamous "two turkeys do not make an eagle" quote once uttered by a Nokia exec).

But here's the thing that I find most fascinating about this: it's a reminder of just how quickly and completely a "dominant" tech firm can almost disappear off the face of the earth. Go back to 2007 (also known as The Time Before The iPhone) and Nokia absolutely and totally dominated the mobile phone market. In fact, I remember making a joke around 2005 or so mocking another company for suggesting that it could pass Nokia in the market (I can't remember which company, but it may have been Samsung) and a telco analyst much wiser than myself scolded me, reminding me how quickly the market can change -- and he was totally correct. Two quick images tell the story. The first, put together by the Guardian using Gartner data, shows how Nokia (via Symbian) basically owned the smartphone market for quite some time. And then its lead disappeared: Or, if you look at it from a profit share realm by vendor, as Asymco did last year, you get an even more dramatic story, where Nokia's ability to profit from mobile phones went away. Even its overall lead in selling all kinds of phones (going beyond the smartphones and into cheaper phones around the globe, a market that it absolutely dominated) was lost a bit ago to Samsung. Just a few weeks ago, Mobile Unlocked put together an astounding interactive chart showing overall mobile phone sales quarter by quarter going way back. This static image below doesn't do it justice. Check out the full thing: No matter how you slice the data, it's undeniable that Nokia absolutely and totally dominated the market. Plenty of people (as noted, myself included) thought that lead was more or less insurmountable. While many may argue otherwise today, at the time it was very, very difficult (unless you were that prescient analyst I talked to) to envision a world in which there was such a major market shift that would take Nokia off its game so totally. And then, along came the iPhone. And Android. And the world changed. And Nokia clearly wasn't ready for it, didn't recognize where the world was heading and was unable to respond in a timely fashion. It tried to shift much later in the game, but it was way, way, way too late.

In fact, it could be argued that its own success was part of the problem. Nokia was heavily invested in Symbian and had committed to following that path. This is actually something that's not uncommon with dominant players. In some ways, they're a victim of being there first. When a disruptive innovation comes along, they can't shift on a dime, and the innovations effectively leapfrog right over them. Yes, you can ride out cash cows for a long time -- and Nokia has done so (as, it appears, has Microsoft...) but eventually the music stops.

I bring this up because we seem to go through this quite often -- with people fretting about certain "dominant" tech firms, and how something has to be done to stop them or they'll have too much power. But, as we see time and time again, it often seems that "something" is done in the form of regular competition and innovation from others, who can come out of nowhere and completely take down a giant in a very, very short period of time.

Filed Under: competition, disruptive innovation, dominant firms, innovation, mobile phones
Companies: microsoft, nokia

Awesome Stuff: Tools For Animation

from the animate-stuff dept

For this week's awesome stuff post, we're keeping it simple with just two items, both of which are free and open source projects having to do with animation.

• First up is Tupi: 2D Animation Software for Everyone, which is exactly what it sounds like. The software looks very user friendly and fun to play around with. They're being a bit ambitious, looking for $30,000 and they still have a long way to go, but with three and a half weeks to go, if they can get some more attention, they still have a shot. The main reward levels are more like sponsorship levels, allowing animators to promote their works on the Tupi website, which may or may not be of interest to some. Still, the project itself looks quite cool.
• Next up is a more specific project: apngasm, a tool for making animated PNG images, while also pushing to get past the animated GIF, and finally moving to PNG instead. Just like regular PNG images are much better than regular GIF images, the animated counterparts represent a step up as well. These guys started with a much more modest goal of $5,000, which they've just about doubled, and there's still a week to go.

I hope everyone has a nicely animated Labor Day weekend (if you're in the US) or just a regular weekend if you're elsewhere.

Filed Under: animation, awesome stuff, free software, open source

Awesome Stuff: Multi-Tool Time

from the tooling-around dept

For this week's awesome stuff post, we decided to look at some multi-tool offerings. There are actually a lot of multi-tool crowdfunding projects out there, with a bunch of them just being a single simple multi-tool. This post is certainly not meant to be a comprehensive listing of all, but rather to pick a few that were a little different and distinct.

• First up are the Ti2 Para-Biners, combining the concept of a multitool with a carabiner. It seriously looks indestructible and would probably be the last carabiner you'd ever need. These don't go cheap, as you're starting at $43 for the cheapest model, but there certainly appears to be quite a bit of demand for these things. With about three weeks left to go, the project has already zoomed way past its $10,000 target to around $60,000.
• Next up, we've got the Silverback 12+ function multi-tool and minimalist wallet. There are a lot of card-style multitools out there, but this one definitely has an awful lot built into a single tool plus, on top of that, the ability to double as a minimalist wallet. Of course, if you use it as a wallet, it might make it a little more annoying to make use of the tools part, since you may have to dump the contents of your wallet first. I kind of like the fact that they kept the pricing on this one pretty straightforward and simple, rather than having a ton of different tiers. And, frankly, it seems pretty cheap for what you get -- so I'm a bit surprised that its only raised around $1,000 of the $3,500 they're seeking. There's still a month and a half to go, and if the project creator can actually drum up some attention (kids: don't forget, you need to market your Kickstarter too), it seems likely to go over the target, though perhaps not by that much.
• I already mentioned how many card-style multi-tools there are out there, but the offering from Tuls is interesting in that it's actually a set of four different mutli-tool cards, so you can have a nice set. The names of the four tools -- Roul, Stan, Lucy and Opie are all kind of amusing once you figure out the main purpose of each tool (though, the Opie tool seems almost too minimalist here, and it makes you wonder why the Stan tool can't do what the Opie tool does). While I like the concept of a multi-tool card set, this one seems kind of pricey. To actually get all four, you're spending over $80. You can buy them in smaller combinations as well, and lots of people have. They're already pushing $30,000 -- way over their target of $1,500, so apparently lots and lots of other people disagree with me on the pricing being too high.
• Finally, we've got one that isn't quite as portable, but is effectively a basic toolbox in one device, called the Zeus multi-tool. Take the basic concept of a pocket knife, and expand it to larger tools -- giving you a fold out saw, pliers, knife, adjustable screwdriver with 16 different sized bits, a hammer, a measuring tape and a detachable light. The thing that surprised me, slightly, was the hammer. I can't recall seeing multi-tools that include a hammer. While they do spell out the dimensions, it would be nice to actually see it in someone's hand, as that would give a better sense of how "handy" it actually is. From the description, I wonder if it's too big, but without any images, it's a little tough to tell. Also, I've been growing wary of projects that advertise how they've received a patent. I'd much rather someone is focusing on executing and building a great product, not spending times with their lawyers and getting a weapon to sue other innovators over. So far the Zeus is really struggling, raising just a few hundred dollars, despite the project being open for over a month. With less than three weeks to go, it's unclear if it'll make its $1,300 goal -- but since it's an IndieGoGo flex funds campaign, all money committed will go to the project's owner. It's unclear if he'll still be able to produce the devices if there really are only a few orders (as I write this there are only six orders), so buyer beware. Either way, perhaps rather than getting a patent, they should have focused a bit more on marketing this and getting the word out.

I hope everyone enjoys their weekend -- and if you've got some home improvement projects to do, make sure you've got the right tools for the job.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, innovation, multi-tools

Awesome Stuff: Taming Unruly Cables

from the wires-wires-everywhere dept

While wireless technologies are amazing, it still seems we're stuck with plenty of cables around all the time, from charging cables to headphones and more. Most people don't do much to organize them, or they go with the simplest route. Personally, I've been using twist ties to keep cables organized on my desk and it seems to do the job. I know there are a bunch of cable organizer products on the market already, but apparently a bunch of new ones have recently launched crowdfunding campaigns, so let's take a look, for this week's awesome stuff post.

• First up, we've got the QooQi, which is a simple device for your desk to organize cables. You have to watch the video to understand how it works, but it's a very simple and intuitive way of organizing your cables and keeping them in order. It has a nano pad on the bottom to help it stick to flat surfaces easily. The project is already just slightly over its $10,000 goal, and has more than three weeks to go, so chances are it will get at least double the goal.
• Next up, we've got the Kordl, which is a very, very simple plastic device that connects to your headphones to keep them from getting tangled. It doesn't tie them up entirely, but rather just connects the two ends to each other, which prevents tangling. As they explain, they're using the "rubber band vs. spaghetti theory" in that single strands, such as spaghetti, get easily tangled and tied up, where as loops, like rubber bands, tend not to get as tangled (they haven't seen my rubber band drawer... ). This one is also well past its target of $7,500, with about two more weeks to go. Personally, $5 for such a simple bit of plastic seemed a bit on the steep side, but I'm sure people sick of tangled ear bud cables might find it worth it to avoid the annoying process of untangling.
• If the Kordl isn't really what you're looking for, there's an alternative, called Loop for organizing a variety of cables, including ear buds, but also power cables, USB cables and more. It's also a fairly simple concept, but executed nicely. Basically a simple attachment to the cable that makes it easy to wrap up our cables when you're done. My Thinkpad power cable comes with a similar velcro strip, and I always wondered why so few cables came with something similar, so the Loop looks like an easy way to retrofit other cables to do the same sort of thing. This one has only raised about $1,000 out of $5,000 targeted, but there's still a month to go. Again, the pricing here seems slightly high -- $10 for two -- when it feels more like $10 should get you a pack of four or five of these things, but again perhaps I underestimate the demand and the production costs. One other oddity, it appears there's a nearly identical campaign to the Kickstarter campaign, except it's over at IndieGoGo, and it's raised no money at all, with just a week to go. It's not unheard of to see projects appear on both major crowdfunding platforms but it does seem like a relatively rare occurrence. Even more bizarre: the pricing is more expensive on IndieGoGo. No wonder it has no buyers while Kickstarter at least has a few.

That's all for this week. Stay organized.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, cables, earbuds, organization

Awesome Stuff: Bring The Cloud Back Home

from the personal-cloud-solutions dept

For a variety of reasons, I've been spending a fair bit of time contemplating and investigating "personal cloud" solutions. There are clear benefits to cloud computing, but there are downsides as well. As I'd mentioned a few months ago, what many people think of today as "cloud computing" doesn't really fulfill the promise of cloud computing at all. Rather, it's just been buying space in someone else's silo. That has a variety of problems. A few months ago, my main concern was about the fact that service providers can (and sometimes do) shut these services down, and then you're screwed. More recently, of course, as so many revelations have come out about government surveillance that seems to thrive on the fact that it can just go to third parties and get access to your data without a warrant, a separate major concern with today's popular cloud solutions has become very, very apparent. A private cloud may still have some drawbacks -- limited services, you have to be your own IT support, etc. -- but this area seems very, very ripe for innovation. A few weeks ago, we had an awesome stuff post about some new services designed to keep your activities private, but as I was preparing for this week's post, I stumbled upon a trio of interesting projects that focus more specifically on personal cloud offerings. None of them were specifically designed with "privacy" as the key driving point, but all recognize that it's a key selling point as well.

• First up, we've got Mailpile, which a number of you have been sending in. This is a project out of Iceland, trying to create a webmail client that matches the kind of ease of use and features of a Gmail or Outlook.com, but which is 100% open source and self-hosted. When I was first thinking about private cloud concepts, I wondered if there was a sort of "Gmail for a private cloud" and it appears these guys are looking to do exactly that, including building in user-friendly PGP. These days, it's still a bit complex (though, not that hard) to set up PGP in something like Gmail, but making it even easier, and doing it on a mail system that will run on your own storage... well, that just seems like a good idea. Hopefully, various useful plugins for other cloud based email services can be configured to work with Mailpile as well (these days, I don't think I could live without Sanebox or Boomerang), but it's good to see that real efforts are being made in this direction. Overall though, Mailpile looks really quite awesome and I look forward to seeing what else the team can accomplish. This one really is in the spirit of donating to something great, since the code will be free and open source, but if you believe that something like this is important, please consider stepping up. The team has already raised a bit more than half of its $100,000 goal -- which will allow the team of three to focus on the product for a year -- and there's still a month to go. It appears they'll work on it no matter what, though if they reach their goal, they'll really be able to concentrate on the product full time.
• But what about setting up your private cloud? The more "traditional" way was to set up a big network attached storage system, which can be quite powerful, with tremendous storage, RAID capabilities and the like -- but they can also be incredibly complex and super expensive if you really make them nice. But some are looking to get away from that, and a super popular one is Lima device looks like one way to do that. This product was known as "Plug" until just a few days ago, but following a legal threat from someone else who apparently holds a trademark on Plug, they've changed the name midstream (ouch) to Lima. Of course, it was so popular already that they had already sold out and have just added a second run of devices. Basically, this is a tiny device that you can plug into your router via ethernet on one side, and then out the other side is a USB plug. In the middle is a tiny Linux server that will take any and all USB drives you attach to the other side and make them cloud drives that you can access from any computer or phone. Basically, turn any old USB hard drive into a network attached storage setup. You can buy two Lima's and set them to do backups to each other as well. Need more storage? Add another USB drive. But it's a bit more advanced than that, because the Lima software also appears to synchronize everything and make it all seamless, so that you're not just seeing "another drive" for things, but rather everything is immediately and easily available on all your devices. No finding a specific drive or copying stuff over. This one was massively popular from the very start. They surpassed their $69,000 goal within 12 hours and then completely sold out of their entire stock of the first run within five days. They've since opened up the ability to purchase the second run of the devices, though they won't get delivered until April. The devices run at $79 per device, which they suggest is a big discount on the eventual $150 retail price (though, I wonder if competition will drive that price down significantly). Either way, they're rapidly approaching $1 million, and this is definitely classifiable as a massive Kickstarter success.
• Didn't get in on the Lima early enough to get the early bird? Think even $79 is a bit pricey for this sort of thing? You might want to check out this other brand new project over at IndieGoGo for the mySkiva Cloud WiFi router. At a glance, it certainly looks like it offers most of the same functionality to the Lima, but with a WiFi router built in as well. Oh, and for early birds (of which there are still a bunch available) it's only $20, which is kind of insane. They have iOS software ready to go and say that there will be Android software by the end of the year as well. From the description, it doesn't look as if the software is quite as sophisticated as the Lima (the syncing stuff with the Lima looks a lot more advanced), so with the mySkiva you'll just have a separate networked drive, rather than making it all as seamless. As mentioned, it looks like this product has really just launched, so there are almost no backers yet, but considering how quickly the Lima (Plug) devices went, it will be interesting to see if this gets similar traction.

And there you go. If people have other suggestions for interesting personal cloud solutions, let us know.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, cloud computing, email, network attached storage, personal cloud, privacy