According to CNNMoney, software entrepreneur Daniel Putterman knew he’d collected too many files — videos, photos, songs, documents — to keep on his personal computer. But for all his digital savvy, he couldn’t figure out the best place to store his heaps of information.
He could buy a one-terabyte external hard drive for under $100. The drawback? When Putterman was away from his desk, he’d have no way to access the data.
Another option: Upload his files to the cloud, paying to store his data on remote servers. Those services, however, would only let him store about one-quarter of his data — for $250 or more a year.
Putterman began to wonder: Why hasn’t anyone created a gizmo that plugs into your personal hard drive and connects it to the Internet, allowing you to access your files directly, from your own hard drive, anywhere? You’d have no service fees or upload quotas. A password system could grant chosen friends and colleagues access to your data, too.
So he decided to turn that idea into a company, Cloud Engines, and came up with a name for his gizmo: the Pogoplug.
A hardware startup can require deep pockets to develop a tangible product and get it to market. That’s why the big guys — Sony, Dell, Apple — dominate the information hardware industry.
But when Putterman decided to take the risk, capital followed. He launched Cloud Engines in 2007 and quickly landed $2 million in seed funding.
Putterman convinced chipmakers and a manufacturer to give him bulk pricing, even though his initial production runs were small. The result is a $129 device the size of a large paperback book. Pogoplug can connect to the Internet using Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable and has four USB ports to link up with external hard drives. Users log into the company’s website, my.Pogoplug.com, to access their files. The transfer rates are fast enough to stream videos and music.
About 50,000 units have sold since November, and Cloud Engines expects to hit $15 million in sales this year.
“It scratched the itch,” says David Sparks, an Irvine, Calif., lawyer who reviewed and blogged about the Pogoplug on his site, MacSparky.com. “You think, ‘Wow, how come nobody else thought of that?'”
Photo by Cloud Engines.