Yesterday around 8PM, I was with two of the Forgetbox cofounders Gawen Arab and Severine Marcombes in the basement of a bar, where they had invited friends to announce the launch of their Kickstarter campaign for their flagship product Plug. In French tradition, we were a little late in kicking off the presentation, which consisted of the two founders speaking about the startup’s journey so far, and then, of course, watching the plug video.
%CODE12%
The video, as you’ll see, introduces Plug, small piece of hardware that connects to your home internet with ethernet, and then to any USB/external hard drive/storage space via USB. In short, Plug turns any piece of storage space you have into a personal cloud, which can be synced across all devices. In short, it’s a game-changer.
Watching their video above, everything looks ‘nice’ – the dropbox feel is a bit too overwhelming – you can sync files between devices, share with friends easily, recover old versions of documents, etc. Until they get to the subject of price.
With Plug, instead of having all your files in “the cloud” (words like “SaaS” come to mind), you have them in your cloud. If you want more space on your cloud, you buy more space. For the cost of that space. And that’s it. So while it may seem annoying to buy 1TB for $100 or so, when compared to how much that would cost you on Dropbox in the first year along, it’s a no-brainer. Personally, I already have a TB at home and will definitely be forking over the $69 to turn it into storage that I can access on my iPhone, laptop & tablet.
There are huge opportunities for these guys, as the technology world shifts back to the pre-cloud area of having your own servers at our home. Storage cost has dropped dramatically, while security risks and concerns about privacy have gone through the roof.
At the time of writing this article, the KickStarter Campaign had already raised the $69,000 it was looking for – in just 12 hours. The campaign has 59 days to go, and I’m sure we will be talking about Plug for a while as one of the top successes on KickStarter, especially for a company that is based in Paris.