Entrepreneurship, startups, and technology in Atlanta and the East Coast.
Our friends over at JungleDisk have been nominated for a Webware award in the utility & security category. Show your love for an Atlanta based company and vote for them to win.
I’m not sure if any other Atlanta based companies are represented but I’m sure other East Coast companies are. If you find them and like what they’re doing, use their proximity to the East Coast as your tie breaking decider on who to vote for.
Good luck Dave and JungleDisk!
I had an interesting call with the CEO of Evoca, Murem Sharpe (that’s her in the photo to the left holding the phone), about what they’re doing a few weeks ago. If you recall I previously wrote about ATDC companies that didn’t drive their own public awareness. One of the companies that does seem to own their public persona is Evoca. They have a nice looking site as well as an updated blog (although the last entry right now is dated December 28, 2007).
The reason it has taken me so long to write about Evoca is first, there has been a lot of good stories to write about but second, I needed to figure out what I thought of their business. In a nutshell, Evoca lets clients convert audio into an embeddable online audio clip. Nothing spectacular, right? Well, their hook is that you use a regular phone to do it. So the idea is that usage is vastly simplified since most everyone knows how to use their phone or cellphone to make a phone call.
Evoca has some interesting client wins including the Discovery Channel and has even been used by President Bill Clinton. But I’m really struggling to see how I could use this service myself. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Skype user (Evoca provides free call recording on Skype). Or maybe it’s because I would often rather chat on IM, email, or in person rather than on my cell phone (I was recently called a Luddite by a friend because I don’t do mobile email - I just like to say that I rock it old school). Judging by the list of recent Evoca recordings it seems like a lot of folks use Evoca in other countries. Maybe we just don’t get “it” in the U.S.
The competition in this space is pretty fierce. There are a lot of companies doing telecommunication related stuff including Grand Central (acquired by Google), Jangl, Jott, Yap, and Jajah. Not to say that any of these companies is directly competitive but it wouldn’t take much for one company to bleed over to another. For example, Grand Central already allows users to embed voice mail messages they receive onto a web page.
Evoca has built their system to be highly scalable and I noticed that they were serving content off of the Amazon S3 service which I talked about before in relation to JungleDisk. Murem also told me that they are using the open source Asterisk project as their platform through which phone calls get convert into audio files.
Evoca is a virtual company with people spread in multiple states. Murem told me that there are about twelve active employees and the company was founded in July 2005. The company has been completely bootstrapped over this time with no outside funding.
I’ll keep an eye on this one to see how it evolves and if I can figure out a way I can use the technology. I still haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe I need to get a technologically current cell phone first. Nah…
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I’m a big fan of doing offsite backups. So much so that I compared a number of offsite backup services a long time ago. But backup solutions that require user intervention is a recipe for disaster. Personally, I’ve tried to automate as much as possible. I’ve set up a RAIDed storage server in my house (for the geeks, it’s RAID 1 with 2 live disks and 1 hot spare, each drive is 250GB) that gets the backups from the other machines in the house (everything executes automatically on a set schedule).
As I mentioned in my post on backup services, I was a fan of Mozy. I still think Mozy is a pretty good solution (more on why below) but having support only for Windows and Macs, it isn’t a complete solution. So I started looking at JungleDisk.
The Background
JungleDisk was started by Dave Wright who is an Atlanta based entrepreneur. Dave was previously one of the co-founders of GameSpy which was then bought by IGN where he was then Chief Architect. Dave started JungleDisk as a side project in 2006 after Amazon announced it’s S3 service. By creating an application that easily allows users to access and backup their files to the Amazon storage cloud, Dave had a hit on his hands. He continued working on the product and released a commercial version in August 2007. He announced pricing at $20 for free lifetime upgrades and support and use on any platform - Widows, Mac, or Linux. Oh yeah, you can use your licensed software on as many machines as you want too. Users pay for usage of the Amazon storage cloud (pricing here
The Technology
Now for the geek stuff. The one interesting aspect of JungleDisk is that Dave releases clients for all three platforms simultaneously. When was the last time you saw a startup do that? Normally when you see people do that, it’s software written in Java. Personally, I hate full blown applications that are Java based. Sure they are fairly speedy with current interpreters but still, they’re interpreted instead of being fully compiled code. I’m a performance freak and I love my compiled code (don’t get me wrong, interpreted languages do have their place and I dig Ruby). Dave has taken the approach of doing fully compiled code across all three platforms. He does this by writing in everything in C++ and maintaining as much of the code base as possible as common through the platforms (I’d assume everything but some network interface stuff and some filesystem work). He uses wxWidgets to maintain a cross-platform GUI and then some open source libraries like libcurl and openssl.
The Competition
With my previously favorite program, Mozy, I could backup my Windows machines but not the Linux server that houses my RAIDed drives. So I still use Mozy since they give you some free space (if you signup for Mozy using this link, you’ll get an extra 256 MB of free space [so will I] for a total of 2.2 gigs free). It costs $5/month per computer to get unlimited storage on Mozy. Compare this to the flexibility of JungleDisk and the cost I’m paying per month to Amazon (less than $5/month for about 26 gigs of storage plus daily backups across four machines - no per machine cost), JungleDisk is overall a better deal. I still use Mozy for random secondary backup purposes (I mean, come on - it’s free!).
Also note, Mozy raised about $2m in venture capital and was recently acquired by EMC for over $70m. Another JungleDisk competitor, Carbonite, has recently raised $15m to bring their lifetime total to $21m in venture capital. Over all the competitors, I think JungleDisk is not only a better solution but a more cost effective and flexible solution.
The Future
JungleDisk is an absolutely phenomenal story. The company has been completely bootstrapped by Dave and now has significant revenue to continue its growth path. In fact, Dave just announced that he’s hiring. If you think you’re a hot shot C++ developer, C#/ASP.NET developer, or product manager in Atlanta, drop a note to Dave and let him know you heard about it through this blog. This is an absolutely phenomenal ground floor opportunity for someone looking for an entrepreneurial experience.
Note, Dave has released JungleDisk Plus which gets him into a recurring revenue stream and provides users with a way to do block updates of incrementally changing files. Given the length of this post, I’ll discuss this service in a future post so I can fully delve into the technical bits.
Disclosure
I paid for my copy of JungleDisk on August 12, 2007 (9 days after it went for sale). This was before I know that Dave and JungleDisk were Atlanta based.
UPDATE: I’m an idiot. I didn’t include a link to the actual company’s site. Sorry about that.
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