Plug-and-Play Cloud Storage At Home: Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman (Part 5)

Sramana: Let’s go back to the “press went crazy” comment. The press does not go crazy, you make the press go crazy.

Daniel Putterman: I would love to take credit, but all we said when we were at our booth was that nobody was too important or small for us to talk to. This was in January 2009, when the social media and blog machine was in full gear with the right attitude.

There was a guy from the Associated Press who showed up. He told me it was going to be on TV and that he had a special iPhone application that he was going to use to record me. I gave him a 15-minute demo, and I was really excited and I felt that it was going to be the breakthrough. When we were done I asked him how many people it would go to and he told me that it went to seven people who were on his stream at the time. That is when I realized name tags don’t matter. We were aggressive after everyone.

Blogs then started feeding off of each other. That led to the Wall Street Journal’s noticing us. We placed our first 2,000 pre-orders hours after the press event. Those orders came from consumers of all walks of life and the company emerged from those orders. They were people who wanted to spend $100 and take a device, connect it to some hard drive they already had, and have that hard drive be accessible over the Internet free. They wanted a personal cloud. They wanted something they could own.

As a side note, we still run the community that way today. We take all comments good or bad, we have 100% transparency with our comments. We are running what is perceived to be a hardware/service company like an Internet company. Good luck trying to find that with a consumer electronics company today. Go buy a hard drive and then try to call someone to tell them that you lost all of your photos. There is nobody there that you can talk to, and even if you could find someone to talk to I wonder if they would care about you.

Sramana: Essentially you offered consumers a plug-and-play device and let them figure out the best ways to use it.

Daniel Putterman: Exactly. The thing about Pogoplug is that it is not all about technology. We are people. Why do we buy more storage? Because we can’t stop generating multimedia files. We are all worried about privacy and security. I was just reading the Amazon cloud terms of service agreement, and they claim the right to examine everything including your files. In general there is something about cloud that is perceived as unsafe.

Sramana: With your device do you just plug in an Ethernet cable? Consumer electronics network setup is terrible.

Daniel Putterman: The real crime is that by the time we make a home electronics networking device accessible, the consumer has disabled their home firewall. They are told to do port forwarding, and they use a wizard which makes a hole in their firewall. At CES, we shipped out 50 reviewer units. We shipped a bag of 90-second popcorn with those devices and a note that said ‘Your Pogo device will be available anywhere on the Internet before your popcorn is done.’ For the most part that held true.

The first thing you do when you open the box is go to Pogobox.com. On the third step a green light on the Pogobox turns on. In more than 90% of installations that light comes on without the user even trying anything. That means our service is connected through their current firewall, which remains intact.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Plug-and-Play Cloud Storage At Home: Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman
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