The Home Cloud

I just got my PogoPlug and I really like it. It has started me thinking about whether there is a “Home Cloud” similar to the storage and services clouds being offered by Flickr, Salesforce.com, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

For those of you who do not know what it is, the PogoPlug is a small plastic brick that has a power plug (110V) and two jacks: Ethernet and USB. You connect it to your home network and plug in USB storage. That storage is securely available to you anywhere on the Internet. You can read and write the storage from a Web page and you can also install the storage as a drive on your networked computer. There is even an iPhone app!

Each PogoPlug has a unique key which you use to register your device at the service’s Web site. The site provides a portal where you can manage the storage. You can share a folder (and all its sub-folders) with someone from the portal by putting in their email. It sends them a URL with which they can access your folder. The problem with this approach is that anyone can use that URL, so anyone who gets it can access your system. The product needs the ability to create a community where people without PogoPlugs can be invited to join and access can be given (and withdrawn) in a way that the access cannot be passed on to others.

The PogoPlug could be a bellwether of a counter-trend in the way people use the Web.  Seems like in the last 50 years or so the computer industry pendulum swings back and forth between personal and shared control of resources such as storage and computing.  Recently we have been swinging towards sharing on the Web.  First homes and business put their data online with email and photos.  Next came ASP model where a single app like Salesforce.com is run “in the cloud.”  Now we are moving to clouds of more generic computing offered by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Putting your data out in the cloud sounds great until your cloud provider goes out of business and you lose all your data. We don’t expect Google or Microsoft to disappear any time soon, but the recent data loss at Magnolia is a good lesson in what can happen when your data is lost by your data storage provider. And who knows what those providers are doing with the data? Does anyone really read all those Terms of Service agreements?

There is a vast amount of USB storage in people’s homes and businesses that is primarily used as backup and to serve photos, music, and video and other files to local computers. If you already have the storage for backup and local serving, why not make it available to yourself and possibly some of your friends on the Web? It seems like a logical step.

I don’t know anything about PogoPlug’s financial and business situation, and I don’t have a vested interest in them, but I think they have the potential to do well. Of course, there is always the question: what happens if PogoPlug goes out of business? Aren’t you just as tied to them as you would be with Google? To address this I believe the PogoPlug folks need to open-source (or license) the protocols they use in their box so that anyone else can offer a PogoPlug portal or build a PogoPlug device. I believe in the long-run they have a much better chance for a home-run success this way, though they need to figure how they keep from getting squeezed out of that picture.

Another company I have run across is Tonido. They are similar to PogoPlug in that they allow to use your home resources from the Web. But the resource they allow you to share is not your USB drives but your desktop computer. If you install the Tonido software on your desktop (Windows only now) and register at their portal, you can get secure access to your machine from the Web. This is NOT login access like that provided by GoToMyPC and others. Instead you can only talk with the Tonido application. That is until someone hacks it.

The application currently gives you access to any of the storage your desktop can reach, so in that respect it mimics PogoPlug – without the hardware plug. But it also provides some software tools on top of that storage so that you can serve music and photos. Tonido has an architecture where more mini-apps can be plugged into their application and available to run over the Web.

I find the Tonido approach less attractive for a number of reasons. First, the target audience (leading edge technology people) are increasingly not having desktop machines at home to connect with, but are using theie laptop as their sole computer. But even these people probably have USB drives. Secondly if you are going to use your home desktop as a resource over the Web, why not get login access to it and use the REAL applications that are installed on it? Admitedly you don’t want to share this access with friends and colleagues like you can with Tonido, but if all you are sharing is the data, PogoPlug does that without tying up the computer.

Kleiner Perkins investment DropBox addresses some of the same issues by making data on your computers available on the Web and on other computers.  But it falls more in the category of a storage cloud than the home cloud.  Of course many NAS products, such as those from Buffalo, can make their storage available over the Web, but they are more expensive and not nearly as widely owned and deployed as the simple USB drives PogoPlug works with.

I have created a little product-feature matrix to help show how these products differ in creating the Home Cloud.

Comparison of the different methods of using the Home Cloud

It will be interesting to see if the Home Cloud catches on and how far it might progress. Please let me know what you think.