[OT] [Startup] Searchable, Secure Home Cloud

[AJ ONeal (Home)]

Hey Everybody,

I'm working on a home / office cloud solution.

I'm applying to BoomStartup and I've made it past elevator pitch to screening.

Now I'm looking for a co-founder with design / html / css skills.

If you know someone who fits the bill, please forward.

And yes, "co-founder" means working for donuts, up to 20% equity, and a small investment from BoomStartup to help us while we continue to seek investment and, more importantly, ship product. If interested, contact me privily. Ask any questions publicly.

The basic problem is that my mom, and my grandma, and many of my friends, we don't like our stuff (or privacy) belonging to (and at the discretion of) someone else. We put stuff in the cloud because it's convenient, not because we feel great about it.

Existing public cloud / home cloud services don't work for me because

* space - I need 1 or 2 terabytes, not 10 or 20 gigabytes (ALL of my pictures, movies, and music, accessible anywhere)

* functionality - even with SpaceMonkey or World Book, there are no apps, no integration.

* searching - Ever tried finding an old post on facebook? Hello, infinite scroll!

* sharing - Ever tried to share a 50mb file with some sitting next to you? #AirDropFail

* security - Lala. Songza. Simplify Media. Ubuntu One. Dozens of others. They shut down and give me x days to backup my crap or I lose it forever. Oh, and then I can't use my playlistst / share folders / moods / presets / etc anymore. All that meta-data style stuff is just gone gone 

* ownership - since XP activation servers are gone, I couldn't help my grandma reinstall it

* extensibility - I'm a programmer. If they'd let me, I'll solve my own problems. I'd even share the solution!

* offline use - if the internet is down, I should still be able to use my home media app to watch my movies

We already have the infrastructure for a solution - almost all middle class American homes have a router that supports UPnP forwarding with an always-on internet connection and even on a "slow" day they can watch Netflix in two bedrooms at the same time.

With the addition of WebRTC, Mozilla's Let's Encrypt, and more and more pocket-sized devices being more powerful than the servers of just a decade ago. Right now, today, we have all the capacity to use the internet in the way it was originally envisioned. The age of the peer web is at our doors.

The cloud platform I'm building is like an iPad meets Wordpress meets a peer CDN - apps that are always-on services and can use each other's APIs in a mesh of trusted peers (the base price will includes 2 boxes so you immediately share with a friend and get 99.99% uptime).

I'm literally working on functionality for my grandma base on a convo we had a few weeks ago. And when I have her box ready, it'll benefit both of us.

She wants to use the photos app to pull in all of her photos from her laptop, backup drive, and sd cards into one place where she can organize and search for them easily, but still be able to share with people on facebook, but also be able to search for previously added photos.

My box will trust her box (oauth2 / android app permissions style) and I'll send an invite to do the reverse so that I can use her box to run a copy of my critical websites and she can use mine for encrypted backups. In the average case the load is round-robin split across both boxes. In the case that one is down, the other will be bearing the full load within seconds. Virtually no downtime.

Currently I've moved every site I run from digital ocean to my home cloud (except a custom Dynamic DNS service that handles the up / down / round-robin jiggery pokery). I take credit cards on it (through stripe). I have a functional OAuth2 framework for apps, people, and devices. I've got UPnP / PMP working. I'm working on some settings / management interface now.

The end game is that this will eventually replace Facebook - and many other services where their only product is our data to their advertisers.

Revenue will come from the app store, curated advertisements, and eventually managing CC processing, SMS, and email (systems that just can't work peer-to-peer). The boxes will sell near-cost for the home tier so that we can ship 2 at a time and expand the network quickly. The business and developer tier will have a little more margin.

AJ ONeal

[AJ ONeal (Home)]

If you're interested in knowing when presales and the kickstarter happen, please put in your email at:

https://daplie.com/walnut

AJ ONeal

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[AJ ONeal (Home)]

I currently have a home network drive I use to store my stuff.  I DON'T have my stuff in the cloud, because, like you said, I need more than 10 or 20 GB of space (the drive is 3 TB).

However, my biggest problem is replication/off-site backup.  If my HDD fails, or if my house burns down, wave bye-bye to all my photos, music, movies, etc.

I love all the other things you propose, but if all my data is in one place, my (personal) primary concern isn't addressed.

Does your system have a solution for that?

The devices will be sold in trusted pairs (you can't buy just one). So you'll give one to someone you trust and share encrypted backups with that person (in both directions).

They won't be able to read content that you haven't shared with them, but if the power were to go out at your house you will be able to log into their device and use the content yourself.

In the beginning this will be pretty straight forward replication of file-level encrypted data, but as the network expands and you have many trusted peers it will operate in bitsync fashion - but that there are other features in front of bitsync, so I'd peg that as at least a year out.

AJ ONeal

P.S. Sorry for sending this sent out twice. The first time gmail switched the address it was being sent from and bounced from the list.

[AJ ONeal (Home)]

That's a rather large vision you've got there, AJ. :)

Yeah, I'm basically building an iPad that you access in the browser instead of a touch screen and that can be used for any type of private/peer-network application.

 

I'm curious if you've looked into Synology and how you think your product trumps (in the short term) what they've already done?

My platform is more webby/appy and less desktoppy.

I'm designing in for people like my mom and grandma, but accessible to techies. It's not a product for techies - more like an iPad (except a bit easier to develop for) and much less like a NAS application server.

It's not a storage solution with the potential for apps. It's an application platform with the potential for storage. 

In the interface the biggest difference with my vision is that the apps will be separate browser tabs (like an iPad) or kiosk mode desktop browser apps (possibly React Native on mobile platforms - but that's a ways off yet), not in modal blocks (like Windows).

That said, Synology looks really cool. I'm logged into it for the first time just now (I had heard about it before, but I hadn't used it).

I do want to get from home to enterprise, but I'm focusing on the small niche market first. And, just like the iPad, the enterprise use cases will come and they'll be very human experiences.

I do want to get a demo up like what Synology has so that it's easier for me to explain to people what this is. It is definitely more similar to Synology in the features respect, but more similar to AppleTV in the in-your-home respect.

AJ ONeal