Mozy Founder Josh Coates launches Instructure today. He’s hoping to disrupt the entrenched player in the University LMS space, Blackboard, and take a big part of its $377 million or so in revenue.
In 2007 EMC acquired Mozy, an online backup solution, for $76 million. Coates stayed for another year, then left.
Since then he’s been helping Nepalese refugees integrate into American society, and he’s a big WWII buff. He purchased and restored a M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer. You can see the restoration process here (he keeps it in his garage). And here’s a video of his wife blowing the crap out of the side of a gravel pit. → Read More
EMC Corporation is announcing the creation of a new subsidiary this morning called Decho (for Your Digital Echo), which has been formed from the assets of two acquisitions: Mozy (acquired in September 2007) and PI Corporation (acquired in February 2008).
The new company is focused on protecting and managing personal digital data. It will continue to offer Mozy’s personal backup product and will add new products over time. The Mozy platform, which now stores over 10 petabytes of user data, has over a million users, 200,000 of which are paying customers. We were particularly impressed with its Mac product, first launched in mid-2007.
There isn’t much information on what new applications the company will launch. But if PI Corp. is anything to go on, look for rich metadata and contextual information to be a part of it. PI Corp. was acquired before launching their flagship storage/backup product. But their website suggests they are far more focused on managing, organizing and searching files than simply backing them up – something Mozy never tackled. The combination of the two platforms is more than interesting. → Read More
Online backup site Mozy is giving away 50 free year-long accounts to commemorate the official release of their Mac backup client. To get yours, send a message to techcrunch@mozy.com that answers the question, “Why do you deserve free backup service for your Mac?” Data-loss horror stories are encouraged. The Mozy team will select the fifty best responses and will email the winners instructions to claim their free accounts. Mozy is a cloud-based alternative to Apple’s Time Machine, which works very well but doesn’t have the added security of off-site data backup. And at $4.99 a month for unlimited storage, the price is couldn’t be much lower. We covered Mozy’s Mac version last April when it was introduced as beta. The final version of the software has introduced support for Apple Mail and Leopard, along with a host of technical features like bandwidth throttling and compatibility for programs with resource forks. In addition to local backup solutions like Time Machine, Mozy faces competition from online storage sites such as Apple’s .Mac, Sugarsync, and recently-released Syncplicity. Carbonite, one of the leaders in this space, works on Windows machines but has yet to release a Mac version. CrunchBase Information Mozy Carbonite Sharpcast Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Cliff Shaw, founder of ProtectMyPhotos and DocSyncer, is having an up and down week. First the bad news. ProtectMyPhotos, which launched in October 2006, is done. They spent $280,000 in seed capital to try to make the idea work, but ultimately they couldn’t compete new backup services like Mozy and Carbonite. Mozy was recently acquired by EMC for $76 million, and Carbonite has raised $21 million in capital. We’re therefore putting ProtectMyPhotos into the TechCrunch DeadPool. But Shaw also writes to tell us that his second startup, DocSyncer, is going gangbusters. The product auto-syncs word documents on your hard drive with Google Docs. In the last five days, he says, users have auto-uploaded more than 200,000 new documents to Google Docs via the product, making DocSyncer by far the largest single contributor to Google Docs. The product appears to have legs. There’s still no guarantee that DocSyncer will make it as a business, but users like the product. That’s a good start, and now Shaw can focus all of his energy on making it work. CrunchBase Information DocSyncer Mozy Carbonite Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
EMC Corporation announced the acquisition of Utah-based startup Mozy this morning, confirming our story of September 23. The price is not being disclosed, but our sources indicate that Mozy was acquired for $76 million. This was an excellent liquidity event for the Mozy team, which had raised just $1.9 million back in 2005. The company claims 300,000 business and consumer customers for their online backup storage solution. → Read More
Online storage startup Mozy, headquartered in Utah, has been acquired by EMC Corporation, a public storage company with a nearly $40 billion market cap. EMC paid $76 million for the company, according to two sources close to the deal. We first covered Mozy in January 2006 as part of an overview of the current generation of online storage solutions. The company has a dead simple way for users to back up their computer hard drives online. Download their software (Mozy supports both Windows and Mac machines) and the backups occur slowly over time. If there is ever a problem, you can restore your hard drive from Mozy’s servers. Mozy’s chief competitor is Carbonite, another company we’ve tracked over the last couple of years. Carbonite has raised $21 million in venture financing. Mozy, by contrast, raised just $1.9 million in capital. The round, closed in May 2005, was led by Wasatch Ventures, with participation from Tim Draper and Novell co-founder Drew Major. That’s quite an exit for Mozy – $76 million on just $1.9 million raised. It’s almost identical to StumbleUpon, which was acquired by eBay earlier this year for $75 million after raising just $1.5 million in venture capital. Rumors circulated a year ago that Mozy was close to being acquired by Google for significantly less than this. The company eventually passed on the deal, which must have been a tough call. They clearly made the right choice in waiting. Look for an official announcement of the Mozy acquisition in the next few weeks. Congratulations to Josh Coates, Mozy’s CEO (who refuses to comment on the deal), and the rest of the Mozy team. → Read More
Mozy is in the news again after announcing a huge enterprise deal with General Electric last week. Today they’ve pushed a Mac version of their desktop backup solution for consumers. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s extremely good. Previously Mozy and competitor Carbonite were excellent ways of backing up Windows based hard drives. Both are very reasonably priced at about $60/year – Mozy allows 2 GB to be stored for free and charges $5/month for unlimited storage, while Carbonite has a 15 day free trial and then charges $5 per month with discounts for pre-payment. Neither charge for bandwidth. With both solutions you download and install the software and the service then slowly begins to backup your hard drive based on your settings. Carbonite still only supports XP (and is a great choice for Windows users). Mozy is the only choice for Mac users and I highly recommend it after my testing. You can make a simple request to back up up the entire hard drive, or get more granular and just back up, say, iTunes and iPhoto. → Read More
Online backup and storage service Mozy has quietly grown to 175,000 customers since launching in April 2006. That’s not bad for the Utah-based company that runs the service, Berkeley Data Systems, which raised just $2 million in venture capital back in 2005. The company went big time today, however, when they announced a multi-million dollar deal with General Electric, which bought MozyPro (the enterprise version of Mozy) for all of its 300,000+ worldwide employees. MozyPro is similar to the consumer Mozy service, but includes server backups, 24/7 support and admin control for the IT department. The service launched last December and 3,200 businesses are now using. GE is now one of those businesses. Mozy and MozyPro are administered through a desktop client and automatically backs up data on the PC every two hours. Thirty days worth of versions are retained, and users can go back and restore any of those versions. Rate card pricing for consumers is free for up to 2GB of storage, and $5/month for unlimited storage. Businesses pay $4/month for each employee, plus $0.50/GB/month of stored data. Bandwidth is free. As a side note, GE certainly didn’t pay rate card rates – a deal this large would have a substantial discount. The company is backed by Wasatch Partners, Tim Draper and Drew Major. They have 25 employees. We first mentioned Mozy back in 2006 when we covered the major online storage providers. On the consumer side, Mozy competes with Carbonite and others. At the enterprise level, Iron Mountain and EVault are the entrenched competitors, although Mozy says they have a 10x cost advantage over those services. Google and Microsoft will also have products in this space. A very large untapped market for online backups are the OEM PC manufacturers, who should be providing a free trial with every PC. Mozy is now positioned nicely to land such a deal. After a grueling due diligence process by GE, the PC guys should be confident that Mozy is as secure as their competitors. And charging 1/10 of what they do is great for the bottom line. → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/editor, the situation was particularly dire.) Since then I’ve been very “don’t let this happen to you” when I talk to people about backing up their files. The number of digital media files alone on my computer skyrocketed over the past few years and to lose that stuff would be devastating. You likely feel the same way about yours. To that end, I decided to throw down some rules to follow to setup a successful file backup routine. → Read More
The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the bursting of the bubble) led to very high prices for a minimal amount of storage. Over the last year a slew of new services have launched (some are launching in February) with serious web 2.0 features, reasonable pricing (including free unlimited storage) and, in at least one case (OmniDrive), the ability to read/write directly to the file with local applications like Office, on the remote server. This last feature speeds the process of writing to files significantly by skipping the requirement to download the file to the hard drive first. The Online Storage Gang We looked at a total of thirteen companies. They are: AllMyData, Box.net, eSnips, Freepository, (the unfortunately named) GoDaddy, iStorage, Mofile, Mozy, Omnidrive, Openomy, Streamload, Strongspace and Xdrive. Another service, Zingee, has yet to launch and may also (or may not) have a compelling offering. Of the thirteen companies that we researched for this post, three really stand out. Australia-based OmniDrive (unfunded but not for long) is the clear leader in features. Box.net and Streamload are also very good choices. The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features – effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here. Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well. Web 2.0 Features Most of the new players (possibly with the exception of Mozy) are laser focused on key web 2.0 features. The best have multiple folders (private, shared, group, public), RSS feeds for each folder, etc. A couple, including Omnidrive, have also built features that allow subscriptions for RSS enclosures (such as podcasts), so that those files → Read More
