Fabrik.com offers cloud storage for a number of hard drive manufacturers including a few we’ve reviewed in the past. They’ve just been bought by Hitachi who is adding the service as well as Fabrik’s own hard drives to their mix of goodies. As a 20 year storage veteran, Mike Cordano, Fabrik CEO and co-founder, will join Hitachi GST as a key member of the executive management team. Mr. Cordano has an extensive background in the data storage industry, having previously served as executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Maxtor Corporation. While there, he was instrumental in building the Branded Products Group, which successfully launched the industry’s first “OneTouch” external storage and backup solution, which ultimately defined the category and broke the technology barrier for mass consumer adoption. → Read More
Fabrik, a storage hardware and service provider, announced today that they’ve acquired G-Technology for an undisclosed amount. G Technology sells external drives that focus on high performance for rich media. Their products are focused on Mac users (thus the announcement today in conjunction with Macworld). G-Technology is also releasing a couple of new products today, including a 1 TB mini Raid USB drive that is bus powered. G-Technology was founded by Roger Mabon four years ago and is self funded. This is Fabrik’s third acquisition (previously Filmloop and SimpleTech). We’ve been hard on the company in the past (see our coverage of the Filmloop acquisition and CrunchGear’s coverage of MyFabrik), but to be fair the company is executing like crazy. They are on a $200 million revenue run rate for 2008, says CEO Mike Cordono, and are profitable after raising around $50 million in capital. 90% or revenues are from the U.S., so there is lots of room for international expansion. Cordono isn’t talking IPO yet, but it’s clear they are on track for a public offering or a very large acquisition. Cordono says they won’t raise more capital for now, unless its for further acquisitions. CrunchBase Information fabrik Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Besides the launch of their portable SimpleTech mini USB drives, Fabrik also launched Fabrik Ultimate Backup at CES. If you’re like me then backing up can be a tedious pain the arse. I avoid it as much as possible. I just don’t have the time or patience to do it. Well, Fabrik realizes many consumers feel the same way and FUB makes the whole process simple. → Read More
Ross Levinsohn (former President of Fox Interactive) and Jonathan Miller (former Chairman and CEO of America Online) launched Velocity Investment Group earlier this year with the goal of acquiring and investing in digital media startups. Today they are announcing a merger with ComVentures, a venture fund with around $1 billion under management. This sounds like a bit of a coup. The new entity is taking Velocity’s name and will be called Velocity Interactive Group. Two ComVentures partners – Michael Rolnick and Jeb Miller, will be “pursing other interests,” which is probably just a nice way of saying they were booted from the fund. This is a rare move for a venture fund, and from what we hear ComVentures has been doing well in its investments. But a series of events, such as the FilmLoop debacle, may have left the brand somewhat tarnished. The fund was also ridiculed for stealing Sequoia’s web site look and feel. A fresh start for ComVentures isn’t a bad idea, and getting talent like Levinsohn and Miller doesn’t hurt, either. The fund will be opening new offices in Santa Monica and New York, adding to existing offices in Palo Alto, India and China. The fund is also announcing a few investments, including NDTV Networks, IndiaTV, Fabrik, Doppelganger and Mixercast. CrunchBase Information Fuse Capital Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
When I added FilmLoop to the TechCrunch DeadPool last month based on rumors of mass layoffs, it was clear there was more to the story. The thirty person company had raised $11.5 million in capital and by any calculation should have still had at least $3 – $5 million left in the bank. They were trailing Slide, RockYou and Photobucket in their market, but had just launched a completely new platform that was getting good reviews. FilmLoop wasn’t dominating the market, but they were not on the ropes, either. More of the story has leaked, from multiple sources close to the company. Here’s a rough timeline of what appears to have happened: January 2005: FilmLoop raises $5.5 million from Garage Technology Ventures (Guy Kawasaki) and Globespan Capital Partners. May 2006: FilmLoop raises $7 million from troubled venture firm ComVentures. Roland Van de Meer joins the board of directors. October 2006: FilmLoop 2.0 launches. Company and investors are optimistic about FilmLoop November 2006: ComVentures, under pressure from its own limited partners to clean up its portfolio and discard any unprofitable startups, meets with FilmLoop to tell them they must find a buyer by end of year. The FilmLoop founders made it clear that they thought they had a good chance at success and did not want to sell. However, ComVentures’ ownership percentage, plus certain rights they have (called “drag along rights”), can force the other investors and the company founders to sell. December 2006: ComVentures proposes Fabrik, another one of their portfolio companies, as the acquiror. FilmLoop was unable to find any other acquiror in the last two weeks of the year. Fabrik acquires FilmLoop for little more than the cash ($3 million) that FilmLoop has remaining in its bank account. Due to liquidation preference rights, the founders and all employees walk away with exactly nothing. In effect ComVentures forced a fire sale of FilmLoop and Fabrik, another company ComVentures invested in, happened to be the only viable acquiror in that limited timeframe. FilmLoop’s desktop and other software will play a part in a future Fabrik consumer storage product. SimpleTech, also acquired by Fabrik and announced today, will provide another piece of the product. It’s clear that ComVentures had a significant interest in forcing a sale to Fabrik on such a short timetable, during the holidays, when competitive bids would be impossible to find. It’s also clear that this sale was → Read More
Oh boy. I hope you guys are excited on this bitterly cold Tuesday because in Silicon Valley, things are getting HOT! A service called Myfabrik is being released today after beta testing. It’s going to change the way you use the web, I swear. You’ll be able to do things you’d never thought possible, such as share files online (up to 1GB), share videos, photos, and the ability to share your thoughts with other people publicly. Groundbreaking stuff here folks. → Read More
MyFabrik, loosely related to Maxtor, is a new online data storing/sharing/organizing application that lets you manage files remotely with just a web browser. You can upload and download pictures, music, videos and documents privately or publicly, depending on what permissions you set. The Web 2.0-ness of the web-app comes from tagging, sharing with others, and the ability to quickly post the files you choose onto eBay and MySpace. It’s aiming to be a one-stop shop for media sharing, attacking .Mac and a number of other players with 2GB accounts for $30 a year and seamless interaction with Maxtor’s Fusion line of hard drives. CrunchGear will have a hands-on update with the beta impressions soon but until then you can give it a go on MyFabrik.com → Read More
Fabrik, a Web 2.0 savvy multimedia storage service, is opening up its web application to a limited number of beta users today. I got a look around inside this system awhile ago and was impressed. Company CEO and co-founder Mike Cordano came from storage provider Maxtor, now a Seagate company. Chairman and co-founder Keyur Patel came from Maxtor as well, following time as Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Inktomi Corporation (a Yahoo! acquisition). There are quite a few online storage services available (most new and notable could be Amazon S3 and EarthLink’s WebLife). Online storage is good; giving your data to a company that specializes in keeping data secure and backed up makes sense when it comes to things like family or artistic photos and video. Storage and bandwidth are so cheap now that leveraging economies of scale enables these vendors to offer storage and delivery as a commodity. Fabrik media storage plans will start at $3 per month for 2 GB of data storage with unlimited transfers. Two things make Fabrik stand out right now. First, they offer a very nice web application for organizing your photos and videos. It’s nothing flashy looking but the functionality is smart. Ajax, both tagging and folders are all nicely used to make organizing your files easy. There are quite a few nice little features like the ability to view items on a time line by either creation data or upload date. The service is intended primarily for long term storage of your personal media, but the included sharing features are good as well. The second thing that makes Fabrik stand out is that its web application is also available for use with local storage. If you have your own network connected storage device you can subscribe to the Fabrik media organizing service at a reduced price. Owners of a Maxtor/Seagate storage device will get an extra discount, but any networked storage device can be used. There are a couple of ways this could play out when the service really goes to market. There is a belief held by many people today that the new web is made up of 1% content creators, 10% content distributors and everyone else consumes the stuff. Of the 1% of content producers, a smaller percentage still will be producing large quantities of multimedia. Some people talk about pro-sumers instead of consumers. Serious content producers → Read More
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