A new Kickstarter campaign kicked off yesterday for a personal USB-based alternative Dropbox solution. The new device/software combination is simply called Plug and it is described sweetly and succinctly by the developers as "The little adaptor that makes all your devices display the same content" and alternatively as "the brain of your devices".
If you have more than one device upon which you create or manage content you will probably have at least dabbled in the use of cloud storage, especially if you have one of those mobiles or tablets that doesn't have a standard (micro)SD card slot. There are lots of cloud storage contenders around; Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Box or SugarSync. They all give you a little taste but want you to become dependent and buy more GBs of space.
Plug works quite differently to all of the above cloud services as:
- It's cheaper: Plug is not a service. You pay once, it's yours.
- It's larger: Plug is designed to store your entire digital life.
- It's faster: if you're at Home, transfer speed is 60x faster.
- It's safer: you can backup all of your content, not only part of it. Privately for free. Remotely for less than $5/month.
- It's yours: it's your own storage. Not a company's, not a government's.
Software and Hardware
Plug apps are an essential part of the solution and free desktop and mobile apps have been made to "make everything transparent and intuitive to use". Software support for iOS, Android phones and tablets, Mac, PC and Linux desktops is already finished and a Windows Phone app is on the way. The software is designed to "not get in the way" and the main utility of plug is that "you don't even realise it's there".
The Plug hardware is "a small Linux-powered dongle" which connects your devices "thanks to a zero-configuration, private and encrypted VPN (asymmetric encryption based on RSA-2048/SHA-1 keys)".
Overall Plug is meant to bring all your different devices together "where playing with two devices from two different manufacturers can really make us live a single and continuous experience."
The Plug project
The Plug Kickstarter project has already almost achieved it's funding goal of $69,000 as I write this, with 59 days of the 60 day run left. The lowest pledge you can make which will get you a finished device, all-being-well, is $69. The developers say the retail price will be $150. Devices should be in backers' hands by December 2013.
