US/French Start-Up Cloud Guys Got $573,377

Cloud Guys Corp., a US/French start-up, has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.com to finance the manufacturing of Plug, a connected storage device.

Plug brings a new approach to storage, by unifying the memories of smartphones, tablets and computers. It introduces several breakthroughs in the consumer electronics space, by removing the limits of size of electronic devices and making file sending instantaneous.

"Today, each one of our devices has its own memory, with its own content. This makes it extremely difficult for normal users to apprehend where their data is. So much that we are forced to manually move our data to the cloud to keep our laptops synchronized with our iPhones", says Severin Marcombes, CEO and co-founder, Cloud Guys. "I sincerely appreciate the efforts made by companies like Apple or DropBox to synchronize the content of our devices. However, I think that creating yet another memory to store our content, like the cloud, is not a sufficient solution. Storage has to be re-thought from the ground up, to make our devices truly work together. The industry needs new storage solutions that make the very idea of synchronization obsolete. Plug brings one of them."

Plug provides a solution to make our devices work as a group. The product is the combination of a small hardware adapter and of an application for computers, tablets and smartphones.

The Plug adapter is designed to be kept at home, connected to the internet. It relies on external USB HDDs to store the content of all the user’s devices. Everyday users only need to connect a USB drive to Plug, and it unifies the content of their devices. After ‘plugging’ a first drive, a user having a Mac and a PC will see the same content on both of them. For every additional drive plugged, his or her devices will become bigger.

"Plug changes the way we see storage. When using Plug, the size of our devices doesn’t matter anymore. All our devices have the same size: the size of the USB drives we connected to Plug. I can buy the big or the small iPad. If I have a 2TB drive connected to Plug, both of them will display 2TB of data," says Gawen Arab-Laffon, CTO and co-founder, Cloud Guys. "When I’m online, I can see these 2TB of files in my iPad. If I go offline, it works just like Spotify or Google Music: I can select which files I want to view when offline".

Plug provides storage capabilities to all the devices on which it is installed. Users can enable DropBox-like capabilities on any folder of their system. Their files are also automatically backed up in Plug and they can roll back to an old version of them anytime.

The Plug application was built with normal people in mind, as a result of Marcombes’ 7 years of experience in teaching computer usage to ederly people.

"Using your computer with Plug is exactly the same as using your computer without Plug. The only difference is that with Plug, all your devices display the same content: you only have to organize your files once, and it sorts everywhere," precises Marcombes.

The product is suitable for people who care about the privacy of their data and don’t want to put all their digital belongings to the cloud, such as Steve Wozniak, co-founder, Apple. Private, Plug storage provides a reliable protection against program such as PRISM, the NSA’s electronic surveillance program. In fact, the data of Plug users is stored at home, and not on a company’s servers.

The storage provided by an external USB drive is about 20x times less expensive than the plans DropBox offers to its non-enterprise users. By encouraging users to ‘up-cycle’ their USB drives, Cloud Guys made Plug both environment-friendly and affordable to use.

Backers of the project on Kickstarter can get their own Plug device against a contribution of 69$ to its manufacturing costs. The company announced that it needs to secure enough funding to manufacture a first batch of 1,000 devices for the Kickstarter campaign to be successful.