Good News/Bad News For Startup Founder Cliff Shaw
Michael Arrington
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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.
