I’m seriously doubtful if there’s room for yet another one, but Kabooza is a relatively new online backup service which just raised 7 million Sweden Kronor or $840,000 in seed funding from Swedish VC firm Aggregate Media, reports ArcticStartup.
Kabooza’s main selling point is that it’s “really simple”, which is basically the selling point for the dozens of similar services out there as well. You download a program to your PC (only Windows XP and Vista users, no Mac or Linux version, sorry) and you select which folders you would like to backup to Kabooze’s servers and voila, you’re done.
That is, if you want to trust a Swedish startup with your data – note that I’m in no way implying that they’d ever misuse or lose it, but consumer trust happens to be one of the issues a lot of cloud services, and particularly online backup services, have to deal with and I find the information on Kabooza’s website far too insufficient to make that call.
Anyway, Kabooza offers unlimited storage and a 25 GB upload limit per month per user. There are no free trial plans available, not even for testing purposes, and pricing is set to $49.95 per year.
Best of luck to them, but I can’t imagine anything better than Carbonite.
New online backup service = FAIL
That is, if you want to trust a Swedish startup with your data
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I’m originally from Sweden (although in no way affiliated to the startup mentioned in the post), and I’d like to mention that Sweden has one of the strictest set of privacy laws for private enterprises in the world: storing personally identifiable data and use of it has to be very explicitly declared to the end user – hell, you are even obliged by law to state your policy on use of http cookies on Swedish websites!
Can’t be any worse than Mozy! What a night mare.
I would say myself, as an important and well known product strategy analyst in the valley, that one important item for such a startup should be the pre-drafting of a letter stating to the subscribers:
“.. the service will be terminating (due to the ‘economy’), and our valuable and respected users have 72 hours to take their data off the service.”
Write the letter now, because when the crap starts flying, the founders will be blaming each other and taking jobs elsewhere. Probably, the one who raised the most aggregate capital over the most failed ventures will get a new board seat or raise another round for a ……social media startup for dogs.
840K ain’t much buffer. For some on-line data startups, 25 million was not enough.
Can’t imagine how they’re going to compete with the ones already out to market. Maybe it’s their pay-once, get service for a whole year thing they’re trying to push. Though that only makes me worry even more about their service. Any way, congrats to them on their funding!
This makes TC?
I know now, its not the idea, its all about how much money one gets.
FundingCrunch it seems.
I mean Jungledisk did this years ago.
I use Jungle Disk software that cost me a one-time price of $20. With this software and my own Amazon S3 account, I am not reliant on any other third party (other than Amazon). Amazon does charge me for the service, but that cost is quite reasonable.
I can install the same Jungle Disk software on multiple computers, and have access to my Amazon service as a regular Windows drive. THe software is available for WIndows, Mac, Linuz, as well as a portable USB version.
You say: That is, if you want to trust a Swedish startup with your data
Robin, give me one reason why should I trust a USA based start up more or less than a Swedish one?
Sweden along with the rest of the EU has strict privacy laws known as the European Privacy Directive. Whilst these actual laws may or may not (im not a law professional) protect the individual it does at least show a certain level of respect for online personal privacy which in in place and respected.As far as I know such levels of online protection are not in place in the USA.
Being a European id honestly prefer to keep my data with a European based company. Thats not to say that I dont use any USA based services..of course I do but given the preference id stay with Europe any time.
I’m European, and I’m not trying to single out Sweden. It’s also not a matter of privacy per se, but a matter of trust. Most TC readers are in the U.S. and will be hesitant to trust a startup from overseas, but I could have replaced ‘Sweden’ with every other country indeed.
And to answer your question: I wouldn’t trust a USA based startup more or less than a Swedish one, no.
@ Jason –
“Being a European id honestly prefer to keep my data with a European based company” — You are not alone in your thinking: There are 450M people in the EU…
@Robin -
“Most TC readers are in the U.S” — True. Also, there are many European visitors to TC, and in this sense, your article is excellent advertising for Kabooza.
Wish them well, although they could benefit from a better design: Blue text on a black background? Unreadable… and amateurish.
Good luck guys…
Hoppas det går bra för er… =)
I use backblaze, used to use sugarsync but too expensive for a full back up. Backblaze is only $5 per month, very similar to carbonite, full encryption of your data, and monthly payments (carbonite wanted yearly).
Why do these services keep popping up? I use http://Spideroak.com that gives me client side encryption, secure shares, 2gb free data and clients for Windows, Mac and Linux.. WHY would I want a ‘easy service’?
‘Simple and easy’ is how you make a pancake, not store sensitive data!
Obviously domain names are really hard to come by these days. With a name like Kabooza, I’d expect it to be a social networking site for alcoholics.
I really do not like to sound negative, but this to me seems like a waste of capital, resources and time.
1. Are you really going to trust your data to a startup that only has 850K in funding? That is enough to pay 3 people for a year and cover rent and server costs. After one year, then what?
2. Are you really going to pick this service over the 100+ other similar services out there?
3. Are you really going to put your faith and critical data in a company based in a country whose legal system, while probably very fair, you don’t understand?
I had hoped that this credit crunch would give rise to a new perspective on investing, and that we would go beyond the mindless thoughtless investing in companies that were not companies, not even products, but rather product features with no chance of syrviving as a standalone business.
It looks like I was mistaken.
Anjali Sen
http://smartbab...learn-from.html
Although I fully agree with you on the points you make in your comment, this may not be as bad as you think… it may be worse.
The “funds” are already earmarked exclusively for paid advertising in specific media outlets (TV, Radio, Print, Web, etc).
In other words, Kabooza is raising “advertising capital” from a fund backed by 10+ different media companies so that the company can afford to pay for ads in those same media companies… against a non-negligeable amount of equity, of course… Sweet.
Obviously, the management team really needs to cut down on the kaboozin’…
Apparently your data is not save with this service. They use FTP which passes all data including passwords using clear text. There is no mention of data encryption either. I guess that w/ $840K they could add these features.
Woah there! They force implicit SSL on all FTP connections so nothing goes over the wire unencrypted. I prefer companies who stick to open standards like FTP, than those who force you to use proprietary applications that cannot work on all operating systems.
It’s true that there’s no mention of *file* encryption, but anyone who actually cares about securing their data is going to be encrypting all data locally before it is transferred anywhere.
Tough market for another back-up service. There are already a few solidified ones out there, carbonite etc. And like the others have mentioned, I don’t think the FTP structure is that safe. Digital security is hard to achieve adequately and cost effectively, but if that’s your business.. I check this digital security site to verify security questions.
I think this market is so overcrowded that there’s only room for one if it’s gonna do something crazy like offer all the storage and excellent support of top services like Mozy at half the price. But that would lead to deflation (which is the exact thing you want to avoid in a down economy), and any company that tried that would probably deadpool.
In Europe the leading player is Memopal. It will lead in the US if carbonite and Mozy don’t get serious product improvments quickly.
Another backup site? Interesting. My friends invited me to look at http://www.MyOtherDrive.com for online backup and file sharing. They ‘get’ ease-of-use, have the best prices, and by far the best sharing. It will be interesting to see what this new site offers that makes it unique.
I work with the team on Kabooza an would like to coment on Kaboozas Strategy for yor data.
Kabooza’s three stability pillars:
From day one Kabooza’s startup team settled on 3 key pillars as the basis of strategy in a competitive market. These principles are held dearly by the management.
Technical pillar
1) in-house development and market leading partners guarantee safety for your data.
Financial pillar
We are already profitable
2) We have devoted ourselves to balanced growth. Rather strong than fast.
3) We have minimal fixed costs that are already covered by our current user base.
4) We don’t offer free accounts! So we don’t bleed to death like our competitors.
a. We do offer 100 day full money back guarantee. That’s how sure we are you will be happy with the service
User pillar
5) We aim to be the easiest to use. Our users stay with us for the long run
6) We aim for fast customer service.
7) We stick to the extremely high user privacy requirements of the Swedish government, even as we are a global company.