Cloud storage has really taken off in the past few years. Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive are few of the many services that offer anything from a few dumb GBs for free to store your files to sophisticated APIs for a fee that you can use to host web apps. Ooberdocs adds the smarts to your dumb GBs by seamlessly taking your email attachments and syncing them across your preferred cloud storage service.
An Inspiring Start
Back in 2006, around the same time when Dropbox was in its infancy, the trio of John McBride, Jeff Downs and Francis Perez set out to create a cloud storage service with the cutting edge technology of the time. But as luck would have it, their venture couldn’t muster the marketing muscle and it slipped into technological limbo.
The team didn’t give up and instead, devised an ingenious solution to cater to their competitors’ userbase, “We had already leveraged their APIs and built the function to allow our users to send files to and from Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and Facebook. Then it hit me, why not make a seamless way for email attachments to be automatically sent to your cloud storage”, says John.
Email is still the most popular way to share a file. An estimated 6-7 billion files get sent out via email and apparently, the top cloud storage players have been ignoring it. So now, a user has to save the email file attachments to their PC and then upload it to their cloud storage account. Ooberdocs interfaces with your email provider (most popular emails are supported), sending copies of incoming file attachments straight to your cloud storage account. “We made it a set it and forget it service”, explains John, as he notes the difference between the cloud based Ooberdocs and its closest competitor Cargolifter which is a software service that needs to be installed on every PC where you need the attachment forwarding service.
The Road Ahead
Ooberdocs is an open beta service so anyone is free to try it out but the company plans to add yearly subscription based revenue model (charging a reasonable $3-$4). Their enterprise model is currently in a pilot phase at Dell where they are evaluating how to charge their business clients for the service. Ooberdocs also has plans of teaming-up with retail chain outlets like Best Buy and offering automatic syncing of digital receipts of users to their cloud account.
For more details, visit:
http://www.ooberdocs.com/index.html
