A small company in Dublin's Digital Hub will organise and manage the storage of all your digital data, writes Karlin Lillington
Digital photos, video clips, multimedia documents, even complete films and television programmes - as computers turn into fully fledged media centres packed with such items, one Dublin start-up firm is betting that people badly need ways of managing, backing up, storing and sharing all that content.
PutPlace (www.putplace.com), a small company in Dublin's Digital Hub, plans to simplify the whole process by offering software and services that will automatically back up and store your digital content, track where all of it is located on your PC or online, and enable you to share it easily with friends and family.
"By 2010, you're going to have a terabyte of data in your home," says PutPlace chief executive Joe Drumgoole. "If you had that in your business right now, you'd need two people to look after it. What we're doing is packaging management for your digital content."
He points to a recent study from Hitachi that revealed that half of those surveyed in the "Generation Y" age bracket of 16 to 24 said they had more than $1,000 worth of digital content on their PCs and, of that, 25 per cent was irreplaceable.
"If you lose your laptop, you can always replace it, but if you lose your wedding photos stored on your laptop, they are gone forever," he says.
There are three ways people lose data, he says: they forget about it, they try to move it or "the usual lifetime events - a laptop is stolen, the kids spill coffee on it, little Johnny drags your files to the trash accidentally when playing with the PC".
He says PutPlace will track all data, provide tools to move data safely and provide secure back-up so it doesn't get lost.
How does it work?
A beta release won't be out until May, but the concept is that a programme downloadable to a computer will automatically find and catalogue specified content, whether it be media files or items in designated folders.
It then backs these up to an online storage location, which could be storage the user has purchased or storage provided through PutPlace (which will use Amazon's new storage service).
A key feature is that the whole process is automated and happens at intervals in the background when the computer is running. Users know they should create back-ups but rarely do, Drumgoole says, so the process needs to be easy, painless and invisible to the user.
PutPlace software will then give a fully searchable index of all that content. But just as important is the ability to allow others to view that content, and this is where Drumgoole feels they have an especially innovative service.
He explains it as the "ski holiday feature": "Say a bunch of friends go on holiday and they all take lots of pictures, but they all upload them to different photo services like Flickr.com, Photobucket.com, SmugMug.com.
"If people want to share those photos with the group, they all have to belong to each of the services, but if they all sign up to PutPlace, they can just send the photos to the person they want, rather than having to send the person to the photo service to view them.
"It automatically manages the photos from all those services.
"In other words, PutPlace is not a site for perusers, it's a site for users."
The idea for PutPlace came out of his own frustration at managing pictures and video shot on a holiday two years ago. If the process created headaches for a programmer and technology "early adopter", then it must be at least as grim for the average computer user, he says.
Drumgoole put in over two years of work researching the concept and hiring additional programmers to develop the software and service. Once the full offering is up and running, he says they will charge incrementally.
An initial round of BES funding raised a six-figure sum for PutPlace, primarily from senior technology industry figures, and Drumgoole also benefited from some funding from Enterprise Ireland.
