Space Monkey has launched its Kickstarter project.
It’s been about a year since we registered for Space Monkey updates. But it looks like the "next generation cloud" service + appliance is getting closer to reality.
Like many new networking products, Space Monkey has realized that Kickstarter is the way to go to get both capital and exposure to achieve critical mass.
Space Monkey’s basic concept uses a distributed private cloud of appliances that sit in subscribers’ homes and offices to store user data. Your data gets broken into encrypted pieces that get sprayed around in a reverse BitTorrent-esque way to Space Monkey boxes.
Space Monkey’s "data center"
Each box has a hard drive (looks like a 1 TB drive from the photo below taken from the Kickstarter page) and a small board with a SoC that handles all the Space Monkey magic.
Space Monkey appliance prototype
Unlike other attempts at distributed-private-cloud storage like BuddyBackup, Space Monkey ain’t free. One Terabyte of storage will cost you $10/month. And don’t forget that you’ll be contributing a small amount of power and some goodly portion of your internet bandwidth to create Space Monkey’s "distributed data center".
If you need more convincing, check out the video. Or if you already are sold, you might be able to still grab a Terabyte of storage and a Space Monkey box for $99 on Space Monkey’s Kickstarter page. After the 501 of those are gone, this will cost you $119. We’ve signed up for ours, and will report on the Space Monkey experience when the "estimated deliveries" take place this July.