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CozyCloud raises $1.1M to help you build your own personal cloud server
Above: Cozycloud founders Frank Rousseau and Benjamin André.
Image Credit: CozyCloud
CozyCloud, a Paris-based startup building an open-source platform for personal cloud storage, raised $1.1 million (800,000 euros) earlier this month.
“We are building an open platform that allows people to have their web apps and their personal data on hardware they control,” said CozyCloud co-founder Frank Rousseau.
In short, CozyCloud lets you set up a server (based on Android) that provides contacts, calendar, file storage, and email — all under your own control. It supports synchronization with mobile devices and laptops.
All of the apps share the same file store.
“Because all apps can share [the data], they can interact together,” Rousseau said. “For instance, we built a quantified self application that provides visualization of data stored by other apps.”
Other companies have attempted to build a “personal cloud,” responding to concerns about privacy and security with the big public cloud providers. Few have achieved much success. For example, Tonido and BitTorrent Sync offer purely private file storage and media access, Lima aims to do the same thing with a plug-in file storage gadget, while Pogoplug has achieved some success selling small file-storage devices that plug into your home network and can be accessed remotely. More comparable to CozyCloud is ArkOS, a 23-year-old coder’s attempt to give the middle finger to Google with a full-featured suite of cloud apps, all running on a Linux box.
However, none of these projects yet have anywhere near the reach of mainstream cloud services like Google Apps and Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box. Like them, CozyCloud will face challenges in making its tech as easy to use and as convenient as popular cloud services.
CozyCloud says that Orange, La Poste, Alcatel-Lucent, and Mozilla are all evaluating its technology.
The investors are French VC fund Innovacom and Seed4Soft, a French angel group. CozyCom has seven employees and was founded in 2012.
Let’s start by a bit of context. The Cozy project is sill young and started last year. We got an intern team during two months, then we spent 6 months as a team of 3. In Februray the team got bigger and grew up to 8 persons. We haven’t raised significant funds so the team works on quite small salaries. And last but not least, we all work remotely. So as you undertsand, we face three common problems for startups:
Finding motivators for everyone
Having efficient communications channels
Shipping something regularly
Of course there are plenty of others issues more related to business, but in this article I would like to focus on the work organization.
Our light agile organization
Prior to Cozy we read books and blogs about agile principles that we could split in two schools: the traditional and the modern. It gave us a lot of insights on how to do it well. The first one looked really dogmatic while the second one felt more pragmatic. Anyway, we didn’t apply blindly what they said. We extracted the essential parts and used it wisely. To some extent, a loose organization has some benefits for a small team :
no one gets on your way when you do something
taking decisions alone make you faster
you can be very reactive
Of course there are several drawbacks if there is too little organization: no consensus, no clear direction, no one knows the whole picture…. these are likely to make you fail. The purpose of light Agile, as we see it, is to keep the flexibility while getting rid of the major drawbacks : in other words, finding the balance between pure mess and pure agile development. Before going further, let’s see how we opperate :
daily skype meetings at 2pm
weekly iterations that ends every week to a google hangout demo session
every two weeks : one day of physical meeting (for those who can come)
continuous deployment
all our code is on Github, we interact via pull request (libre and open source product)
everyone can work on any project but has specific responsibilities on given projects
we use Trello kanbans as a collaborative to-do list
Benefits
This organization is aligned with the agile spirit. Because we don’t have product owners and don’t make estimations it is not really agile but it give us the opportunity to keep working with autonomy and creativity. The periodic meetings could look too numerous but they are mandatory to share the vision anh keep direct human interactions (we are not robots!). At last the fact that our master branch is always up to date and that we make demo often pushes us to ship regularly. The last problem was to find motivators. But let’s think a minute about what implies this organization:
everyone is in control of what he/she is responsible for
everyon can show his/her progress and is still up to date on how the whole picture evolves
Everyone feels that he/she has an essential role to play
Everyone can add his production to his portfolio
Final thoughts
Until now that worked pretty well for us. But being truly agile means being agile with the organization too. We regularly look for improvements. For instance, this summer we did “focus sprints”. Before that we were all working separately on the modules we were reponsible for. As we needed to make big improvements on two of our applications, we added more agile rules in our process : we shared the same backlog and we introduced rough estimation. These sprints helped us strengthen the team sprit. Today for practical reasons, we are back to our previous organization.
To conclude, I would say that light agile provided us another benefit : our team is flexible enough to use the right organization at the right time.
NB: we would be glad to know how you do with agile as a small startup, let’s share with us the way you do!