Comments on: Fabrik of Storage

By: Netgear Joins the Web 2.0 Party With Dekoh - GigaOM

Netgear Joins the Web 2.0 Party With Dekoh - GigaOM — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:53:27 +0000

[...] isn’t the first hardware company to get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Maxtor back in 2006 teamed up with Fabrik and bundled MyFabrik service and software with its drives. Fabrik has since bought Simpletech, a [...]

By: Brajeshwar

Brajeshwar — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 06:30:55 +0000

Fabrik of Storage…

Abdul Qabiz just forwarded me this article, Fabrik of Storage, from Om Mallik. He talks about a new startup, Fabrik, a San Mateo-based company that plans to reinvent the world of storage. My main interested is because of a person whom very recently I t…

By: Brajeshwar

Brajeshwar — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 14:52:59 +0000

My Fabrik - the marriage of an online and offline media storage…

The web interface is powered by Ajax, making it easy to organize your media files - photos, audio, videos and other documents. The application have smart ways of tagging and organization through folders. Besides the impressive online mechanism that the…

By: Antonio Rodriguez

Antonio Rodriguez — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 16:08:05 +0000

So, my hat is off to these guys for trying this. At Memora we went for exactly this market back in 2000 which was a bit too early, but here are some of the things we found that I do not think have changed:
1. This is a very hard value proposition to sell the the regular enduser
2. The distribution channels for this suck. Margins being what they are, you need to build in a 4x price bump on any HW unless you are selling direct. As as both Memora and Mirra have shown, direct doesn’t scale to any kind of a mainstream market.
3. The “deals” one can make in the industry can really end up backfiring (or worse yet going nowhere) because what you need to do this right is a lot of well written software (especially around the UE) that is tightly integrated with the hardware. At Memora we were talking to Phillips and Linksys and I can say that neither company was particularly good when it came to understanding how to make software/hardware that works like iTunes/iPod.

The final thing is that though the demand side is more educated than it was back in 2000, real credible broadband has advanced in enough ways to make me doubt our original plan to have HW in the basement. In my case I have been floored by Verizon’s FIOS which really does deliver on the possibility of centralized services giving me compute and store “dialtone” from an infrastructure perspective.

Still, I am excited to see where this goes!

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 18:00:01 +0000

yes this is off a working product. that is where i got the screen shot.

By: PanMan

PanMan — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 09:58:47 +0000

Where did you get the screenshots from? Do they have a working product yet??

By: BillyWarhol

BillyWarhol — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 05:32:55 +0000

Very interesting! a friend just asked me how to do exactly that the other day.

Sounds like Fabrik has the answer.

By: Dan Vogel

Dan Vogel — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 19:53:02 +0000

The hardware sounds like a mix of Mirra with what's (jokingly, I hope) being called Web 2.5 (Web2.0, but self-hosted). Interesting.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:59:07 +0000

yes it does.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:03:53 +0000

does it work with Safari?

By: Saul Weiner

Saul Weiner — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:50:27 +0000

I wonder how this will compete with box.net which come in from slightly different angles.

For these services, my guess is it’ll be like search engines: once a company stablishes dominance, they’ll monetize and create customer stickiness in ways we can’t think of right now.