Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

I wrote several times about nice solutions for portable applications in my blog including the solution that U3 offers. The problem - if you see it as a problem - with U3 is, is that it is a proprietary solution that only comes pre-installed with certain USB sticks. Well, John T. Haller, the developer behind numerous portable applications (like Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.org), has come up with his own portable U3-clone that is actually open source! It's briljant! PortableApps Suite is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, sudoku game, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you're ready to go. Sweet! Just head over to his website PortableApps.com and give it a spin on your USB-stick!

One of my readers (Joel Eland) commented on my Portable comparison story in which I tried to outline the current range of portable devices for us digital nomads that travel a lot. And although I have been very charmed by the solution that MojoPac offers, there are also a few hardware-based solutions out there that look very promising. One of them, as pointed out by Joel, is Project BlackDog:

BlackDog is a fully self-contained computer with a built-in biometric reader and a host of other powerful features. Unlike any other computing device, BlackDog is completely powered off of the USB port of your host computer – no external power adapter required!

To access and use your BlackDog, you merely plug it in to your host computer’s USB port and BlackDog takes over! Your host machine’s monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Internet connection are taken over by BlackDog for the duration of your session, when you are done, you simply remove BlackDog and everything on the host is returned to its original state.

Now, what is so cool about this one, is that it is actually a small Linux server (Debian based). The fact that it is a hardware solution with biometric access makes it safe as well. Too bad it is $199,- for a mere 256mb.

Here is a little promotional video for it (I sure wished I could test one of those things!)

Blackdog in action

I can't remember when I had such lengthy discussions with the VP of any company, as I have been having with RingCube's VP of Business Development, Katya Falakshahi in the last few days. They must be working around the clock there (the same work ethos I remember from my time at Lost Boys) to redeem themselves and make their product a success. And as I mentioned many times now: I do like their product. It is easy to use - when they don't screw up with a bad update - and it actually is a brand new approach to portability. In fact I have tested and tried the product from that other startup I mentioned: Moka5 LivePc, and it's nice, but you don't get Windows (it's basically VMware beefed up with preinstalled Linux environments) and performance is really bad. I'm sure there is a market for those virtual environments, but I suspect performance will always be worse then what MojoPac has to offer because MojoPac seems to be a native solution and does not carry the overhead of a full virtual environment that emulates a complete PC like VMware does.

But back to the subject: I as I mentioned in my post yesterday, I wrote another email to RingCube asking them to go more into detail about their timing for closing down the forum, update policies and their support. And as it turns out they definately are listening to their users - such a myself.

Here is the nitty gritty in short:

• As it seems RingCube has no control over their own website but they depend on (a 3rd?) party to make the updates they want. I can see where a start-up would like to focus on their product and have their website outsourced, but it seems that this has now backfired on RingCube. Not to mention that I would not find it acceptable that another party decides to have their own time scheme for updating - especially when a major glitch occurs. In fact their website still mentions the forums as a way of support even now it has been taken down.
• The good news is that their new support approach will be both a FAQ and a forum (which I think is good for building a community!) - and email off course.
• In the future updates will show a changelog prior to installing an update and people will be able to opt out of updating
• The next update will have two major issues fixed: first the serial number issue and a "RS1 fix (this is an error that people were getting when connecting to some PCs in corporate domains.)"
• The MojoPac demo version will have a 100 boots before it stops working: so people can try out MojoPac more frequently before they make a decision to purchase.
• The special introductory price of $29.99, with up to three additional licenses available for just $14.99 each will extended with the new update. After that the price changes to a one time fee of $49.99, with up to three additional licenses available for $24.99 each.

As before you can read the whole conversation below and I included my response as well. Now let's see if MojoPac can keep their promises. Continue reading "MojoPac to redeem themselves" »

Apparently launching a new portable software solution isn't that easy: after a major glitch in their software (making it impossible to install on some devices) MojoPac just shut down their forums, citing "an overwhelming number of requests from many of you who asked us to revamp our forums." Sounds more like a corporate spin doctor at work. As I wrote Thursday, I was very much surprised frustrated with the way RingCube (a start-up company from Mountain View, California) is handling the problems they have after they managed to shoot themselves in foot, by launching a new version of their portable software solution, MojoPac.

Imagine my surprise when the person leading the marketing and business development department at RingCube, the parent company of MojoPac, herself, found time to contact me by email! Talk about 1:1 support...

At first I was impressed, but after a while I felt like she was just dodging bullets: we had a lengthy conversation by email, but in effect I feel she kept just focusing on the part where I doubted the 5% figure RingCube gave for the percentage of USB discs not working with MojoPac after they implemented the serial number check. Also she emphasized on how fast MojoPac responded to emails (which is nice, but I rather have a response that takes longer but has the right answers, than one that actually gives me wrong information) and that they really are redesiging the forum. Also she defended things that I never commented about (like deleting someone's post in the now non-existing forums), which I found odd...

As someone else commented in his blog:

nevf Says: October 6th, 2006 at 9:50 am
(...)In case you weren’t aware they’ve recently received $US4M in VC funding from New Enterprise Associates (www.nea.com). You would think they’d use some of this to get on top of the forums problems, pronto. I mean that is something that is easily doable, whereas resolving the software problems is more challenging and will no doubt take some time.

I have to wonder if the VC folks are at all concerned about the debacle that is unfolding. Likely not as I’m told it is just a numbers game for them. You win some, you loose some.(...)

Don't get me wrong: I still like the whole MojoPac concept, but I just find RingCube's way of handling problems really strange. You do not put a gag on an effective way of communicating just because a certain percentage of users (allegedly) doesn't understand how to use it.

The timing for doing this (just after a major glitch in the software comes up) is just ridiculous.

Anyway, here is the full conversation with some remarks from me. Read how RingCube VP of Business Development, Katya Falakshahi goes into the details of some problems that MojoPac has since they came out with a failing update that introduced a huge glitch in their software and defends their decision to shut down the forums. Continue reading "MojoPac problems part deux" »

About two weeks ago I wrote about this new portable solution called MojoPac. I was pretty amazed about the way it works and how it actually is a new approach to the problem of portability of software and data. I installed it on my 2inch Trekstor 30gb USB 2.0 external drive and installed stuff like Office 2003 and other software on it. It worked like a charm: sweeeet! Until this weekend when I fired it up again and got notice that there was an update to the software. Off course I tried to install that newer version of the beta I got. Big mistake. As soon as I tried to install the update I got an error telling me that the update was unable to install because of the fact that my USB drive did not have a valid serial number. Excuse me?

Now, getting an error is one thing, but it also effectively locked me out my MojoPac installation because it would not start it up anymore and just kept coming with the same eror message and then would exit. Arghhh! An infinite loop!

So first I mailed MojoPac support and off course I turned to the MojoPac Forum for some help. Low and behold: there were more that 1700 people that viewed a topic called "What's up with the serial number". Mind you: the most views of ANY topic in their forum that before this happened was in a state of coma.

Anyway, what unfolded was the worst case scenario of 'support' I have seen in a while from a start-up. They even took down their Forum. because of all the negative reactions they got there!

Bad Mojo! Continue reading "MojoPac causes bad Mojo" »