Announcing the release of Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp

After a month long beta we’re pleased to announce the general availability of our product Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp™. The most comprehensive backup tool for business users of 37Signals Basecamp™. Our product backs up all of your data, files and Writeboards and delivers it to you via Dropbox™ or FTP.

We started out by making a product we needed ourselves. We then worked hard to enhance it for our alpha and beta users. Now, we are opening it to everyone. Our users feedback is what shapes the product. We'll be continuing to engage our users and enhance Centripetal Retrieve based on your feedback.

General

• Centripetal Retrieve is a hosted application that runs in the cloud.

 

Features

• Complete Retrieval of all your Basecamp™ Data, Files & Writeboards.
• Control where your data is stored. Choose Dropbox™ or FTP.
• Secured using the latest encryption algorithms when transferring data.
• Stored in non-proprietary formats that you can access at anytime.
• Control when your data is retrieved through our automated scheduling.
• Peace of Mind that you are in control of your data.

 

Pricing

• Plans starting from FREE up to $55/month
• 30-day Free Trial on all Basecamp Backup Jobs

 

Overview Video

 

More Information

• Company Website: http://www.centripetalsoftware.com
• Company Blog: http://blog.centripetalsoftware.com/
• General Information: info@centripetalsoftware.com
• Press Inquiries: press@centripetalsoftware.com
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/centripetalhq
• Product Tour: http://www.centripetalsoftware.com/product_tour/index.html

The global nature of running a startup

One of the things that I love about running my own startup is the chance to interact directly with my customers and other people. In my many years working at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems before that I rarely got the opportunity to meet and talk with customers. There was always the customer support team, or the business development group, or some other group that “owned” the customer. And the last thing anyone wanted was for an engineer to talk to a customer <gasp> who knows what they might say…. So, needless to say it is refreshing to be able to work directly with customers and other people that are connected to my business. This might be helping a customer through a problem they are having and in the process understanding how to make it more intuitive for the next person, or walking a vendor through code explaining the reasoning for implementations (which helps me think it through also). The benefit of the direct interaction is huge for my company and I believe it has been beneficial for my customers as well.

This week has been particularly interesting as we are preparing to launch our product out of beta and into its full release. I found myself smiling at the global nature of a small startup and somewhat awed by the reach that the internet of today allows. So much of this wasn’t possible even 5 years ago, well maybe technically possible, but highly unlikely at least. This week alone I have been on Skype with customers in Colorado, Florida and Switzerland; exchanged multiple emails with customers in New York, UK and Australia; interacted through web tools with developers and writers in South Africa, Philippines, China and India; worked with my test team who are distributed in places like India, Canada, Chile and the USA. All of this from my tiny office in Carpinteria, CA. The world is getting smaller.

What's Your Problem?

I often go back and read Getting Real from the guys at 37Signals. It’s a great book (available online for free) about keeping things simple in the software world. Every once in awhile I start to freak out about my business and fell like I need to go get lots of venture capital so I can hire lots of people so I can build tons of features…. Well this is exactly what Getting Real addresses. I was just re-reading the essay titled “What’s Your Problem?” and thought I’d share a bit about how Centripetal Software got started. The premise of this article is that you should build software for yourself because then you’ll be more passionate about it and you are your own user so you can make more informed decisions more quickly.

I have a 4 year old son. When he was born we needed a way to share his life with our families around the world, so I started up a free blog on Blogspot. That turned into our family picture album, we have about 1500 posts over the 4 years including some 5000 pictures and 300 videos not to mention all the stories written down to go with each post. About a year ago I started to realize that this was more than just a blog, it was really our only family album and it had a lot of memories in it, and I realized I really didn’t want to lose it. I started looking around for a way to save it off, but there was nothing out there. So, as any good software developer would do, I started to build my own. At first I was looking to build something to allow us to print it, but that had its limits, so I moved onto more of a backup solution that would allow me to have a local copy of the blog. As I got deeper into the implementation of this I started seeing that it would work for other things that I did online, the first of which was my Basecamp account. I built out some rudimentary integrations with Basecamp to meet my needs. As I began using Basecamp more and more there were more and more things I needed to backup and eventually (after a couple complete re-writes of the code) I had a pretty stable piece of code.

It was one day as I was looking for something in the Basecamp forums that I realized that my little homegrown application might have a broader appeal as there were quite a few people in the forums asking for pretty much exactly what I had. That is when I decided to try to make a product out of my tool. After reworking the solution some so that it would allow other people to use it I threw it out there for some people to try. I was given lots of feedback and was able to iterate on it and improve it quite a bit. I was blown away with the response I got and people were really excited about having a solution like mine available. The time I was investing in this was beginning to be somewhat taxing, so about 3 months ago we took the plunge, I quit my job at Microsoft and went out on my own with the hopes of creating a real business out of this.

Fast forward to today and we have come through a successful beta period with the application and we are officially launching the product on Monday, Feb 1, 2010! We’ll continue to build out the things that we need for ourselves and work hard to keep a solid, stable, working product for our customers that is simply a joy to use.

Article: Why you need a SaaS Strategy

There is a great article over at Information Week about why companies need a SaaS strategy. Hosted business applications as a market in itself is still quite new and is something that many businesses are just starting to explore. It’s imperative that IT departments take a long term approach to their adoption of cloud applications.

While SaaS shifts software deployment and maintenance burdens to the service provider, freeing up resources for other projects, IT is at the mercy of the provider for availability, data security, regulatory compliance, and other key issues. Outages will halt business, and poor response times will hamper productivity. SaaS apps aren't just a nice-to-have. Three-fourths of companies using SaaS consider application services extremely or critically important to their organizations, according to our InformationWeek Analytics survey of 281 business technologists, including 131 who now use SaaS. About one-third describe their SaaS apps as mission critical.

When Cloud applications become mission critical to a business there is an imperative to extend core IT principles to those cloud applications. Clearly this is a concern for many who are investigating SaaS adoption:

Data ownership is also a big obstacle, with 31% citing it as a reason they're not using SaaS. In speaking with SaaS vendors, they say security, privacy, and portability are the three objections they hear most. Portability will likely be one of the biggest worries this year, as companies pour more data into these apps and, having gained some SaaS experience and seen the growing number of choices, start switching providers.

The author goes on to discuss 9 key areas that need to be addressed when adopting SaaS applications for your business. A couple of them are items that I am consistently touting from my little soapbox in the world.

Have a detailed exit strategy. If you do cancel, can you get your data back, and in a form that you can use? This will become one of the biggest questions around SaaS in the coming year, as companies put increasingly vital information into these platforms, in increasingly large quantities. So make sure you have a plan to move data when you want to change providers, or bring the solution back in-house.

When you are putting your critical business data into someone else’s database and storing your important documents on someone else’s hard drive you need to be sure that you can get it out for any reason. That might be that you want to switch to another provider, you might want to integrate it into other applications, or it might just be that you want to have a full backup copy of it. Whatever the case you need to make sure that any cloud application you sign up for provides this capability or there is a third party tool that will allow you to extract that data for you.

Create a contingency plan. With SaaS, we haven't left the concept of five nines behind. While satisfaction levels are high for SaaS, IT must have a backup plan for apps that can't go down or data that can't be lost. It's critical to classify the type of data you need to back up.

Even though your SaaS provider will tell you that they are backing up your data for you any IT department worth their salaries will be skeptical of that. Until you have seen the backup data and know that you can access it when you need it you should keep looking for a backup solution. Fortunately there are beginning to be a number of third party services that can backup data for you from online applications and deliver that data directly to you.

 

Read the Full Article

Cloud Computing Trends

Cloud adoption is rapidly increasing. Companies are moving more and more towards adopting applications to run their business where the application is not run on their computers, but is run as a hosted service deployed in the cloud. Many organizations see the economic benefits of not having to maintain their own IT infrastructure specifically real time storage, availability, 24x7 support and backups. This is one of the touted benefits of Software as a Service, your company no longer needs to think about managing IT infrastructure. The IT department doesn’t need to be thinking tactically about how to keep the business going, instead they can begin to think strategically about where the business needs to go from a technology standpoint. However, even as companies move more and more of their computing to Cloud based applications, they are still wary of losing their critical business data and about controlling security across all of their applications. While cloud application adoption can free up IT departments to think more strategically then simply cannot ignore the day to day technology operations of their company.

One trend that I see emerging is the need to back up the data and files stored in these cloud based applications. Most "cloud backup" companies provide the functionality to back up a PC or a datacenter server and store the data in the cloud for you to access at anytime and from anywhere. I see that there is a need to go the opposite way, i.e.. take my data out of the cloud and let me keep my own copy of it, maybe even integrate it into my existing backup processes. It is true that most large cloud application providers like Salesforce can likely do a much better job of managing a datacenter than the average small or mid size business, but even the big guys can screw this up (Look at the TMobile/Microsoft Danger disaster). Not to mention that the majority of cloud applications out there are actually hosting their applications on cloud infrastructure that they do not own, thus essentially outsourcing all of their own IT. The cloud applications that you are using likely have many more layers involved and so getting data restored in the event of a disaster may not be as simple as calling up your vendor.

I’m not trying to be gloom and doom over here, but there are certainly things to think about as you move to adopting cloud based applications. The issues can all be overcome quite easily and the benefits to cloud applications do far outweigh traditional software in many situations. Be brave about adopting cloud applications, but be diligent to control the data that is important to your business.

Weekly Release

We’ve been working hard on the final push for our public release of Centripetal Retrieve so there isn’t a whole lot in our weekly release to the beta app. We’re shooting for launching out of beta by the end of next week, probably official announcement on the Feb 1, 2010. There were a couple little items that went into our release this week, here they are:

In the Web Application:

• We did a revamp of the Status logs. This allows you to view all the details of the history of a Basecamp Backup job. From the initial configuration of it through all that happens on each run of it. One thing we had in there for out beta was a pretty nasty looking field that would usually drop exception stack traces from the code on errors. That is really a debugging field for internal use, so we took that out of the view that the user gets and replaced it with a more informative message.

In the Core Engine:

• We continue to fix bugs as we find them. There seem to be an unlimited number of permutations of how FTP servers were implemented so as we run more and more jobs we with different FTP servers we uncover more issues with storing to them. This was the bulk of the bug fixes for this round in the engine.

Help Files:

• We added a new help topic on setting up Dropbox and figuring out if you have enough space to store your Basecamp files there. We’ve been trying to add a screencast vide to each help topic to make it a little easier to understand. Here is the video from that How-To:
  
  

 

Stay Tuned for more next week.

5 Steps to Protect Yourself from Computer Data Loss

Here’s a good blog post on protecting yourself from data loss on your computer. I would assert that companies need to take many of the same steps to protect their data and files even as they move those files onto online applications. Make sure that you are creating your own backup of your data and files in those online applications in order to protect them.

Excerpt:

The Apple bug illuminates the need for computer users to take necessary steps to protect their data. Anyone who uses a computer, even a great one, is at risk for data loss. An operating system crash is only one cause of data loss. Others include, theft, user error, and lost media. While data loss may be rare for each individual, it only takes one instance to wipe out months, perhaps even years of irreplaceable data.

- blog.engyte.com

Read the Article

40 Creative Uses For Dropbox

Interesting article over at MacStories.net on lots of great ways to use Dropbox besides just file syncing. I’ll add another to the list in that you can store backups of your online application files and data like Basecamp, Highrise, or any others.

Excerpt:

Dropbox is a great service: it allows users to keep everything (yes, everything) in sync between multiple devices. I daily use Dropbox in my workflow to backup my Yojimbo library and share stuff with my friends and co-workers, and I’m very satisfied. If you’re new to Dropbox, you can signup with this referral link and, besides testing the service, you’ll make me earn 250 extra MB. (and I will thank you in one way or another)

Anyway, there are many creative yet less known uses for Dropbox. In this roundup I’ve collected the best I found around the web

- MacStories.net

 

Read the Article

Article: 5 Basecamp iPhone Apps

As you undoubtedly know, Basecamp is a simple and effective online project management system. And a few fortune 500 companies are even using it. One of the things Basecamp did from the beginning – and did well – was open itself up through its API to developers, in order to develop outside products and services. Well, being small, open, and extensible, has its advantages and one of those advantages includes the quick and simple development of outside Basecamp iPhone Apps. But which one should you choose?

 

See the Article

Article: Best Remote Backup Services

Remote backup and storage is not just for big corporations anymore. You too can get your data backed up at a secure remote location at very minimal fee. If you just want to prevent data loss for your most important 2GB of files, you can even get a backup solutions free-of-charge.

See Article

Weekly Release

We’ve pushed out our weekly release this week which sets our our product for it’s public launch very soon. Here’s a breakdown of what’s in this release:

In the Web Application:

• We had a lot of beta users asking for the ability to update account information. We just hadn’t added it yet. Well today it is now there. You can now update Basecamp, Dropbox and FTP account information. Access it from the main console as seen in this screenshot.
• Part of allowing editing meant we needed to have more information available on the Console so we rolled out some console UI changes that we had been working on. Now there is an accordion view of all of your jobs. Clicking on one of them opens up the detailed information about the job.

• In response to our beta users requests we have added an additional plan that allows retrieving files and data for Basecamp plans with up to 30GB of files stored. This is our Gold plan. We’re testing against the 75GB Basecamp plan as well and should have that available soon.

In the Core Engine:

• The reason we don’t just support all of the files and data that you want to have retrieved is that it is actually somewhat difficult and error prone to retrieve huge data sets across the internet. There are so many network issues that can go wrong and we are dealing with lots of different networks. In order to retrieve your files from Basecamp and deliver them to you, we have to access your Basecamp account to get the information about your files, access Amazon where your Basecamp files are stored, and then access your FTP server or Dropbox to store your files. We have been doing extensive testing to capture all of the corner cases of transmission errors, access errors, FTP server intricacies, and whatever else can happen. As part of rolling out our Gold plan we have also rolled out support for the in our Core Engine. This includes a lot more error handling and retry mechanisms to make sure that we get the files and data that we need.

Board of Advisors

Our Advisory Board consists of a few, carefully selected individuals with a vast amount of experiences, and coming from diverse backgrounds. Our advisors are there to provide us with a personal, confidential, trusted sounding board and to help guide our company as we navigate the waters of being a software startup.

We are pleased to welcome 3 new members to our Advisory Board:

Cordell Baanhofman

Vice President of Technology and Corporate Development
Patient Education Systems

Tyler Morgan

Nonprofit Finance and Operations Treasurer
Reality Carpinteria

Joseph Rehfeld

General Partner
Noble Investments

Check out our Advisory Board page on our website for more information about each advisor.

Weekly Release

Happy New Year! One of the big items that we’ve been hearing from our beta participants is that FTP is a nice way to get their files to them, or at least it would be if they had an FTP server…. FTP is sort of an antiquated technology that is still around and used all over the place, but not everyone just has access to a FTP server to store hordes of files on whenever they want to. They have FTP servers for their websites or some other specific purpose, but they don’t want their backups going there. We knew it was going to have limited appeal, but we felt strongly that it was most important to be able to give your data and files to you as opposed to storing them somewhere else in the cloud. Many people have questioned the value of storing their backups on yet another cloud storage system and we wanted to make sure that you get what you want.

So we’ve spent quite a bit of time investigating other options that meet the criteria of giving you your data in a way that doesn’t require custom FTP servers to be setup. There are surprisingly a ton of options out there. We’ll be building out many of them in the near future, and with this weeks release we have already implemented one of them. The current  release that is at https://beta.centripetalsoftware.com now provides you with the choice of having your Basecamp files and data delivered to you via Dropbox using your own Dropbox account. We still provide the ability to use FTP if you still want to. We love this feature for our own backups! When the backup is running you actually see the files getting synced to your computer via the Dropbox client and you can also access all of the files through the Dropbox website using your account. We then add our Dropbox folder to the formal backup process we have running and all of our Basecamp files and data are stored on secure backups! Give it a try and let us know what you think.

That was the main feature we worked on, but there was other stuff in this release. Here’s a quick run down of the changes we pushed out today:

In the Web Application:

• We did another test run with UTest which found a number of bugs in the validations on our data entry screens. These all got fixed.
• There were a number of broken links that got fixed. These were due to the new website we rolled out last week.
• We added in the new Dropbox choice and configuration screens so that you can get going with Dropbox.

In the Core Engine:

• FTP is a little frustrating on our side as well, there are a million different FTP servers out there that all seem to have little nuances that cause problems with our system. We discovered some issues with the DriveHQ FTP servers, we got that fixed up so that you can use the free and paid accounts with DriveHQ.
• Then the big feature mentioned above, most of the work happened in the core engine to store the data to Dropbox. Check it out.

Stay tuned for more big changes up in the next week or so.

How to get useful feedback for your product or website

Running a Micro ISV software startup is a lonely job. It's not like I don't have friends to have coffee with or go surf with, but there just isn't anyone who cares about my product that I can chat with on a daily basis and bounce ideas off of. That's a tough thing, because it is so important to be able to have a feedback loop. I've been a developer for 15 years building back end servers, services, reusable components, compilers and languages and lots of other lower level computing stuff. I feel like I can certainly build software. However, running my own company also requires me to be able to make things look pretty and get my messaging crisp so that I can sell my products. This is where my company needs that feedback loop.

Why friends and family feedback sucks....

I initially tried to go to the people I already knew, friends, family, friends of friends, etc. This generally doesn't pan out for me too well. People seem to fall into one of three groups: First is the group of people that just plain have no idea what I do. These people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between my product and an IPhone, let alone understand how to help craft a message that will help sell my products or give me relevant feedback on pricing plans and UI layouts. It's nice to hear their encouragement at times if for no other reason than to hear that someone out there thinks I am smart (thanks great aunt Mildred...);

The second group that I've run into seems to fall into the camp of people that certainly have the aptitude to understand what it is I do, and likely have the ability to provide detailed, relevant feedback on everything I am doing. Many of these people could certainly be in my shoes running this company, building this software if they wanted to. Sure they like to hear about my experiences using .Net 4.0 and the new Parallel Extensions, or they are interested in hearing how the Quartz scheduler is working out for me. These people will even help me out by answering technical questions when I am in a pinch and would probably even write code for me if I begged hard enough. But they truly, just aren't all that interested in what I am doing. Sort of the same way that I could care less about Ruby on Rails or Adobe Air, but still talk tech with my friends who live and breath those things. For this group, I keep on plugging my product and hope that one day some of them will care enough to take an interest, but the best I get for now is a half hearted, short winded answer;

The final group that I'll put people in for the purposes of this conversation is people who think I'm just absolutely crazy for leaving a posh, high paying, "secure" job at Microsoft to follow some hair brained idea I have and spend all my savings for what they see as sure failure and financial disaster. Of course they are way too nice to say any of that, and also way to nice to provide any critical feedback so everything I ask of them is met with a polite answer of how good it looks or how well I am doing. The best I get out of them is a cup of coffee because they can't stand to see me spend my child's college fund at Starbucks. I guess that is worth something.

So where do I get useful feedback?

So in order to get good, constructive criticism on what I am doing and what I should be doing, I've taken to paying people for it. My company has become quite dependent on services like usertesting.com and utest.com for getting feedback on how things work and what people's impressions are of my products and marketing. It's nice to get this feedback from these places because it is unfiltered. These are people I never meet, likely never will meet, and all of their feedback is offline, meaning that they record it or write it up and send it to me. I've learned a lot and made a ton of changes based on the feedback I've received from these services. Someday soon I'll write up a separate review of those services. The one thing that the feedback I received from these services lacked for me was credibility. I find myself still wondering if a suggestion is the best thing to do and still have no one to bounce the ideas off. So I went in search of something more.

There are plenty of blogs, sites, podcasts, books, etc out there on software startups, and I read my fair share of them. There are a few however that played a part in helping me to take the plunge of quitting a high paying, "secure" job at Microsoft and spending my savings on running my own company. One book in particular is "The Web Startup Success Guide" by Bob Walsh. He has a great podcast and blog as well. Bob's writings really gave me a lot of the confidence that I could be successful and helped me to take the plunge. So when I found out that Bob has some consulting services where he provides website reviews and marketing type feedback and advice, I naturally decided to give it a try. For the money I don't think there is any better option out there. Bob provided me with candid feedback that was highly critical but was backed up with advice and thoughtful options for getting on the right track. Our working relationship started out on a Thursday morning as I sent Bob an email asking for a review. Within an hour Bob called me and we set the whole thing up. By the following morning I had a detailed, written review of my website and marketing message. We then had an almost 2 hour phone conversation the same day to follow that up during which he walked me through his comments, and went into much deeper detail as well as answered my questions and brainstormed some ideas. The time spent was well worth it and I came away with tons of actionable work items for improving my message as well as my overall site. If you're in need of some seriously constructive criticism of you product site and your message, you need to talk with Bob Walsh.

New Website and Open Public Beta

I've already finished implementing many of the suggestions that Bob gave me in this review, there are certainly more coming. The culmination of the majority of his guidance and critique can be seen now in the new Centripetal Software website that was recently published. There are still more items that will be done over time, but I'd really appreciate any feedback on the new site. In addition to publishing the new site, I've also been slaving away at new features within the Centripetal Retrieve™ application. The current release that was published a few days ago, opens up our beta to anyone wishing to participate, it is no longer a closed beta. If you are interested in controlling your data and files that you store in 37Signals Basecamp™ product then check out the Centripetal Retrieve™ for Basecamp™ product. While in beta we are not charging for the service. There are lots of new features getting added on a weekly basis also.