September 2, 2013 at 14:07MyApollo social network: all eggs in one basket
If you and I lived in Toronto, you probably noticed a lot of boxes and stands on the streets with advertisements for some new myApollo service. And one day they would not stand it and went to Google to find out what this service is and why it has such an active advertising company. We live, of course, not in a large Canadian city, but we had a reason to find out as much as possible about myApollo. Which one - we'll tell you a little later, let it be a teaser.
So, there is good news: very soon, or more precisely, at the very beginning of September we will be waiting for you to launch a new social network. True, there will be nothing fundamentally new in it, hitherto unprecedented and revolutionary, but its founders swear that once you try it, you will never want any other social networks. What is the trick then? Let's go in order.
MyApollo is the brainchild of Arroware startup Toronto. It was founded by two daredevil fellows Harvey Medcalf and Phil Kinsman, who somehow managed to convince investors that their project was much better than Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive, iTunes and Etsy combined. Perhaps the patriotic ambitions of the developers also played a role: offhand from the Canadian IT companies, I recall only Blackberry, and those things are not going well now, so the guys from Toronto clearly are not averse to raising the image of their country.
Harvey Medcaff, CEO and President of Arroware
As usual, one day the future creators of myApollo came up with a simple thought: why do we communicate with friends, post our photos and videos on one service, and store all our files on another? Why not combine a platform for communication with cloud storage to use only one service? Indeed, if you think about it, then with the current development of technologies (and the role that digital data plays in our lives), it is simply indecent to have so many accounts on so many sites. In general, the Canadian guys thought about it and came up with a powerful data center in which you can also communicate.
MyApollo has everything you need to have a modern social network: a “wall”, a personal profile, the ability to chat with other people, quote, rate, share photos - but all this is served under the sauce of a cloud storage. That is, in contrast to the same Facebook, you can share files of even larger sizes: an hour-long presentation video or portfolio, collected over ten years of work.
According to the Arroware guys themselves, they simply took and removed all the artificial restrictions that developers of existing platforms and even hardware manufacturers put in the way of Internet users. As befits a cloud service, myApollo offers a single file storage with easy access from any computer and mobile device. Roughly speaking, being anywhere in the world, the user can write a post on his page and immediately illustrate it with a couple (dozens) of music tracks from those stored in his cloud storage. Well, or send one of myApollo’s contacts your entire photo album for several tens of gigabytes - let him immediately see who he is dealing with. According to the official website of the service, applications for iOS, Android, Windows and OSX are in development.
On the one hand, nothing new, and all these services have existed for a long time, but so far so that they are not just on the same platform, but also just a click away - not yet. For example, service developers see the possibility of using myApollo as a platform for demonstration and sale by creators of their own graphic work: you can store high-resolution images and source codes of design layouts and discuss conditions with customers within the same service, and completely free of charge.
By the way, the creators of the project promise that they are not going to hand over information about users “to the left” - everything is as transparent and safe as possible. They plan to receive profit only from the placement of banners and targeted advertising. But the service does not have a specific target audience, at least, as the developers themselves say - as they say, young people are dear to us everywhere, old people are always held in high esteem.
It would seem that the idea of myApollo lay on the surface: the guys just took and connected in one service what a modern Internet user needs without inventing anything new. But we know that the new is not only the well-forgotten old, but also wisely updated relevant. Just give people what they want - everything is simple. So, it seems, Jobs was still talking, and he knew a lot about positioning. True, a reasonable question arises: how to squeeze into the already full market of social services, cloud storage and file cleaners, because it will not be easy for the average user to explain why myApollo is better than other social networks. In a word, we need a powerful PR campaign, which is what startups are currently doing. And then it’s up to the “small” thing - to finally launch the service, attract users and not scare them off with minor flaws, which are inevitable in the initial stages of any project. But we believe in the guys from Arroware.
Oh yes, you probably want to ask for a long time why we are posting about some kind of social network in the Dell corporate blog? It's simple: myApollo uses our servers to process and store that huge amount of data that happy users will share with each other on a new platform. Dell designed a flexible infrastructure for myApollo, which can be gradually expanded as the platform evolves. It includes the latest servers, drives and network devices that provide reliable data protection and are characterized by huge fault tolerance. Service will run on Dell M620 blade serversinstalled in the M1000E racks. Network infrastructure will use Dell Force10 switches, in particular, Force10 MXL, Force10 S4810, Force10 S50N and Force10 S60N. And do not forget about the most reliable Dell storage.
In general, we are waiting for the date “X” (the launch of the Android application is already scheduled for September 6) and see what happened with Arroware. Perhaps we will be involved in the creation of a new Facebook or, even better, a new Google.
So, there is good news: very soon, or more precisely, at the very beginning of September we will be waiting for you to launch a new social network. True, there will be nothing fundamentally new in it, hitherto unprecedented and revolutionary, but its founders swear that once you try it, you will never want any other social networks. What is the trick then? Let's go in order.
MyApollo is the brainchild of Arroware startup Toronto. It was founded by two daredevil fellows Harvey Medcalf and Phil Kinsman, who somehow managed to convince investors that their project was much better than Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive, iTunes and Etsy combined. Perhaps the patriotic ambitions of the developers also played a role: offhand from the Canadian IT companies, I recall only Blackberry, and those things are not going well now, so the guys from Toronto clearly are not averse to raising the image of their country.
Harvey Medcaff, CEO and President of Arroware
As usual, one day the future creators of myApollo came up with a simple thought: why do we communicate with friends, post our photos and videos on one service, and store all our files on another? Why not combine a platform for communication with cloud storage to use only one service? Indeed, if you think about it, then with the current development of technologies (and the role that digital data plays in our lives), it is simply indecent to have so many accounts on so many sites. In general, the Canadian guys thought about it and came up with a powerful data center in which you can also communicate.
MyApollo has everything you need to have a modern social network: a “wall”, a personal profile, the ability to chat with other people, quote, rate, share photos - but all this is served under the sauce of a cloud storage. That is, in contrast to the same Facebook, you can share files of even larger sizes: an hour-long presentation video or portfolio, collected over ten years of work.
According to the Arroware guys themselves, they simply took and removed all the artificial restrictions that developers of existing platforms and even hardware manufacturers put in the way of Internet users. As befits a cloud service, myApollo offers a single file storage with easy access from any computer and mobile device. Roughly speaking, being anywhere in the world, the user can write a post on his page and immediately illustrate it with a couple (dozens) of music tracks from those stored in his cloud storage. Well, or send one of myApollo’s contacts your entire photo album for several tens of gigabytes - let him immediately see who he is dealing with. According to the official website of the service, applications for iOS, Android, Windows and OSX are in development.
On the one hand, nothing new, and all these services have existed for a long time, but so far so that they are not just on the same platform, but also just a click away - not yet. For example, service developers see the possibility of using myApollo as a platform for demonstration and sale by creators of their own graphic work: you can store high-resolution images and source codes of design layouts and discuss conditions with customers within the same service, and completely free of charge.
By the way, the creators of the project promise that they are not going to hand over information about users “to the left” - everything is as transparent and safe as possible. They plan to receive profit only from the placement of banners and targeted advertising. But the service does not have a specific target audience, at least, as the developers themselves say - as they say, young people are dear to us everywhere, old people are always held in high esteem.
It would seem that the idea of myApollo lay on the surface: the guys just took and connected in one service what a modern Internet user needs without inventing anything new. But we know that the new is not only the well-forgotten old, but also wisely updated relevant. Just give people what they want - everything is simple. So, it seems, Jobs was still talking, and he knew a lot about positioning. True, a reasonable question arises: how to squeeze into the already full market of social services, cloud storage and file cleaners, because it will not be easy for the average user to explain why myApollo is better than other social networks. In a word, we need a powerful PR campaign, which is what startups are currently doing. And then it’s up to the “small” thing - to finally launch the service, attract users and not scare them off with minor flaws, which are inevitable in the initial stages of any project. But we believe in the guys from Arroware.
Oh yes, you probably want to ask for a long time why we are posting about some kind of social network in the Dell corporate blog? It's simple: myApollo uses our servers to process and store that huge amount of data that happy users will share with each other on a new platform. Dell designed a flexible infrastructure for myApollo, which can be gradually expanded as the platform evolves. It includes the latest servers, drives and network devices that provide reliable data protection and are characterized by huge fault tolerance. Service will run on Dell M620 blade serversinstalled in the M1000E racks. Network infrastructure will use Dell Force10 switches, in particular, Force10 MXL, Force10 S4810, Force10 S50N and Force10 S60N. And do not forget about the most reliable Dell storage.
In general, we are waiting for the date “X” (the launch of the Android application is already scheduled for September 6) and see what happened with Arroware. Perhaps we will be involved in the creation of a new Facebook or, even better, a new Google.