Liquiditätsfalle Cloud: Das passiert, wenn Sie Ihren Cloud-Anbieter nicht bezahlen

Eine Frage, die man sich bei Verwendung von Cloud Diensten möglicherweise erst stellt, wenn sie auftritt: Was passiert mit dem Zugriff auf Dateien bei Liquiditätsengpässen? Lässt Google, Microsoft, Dropbox und co. mit sich reden, wenn man einen, zwei, drei Monate nicht bezahlen kann? Wir sehen zusehends, dass dies für das Management von kleinen und mittelständischen Unternehmen ein großes Hindernis ist, Cloud Dienste einzusetzen. Wir haben das recherchiert und hier einige Auszüge exemplarisch aufgeführt.

Kurze Antwort: Die Anbieter, die wir uns angeschaut haben, lassen keinen Spielraum bei Zahlungsverzug. Zunächst werden die Konten gesperrt, wenn das Geld dann nicht bald auf den Konten der Anbieter verbucht wird, werden die Daten gelöscht.

Dropbox schreibt: “Wird eine Gebühr nicht zeitgerecht bezahlt (…), behält sich Dropbox das Recht vor, den Zugang zu Ihrem Dropbox-Konto und den Dateien zu sperren. Wenn Sie Ihre Außenstände bei Dropbox nicht innerhalb von fünf (5) Tagen, nachdem Dropbox Ihnen den Rechnungsrückstand mitgeteilt hat, ausgleichen, behält sich Dropbox das Recht vor, nach eigenem Ermessen einige oder alle Ihrer Dateien zu löschen, (…)” Vergleiche: https://www.dropbox.com/terms#pricingterms. Übrigens sagt Dropbox zu den kostenlosen Konten, die auch im Unternehmensumfeld viel eingesetzt werden: “Dropbox behält sich das Recht vor, kostenlose Konten jederzeit mit oder ohne vorheriger Benachrichtigung zu kündigen. Unbeschadet der allgemeinen Gültigkeit der vorgenannten Bedingungen kann Dropbox Ihre Dateien ganz oder vollständig ohne vorherige Benachrichtigung löschen, wenn das kostenlose Konto neunzig (90) Tage lang inaktiv ist.”

box.com ist in Deutschland weniger verbreitet, spielt in den USA aber eine große Rolle als Cloud Anbieter. Sie schreiben bezüglich Zahlungsverzügen: “If payment is not received by the end of the given 30 day time period, user’s account will be frozen, inaccessible, and all shared links will be turned off (…). Users retain the responsibility for settling all outstanding balances in a timely manner and maintaining updated billing information. If not complied with, at the end of 90 days, user’s account will be deactivated and all files will no longer be retrievable.” Klingt nicht gut, es geht aber noch weiter: ”Box reserves the right to terminate without notice your password, account or use of Box Services and delete any data within Box service, in our sole discretion, without cause and/or without notice.” Vergleiche: http://www.box.com/static/html/terms.html.

Google Drive ist in Deutschland noch nicht verfügbar, doch findet man in den Englischen billing basics zu Google Drive: “It is possible for your domain to be automatically suspended after a period of time if the automatic payment fails.” Vergleiche: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1224185.

Microsoft Sky Drive, direkt findet sich nichts zum Sperren oder Löschen von Accounts bei Zahlungsverzug, doch schreibt Microsoft: ”Sie verpflichten sich, die Daten, die Sie innerhalb des Services speichern, auch nochmals gesondert durch eine Kopie zu sichern. Wenn der Service Ihnen gegenüber gesperrt oder gekündigt wird, werden Ihre Daten permanent von unseren Servern gelöscht.” Vergleiche: http://windows.microsoft.com/de-DE/windows-live/microsoft-service-agreement.

Was sind die Alternativen?

Einzig eigene Server oder private Clouds bieten die Sicherheit, wirklich die Kontrolle über die eigenen Daten zu behalten. Auch wenn nur gemietet, wird man zumindest die Gelegenheit haben die Daten zu sichern, bevor die Geräte wieder abgeholt werden. Bisher sind kleine Unternehmen und eigene Serverlösungen aus Budget- und/ oder Personalgründen nicht vereinbar. Server zu betreiben kostet erstens viel Geld für den Aufbau der Infrastruktur und zweitens viel Zeit für die Administration. Darüber hinaus sind herkömmliche Lösungen meist überdimensioniert und unnötig kompliziert für das kleinere Büro. Es bleibt, Datenschutzbedenken leichtfertig abzutun, die Probleme in Liquiditätsengpässen zu ignorieren und oben genannten Dienste einzusetzen. Denn Vorteile bringt die Cloud: Neben Produktivitätsgewinn ist sie vor allem skalierbar. Für neue Mitarbeiter werden Lizenzen und Speicherplatz mit wenigen Klicks hinzugefügt, mit verhältnismäßig überschaubaren Kosten. Trotzdem sind noch immer E-Mail Fluten und überfüllte Postfächer im Einsatz.

Wir haben uns bei protonet gezielt diesem Problem gewidmet und eine einzigartige Lösung entwickelt, Datenschutzbedenken auszuräumen, Angst vor Liquiditätsengpässen zu nehmen und kleinen Unternehmen eine IT-Lösung zu geben, die einfach funktioniert. Auf Knopfdruck.

protonet @ CeBIT 2012

Thanks to the betahaus we were able to enjoy our first exhibition “in swimmies”:

Protonet in the coworking area at CeBIT 2012 

Christopher and Henning used the day before the official start to set up the node infrastructure in the coworking area, just outside of hall 2 at the convention center. Ali and I joined Tuesday morning, just in time for our first journalist meeting with the computer magazine c’t. The outcome was more than we could have asked for: an awesome article about our product on heise.de, the biggest German IT online news magazine: http://heise.de/-1467773 (Thank you!).

Amongst laser cutters, 3D printers and crazy betahaus sessions we set up our protonet node, lay out our cebit flyers and got ready to talk all day about wifi, storage, data security, collaboration and our (so we heard) great 70s design. Although we were not directly in one of the exhibitor halls we had a steady flow of interested people coming by and checking out us and the betahaus area.

We also visited a few events that were more or less effective. There were discussion rounds that turned out to be sales attempts (where we decided to use that for our benefit and in turn tried to sell them our stuff) and quite a few networking get-togethers were we met some really interesting people and startups.

We were told not to miss the parties when going to CeBIT, so we took that advice to heart and to be honest - we were quite surprised. Not only did we get drinks everywhere after six o’clock, but most parties also served food and snacks. While talking to people during the day we were invited to some parties that were truly valuable (mostly for the first non-drunken hours though). Our advice: visit the Tobit booth, with free booze and robot strippers you can’t do much wrong.

Talking all day, partying every night, walking and standing around is exhausting. The conferences in the convention center only went from Tuesday to Friday, so we decided to leave CeBIT on Friday. Considering our startup-like sleeping arrangements in a Karate-Dojo nearby that probably was a good decision. All in all this was a great experience for us, both in teambuilding and in sales & pitch practice. Next stop DAX30.

It’s time to get back to serious business! Your Serious Business Officer, Wolfgang

Private Cloud - Knight in Shining Armor

Cloud Services and their beginning.

Remembering the German Windows 7 TV commercial from 2010, Microsoft wanted to explain their cloud service Windows Live; a mother wants to edit a family photo. “Up in the Cloud” she says in German, apparently needing the cloud to edit the picture. She takes a part of one photo and puts it into another, resulting in a nice family picture. Either the viewer asked them self why she needed the cloud to do that or they were confused as to what this cloud is supposed to be all together.

Nowadays cloud computing is pretty much used everywhere, privately and job-related. Applications go from emails and calendars, customer relationship management and many more to backups in the cloud. The named advantages of cloud services are cost savings, flexibility, agility, security against data loss, focus on other things, scalability and collaboration (link). According to Interxion (300 interviewees in Europe) almost 70 percent of European companies have set cloud computing as one of their priorities, 76 percent use cloud services already or at least plan to in near future.

Cloud services have been around for a while, dropbox raised a seven digit figure of funding back in 2007 in the US, round here in Germany it became popular rather late – at least as far I’m concerned. Dropbox probably is that service in Germany that explains cloud computing best to most: Save data somewhere and access from everywhere.

Clouds downsite: Data Security

Dropbox, just like box.net, Google, Amazon, Microsoft or other big players in online data storage and sharing, are US companies. Consequently their servers are mostly located outside Germany and outside Europe. Dropbox uses the Amazon simple storage service (s3). The only European Amazon servers are in Ireland, same with Microsoft. Google has a rather distributed server landscape. Independently of the physical location of the data, American companies are subject to American laws. (Data) privacy is not such a big issue in the US as it is in Germany, see privacy discussion of Facebook as one example (German article). To make matters worse there is the US Patriot Act that allows public authorities to reveal data from customers of US American companies.

The newly appearing idea of the “personal cloud” doesn’t change the data security concerns, although one might think so by the name. Personal clouds allow access to applications from any device, but you don’t keep the data personally. Most use the personal cloud already, for example when synchronizing e-mails on mobile phone, desktop pc and laptop or when using services such as dropbox.

Advantages of Private Clouds

However, there is help (described by another buzz word): private cloud. Applications etc. are taken in-house onto internal company computers. This actually solves the problem since the data stays in-house. Private clouds bring all the advantages described above such as everywhere access, backup service and so on without the downside of data insecurity. Not only companies with data privacy policies and requirements benefit from private clouds, it also suits all businesses with high privacy standards. Usually there is a high cost  for such a set up taking into account computer centres and administration. Adequately, the guiding theme of this year’s CeBIT is “Managing Trust”. After “Work & Life with the Cloud” in 2011, security and safety in the digital world is the logical next step.

Protonet is on track to provide “private clouds” for small enterprises. Low costs, barely administration efforts and transparency are the promises of protonet, keeping all advantages and usability of the own it-infrastructure. You can find us at CeBIT in the betahaus coworking-area in the convention center (cc) outside hall 2. There we will provide the wireless network and present our product and service.

Meet the Team

As of today the protonet core team consists of six employees. We gratefully received an innovation grant from the State Of Germany.

Now it’s time to give you a quick introduction to “who’s who” of the people behind protonet:

Ali Jelveh, Co-Founder & Chief Revolutionary Officer

Ali has been a developer since back when he dropped out of university and needed the money. He started with building minimal billing solutions and grew to build teams and create ERPs for mid-size companies. With the rise of the web he moved from building first small webstores to designing and creating JavaScript architectures for one of the first big social networks. He joined the XING AG as a RoR developer early on where he had the opportunity to meet and work with truly amazing people. This is also where he finally decided to start working on an idea that was simmering in his head for quite some time. He told Christopher about it and the rest is history. When he isn’t working on protonet he spends his time thinking, planning and simulating (cue manic laughter here).

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Christopher Blum, Co-Founder & Intergalactic President

At the age of 16 Christopher founded his own little company, PackYourFiles.com (a one-click share hoster, similar to megaupload, with file compression technology). After finishing school he studied communication design and started working as a freelancer in an online marketing agency. Later he got hired by the largest european social business network, XING.com, where he was mainly responsible for the JavaScript architecture and the integration of a third party app eco system. During that time he met Ali, who also worked at XING. Ali convinced Christopher from the first day on to work with him on protonet. Since then the first prototype was developed after work and on the weekends. Apart from that Christopher is the owner of SpellBoy.com, an online spell checker, that had in its best days more than 100,000 unique visitors per day. In his free time he enjoys playing football or having a cold beer with friends.

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Wolfgang Peters, Serious Business Officer

Early during schooldays Wolfgang developed websites for small local businesses for small money, later he finished commercial high school and studied Business Administration at the University of Kiel in Germany and the University of Tromso in Norway. During his studies Wolfgang worked on several consulting and startup projects. After finishing university in 2011 he started working as Business Analyst for the startup incubator Hanse Ventures in Hamburg. He earned major insights in the startup and venture capital industry and got prepared for founding and administrating an own business. During founder workshops at the betahaus Hamburg he met protonet who were looking for a business guy. After getting to know the product and team members the decision to work together was made. Wolfgang now is in charge of the business stuff, looking at numbers and cash, taking care of marketing and sales, doing everything he can to let the developers develop. Serious business so to speak.

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Henning Thies, Senior Interactive Developer

On the i486 of his parents Henning made his first foot steps on his programming career with Turbo Pascal. In school he got even more interested in the whole computer science, that he decided to study IT and Design in Lübeck. Next to the studies he worked in a small local agency and learned programming for the web. After he returned from a semester at the Universtitat Politècnica de Valencia he went to Hamburg. He started to use Ruby on Rails at Ubilabs and earned a Google Qualified Developer certificate. To finish his diploma Henning went to Kiel an started to develop various web-projects at empuxa. Once done he moved back to Hamburg and continued to work for empuxa out of the Betahaus. There he met Ali, Christopher and protonet. After being under observation for some time, they decided to ask him to join their team to make it even more awesome.  Now he tries to to implement new backend and frontend features. And of course support Ali and Christopher to maintain their growing bug collection. To get rid of all the messy weather-sites he co-founded the website wetterwolke.com.

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Johannes von Bargen, Dynamic Research Scientist

Johannes studied Architecture and Urban Development at HfbK and HCU Hamburg and graduated in late 2008. Additionally he’s very interested in information technology of all kind. Especially when making ones life easier and more fun with its help. Since highschool and througout his university studies he provided Web/Email/Backup-hosting services for small companies and did custom software development. He’s really unhappy with the current situation: People give away even their most private information and data unmindfully and put themselves into the hands of big companies that would sell their mothers soul to increase their profit. By putting his power behind protonet he wants to enable even the not so tech-savvy people to use the power of open source to get in charge of their own data and disburden them from the dependency on third party services.

Contact him via XING.

David Burkhardt, Senior Craft Meister

David had a knack for designing early on: with 17 he won the “Landeswettbewerb Jugend Forscht” with his passively cooled mini-computer. He then went on to design and build his own line of speciality cooling solution for custom PC hardware. While doing that, he started his design studies at the HfbK in Hamburg where he studied under Prof. Löw who incidentally connected him with the protonet project. Since then he turned the mere idea of an enclosure for our unique hard- and software combination into an actual physical thing, designed, built and assembled here in Hamburg. He spends the rest of his time either on his house boat thinking about artsy things, or at the university crafting even more artsy things. Oh and, he’s not only good at design, he’s also a great engineer, perfect combination if you ask us.

And that’s it! Six people to change the world, and now that we’ve finally solved the tough problem of naming our positions, it’s time to get some work done! Expect great things!

You’re kick-ass business dude? Join us!

After three years of hard work and our first shipments behind us - the time has come for us to walk out of the dark and change the world.

Changing the world however is not an easy feat and we can’t do it alone. We need you to help us. This is a life changing opportunity and we’d love you to take this journey with us but before you say yes, here are some things you should know.

What we believe in:

We believe in freedom, we believe that computer can change the world, and we believe in using this power to catalyze true social change and to make businesses and communities less dependent on the big players for they’re most important tools.

We also believe that true fundamental changes happen through the power of your local communities (whether it is a business or private community) and we want to enable these communities with tools that make them strong and independent.

As far as user-computing is concerned we believe the web to be the operation system of the future and we’re preparing our company to be ready and on the (surf-)board when this spectacular wave hits the shores.

What we do:

We’re building the next generation of social infrastructure, a mashup of a mini server - an accesspoint and a distributed social network. With our protonet nodes small and medium enterprises are enabled to create a secure and - most importantly - social infrastructure with the push of a button.

In the long run we’re in fact creating a new kind of operation system meant to one day provide the IT and eSocial needs of SME’s and Communities in general.

Check out some images: http://twitter.com/#!/protonet/media/grid

Some videos on our current splash-page: http://protonet.info/

What you’ll be doing:

Production and supply chain management

It’s a different kind of business, we do hardware, we do software, we do it locally, we do it distributed. you’ll be in charge in creating a supply chain that can handle our needs, and make sure we get our nodes produced in time, in perfect quality and for a good price, we’re going at the hardware problem as we go at the software problem, small iterations, small changes, short cycles. You’ll be helping us build stuff that is meant to last.

Marketing and sales

You should love to sell and since the market we’re catering to does not yet exist you’ll have to build that one too. You’ll be in charge of creating and managing a sales team (in- or outsourced), handling whatever marketing needs to be done to get the company off the ground.

Controlling and funding

As a company we’ll need numbers, we need to always know exactly where we stand, you’ll be creating the framework for us to know the company numbers at any given time. At some point we might take on external investment so you should know how to get that funding. if you don’t know it yet, don’t worry you’ll be able to learn this kind of stuff on the job.

Yes, we know this sounds like a job for a whole team (or several), and that’s what you’ll probably end up building and leading, but right now, our budget allows for just one position and that is yours. Currently all these task are handled internally within our team so you will not be alone on these issues.

How we work:

You’ll get the opportunity to work with some great coders (including 2 ex-XING Architects) an amazing industrial designer and you’ll be meeting a lot of great people in all kinds of fields helping us make this a reality. You’ll be able to tap some massive brainpower whenever you need help on something. Our company culture is a work in progress, as of now we just have one rule: create the most awesome thing you can within the given constraints.

Just as our products are made to last we see this as a beginning to decades long journey, that is why we want to provide a healthy work life balance - we work 9-5 (rather 10-6) and leave enough breathing room for your creativity and skill set to grow. We understand that there is only a certain amount of work that can be achieved in a day, so be smart, keep problem solutions as simple as possible and start on iterating from there.

The pay is decent and there is equity but if you’re looking to earn big from the get go we’re not your startup.

Our office is currently embedded within the great betahaus Hamburg.

If you’re interested and not afraid to challenge the status quo, drop us a line at: team [ät] protonet [döt] info .

Hostapd: Beacon set failed

Right now you’re probably thinking ”Mhhhmm, Bacon” (but no this is about “beacons”).

For our current revision of high-end nodes, we use a motherboard named Asus E35M1-I Deluxe.

This board includes an Atheros AR9280 WLAN chipset which is usually well supported by the default linux compat wireless drivers.

Our software setup (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS3) contains the latest stable version of the HostAP Daemon (v0.7.3) which is compiled with the following build options:

CONFIG_DRIVER_NL80211=y
CONFIG_IEEE80211N=y

Our hostapd config looks a little bit like this:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd
driver=nl80211
hw_mode=g
wme_enabled=1
ieee80211n=1
ht_capab=[HT40-][SHORT-GI-40][DSSS_CCK-40]
channel=6
ssid=protonet-private
interface=wlan0
macaddr_acl=0
auth_algs=1
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0
wpa=2
wpa_psk=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP

And here comes the main reason why I’m writing this blog post:
Whenever we try to start hostapd in verbose mode it shows the following error:

nl80211: Set beacon (beacon_set=0)
nl80211: Beacon set failed: -22 (Invalid argument)
Failed to set beacon head/tail or DTIM period

It seemed like we were the only ones having that issue. Google Search didn’t offer any help. Writing to the linux wireless mailing list didn’t help much either.

So we went with the trial and error approach and therefore compiled hostapd over and over again based on different build configurations.

After 10 days of debugging (seriously!) we finally managed to find a fix.
It turns out that including this build option magically heals hostapd:

CONFIG_IEEE80211R=y

Don’t ask us why enabling Fast BSS Transition (802.11r) solves it. We’ve no idea. If you’re a hostapd developer reading this please enlighten us.

How to save plenty of Cash on HDDs these Days

As you probably already have heard the price of hard drives has increased significantly due to the horrible flooding in Thailand.

• Western Digital, the world leader in HDD production, was heavily affected by the natural disaster
• Seagate, an American company that outsourced its HDD production to factories in Thailand, lowered it shipments estimate
• Altogether it seems that every HDD manufacturer has (or is dependent on) production facilities in Thailand
• Some news sources say the flooding could impact global HDD production until spring 2012 while at the same time the global demand for HDDs is continuously growing

Now if you look at this graph that compares consumer prices of a Seagate 2TB HDD over the last 90 days, you’ll see an increase by more than 100%.

We at protonet are suffering big time from the price drama since we are preparing our first delivery of nodes to our customers.

But, lucky us, we managed to find a way to bypass the increasing of prices (temporarily): It turns out that the prices for external HDD are pretty much not affected yet.

We think this is because those vendors still have big stock reserves. Look at a price comparison of a LaCie 2TB Hard Disk (which contains exactly the above mentioned Seagate hardware):

We even spotted local shops that have plenty of supplies and offer it even cheaper than shown in the graph above.

Yes, you understood correctly: Right now if you need a Seagate 2TB HDD (or any other HDD) it is much cheaper to buy it with an external case than without.

Here’s a list of external cases and their respective HDDs (no guarantees + if you have infos on any other cases please write their spec in our comments we’ll update our list):

• “LACIE hard disk” EAN 3660619318711: Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB (ST2000DL001)
• “TOSHIBA STOR.E ALU 2S”, Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB (ST2000DL003)
• “SEAGATE GoFlex Desk 2TB”, Seagate Baraccuda LP (ST2000DL003)

Launch date is coming closer

About Onlinehelp24: We are about to setup an IT support infrastructure for protonet and have already deployed a handful nodes for early adopter customers.

The last two weeks were totally exciting and absolutely productive. We started to drum up business and focussed on how protonet can be used in the wild :)

Besides of revolutionizing the way people socialize we came up with 2 scenarios where we think that protonet might also bring a big change and benefit for its users.

Moving the world from data-stockpiling corporate social networks with almost no local impact to decentralized infrastructures where everybody can be a social network hoster and have a real effect in his everyday life.

Check out protonet as a office server for small and medium-sized enterprises:
http://protonet.info/docs/protonet_use_cases_smes.pdf

Check out the scenario for travelers at a hostel:
http://protonet.info/docs/protonet_use_cases_hostels.pdf

What do you think? What would be another convenient scenario for protonet?

If you need help setting up your own protonet node at home or at your office, feel free to contact us at protonet@onlinehelp24.net. We’ll deal with all your questions getting it up and running in no time.