Pogoplug blog

Thanks to all of you in our user community, Pogoplug has gained a reputation as the easiest remote access product around. Our polished, friendly user interface makes setting up and using Pogoplug a breeze, especially the ability to share personal photos and videos with friends and family with just a few simple clicks.  We’re excited to announce that the Pogoplug experience is going to be available in a brand new form factor.

Today, Seagate launches their new network adapter based on Pogoplug technologies, the FreeAgent DockStar. The DockStar works with any Seagate FreeAgent Go disk drive to bring you Pogoplug functionality in a new and exciting  form factor. We are excited to be part of such a cool new project and to work with Seagate to bring Pogoplug capabilities to a wider audience. For more information on the project, you can go to www.seagate.com/dockstar.

This is by no means the end of the Pogoplug product from Cloud Engines.  We are committed to innovation around the Pogoplug experience and our hardware device is an important part of our roadmap. We appreciate all of the support and input from our community and look forward to welcoming DockStar as a new member of the Pogoplug family.

Good evening everyone!  Last week we announced that our backorder was coming to a head when a shipment of Pogoplugs reached our distribution center in California.  Today we’re happy to report that we’ve received another shipment and our backorder is officially over.  All outstanding orders have been shipped out and new orders are available to ship by the next business day.

If you’ve been waiting for your Pogoplug, we thank you for your patience as we’ve ironed this out.  For those of you who’ve been waiting for more stock before you placed your order, now’s the best time to snatch up your Pogoplug.

On June 30th we announced a backorder that delayed fulfilling new orders. It’s hard to keep Pogoplugs on the shelf, which we’ll take as a complement.  The high demand for the Pogoplug shows people are really happy with our product and they’re helping us spread the word.  We also know how frustrating this can be for new customers, so we are being as transparent as possible to keep you updated.

Today, we’re happy to report a shipment has arrived to our distributor in California.  This covers a good amount of our backorders, which we’ll start processing immediately, starting at the front of the order queue.  If you placed your order between June 23rd and July 10th, then you’ll be the first wave of customers to get your Pogoplug.  For those of you who ordered a Pogoplug after July 10th, we are doing everything we can to fulfill your order as soon as possible – we expect a quick turnaround and we’ll post again when we have concrete details.

Our product has come a long way since we launched at CES in January, but so far our website has remained static. We are now working on a new site that will launch soon, but we need your help with some of the finishing touches. We’d like to include a real-life “User Testimonial” video section on the site, where you tell us how you use your Pogoplug.

Think about time Pogoplug helped you do something cool- maybe you forgot a file at home during a business trip, saw videos from your loved ones living abroad, or streamed long forgotten music from your home drive to your iPhone. Perhaps your story is completely different- whatever your unique experience, we’d love to hear about it.

If you’re interested, upload your video to the site of your choosing (Pogoplug RSS, Vimeo, YouTube or you can host it) and publish the link in the comments below.  For those of you who don’t want to submit a video you can still participate by leaving us your comments about the video(s) you like the most.  We’ll pick our favorites 2 weeks from today and ten winners will be featured on our new website and will win a Pogoplug t-shirt and 4 GB USB thumb drive. So what are you waiting for? Tell us your story!

As you may know last week, we added HFS+ support to make our drives more Apple friendly. What we didn’t tell you is that we’ve also been working to increase our transfer speeds for NTFS drives. These upgrades make remote uploads so fast, you may not notice that your drive isn’t attached to your computer.

How fast is fast?

To answer this, we conducted tests in the Pogoplug lab, pitting the old drivers against our swift, new make. Using the Pogoplug drive application and we measured the difference in speeds for a large file and multiple small files. Here’s what we’ve found:

Test 1: Uploading a large file (4.77 GB) to an NTFS drive with the upgrade is 600% faster than before!

Test 2: Uploading 10,000 small files (ranging from 1 kb to 977 kb) is 25% faster than it was for multiple small file uploads.

So whether you’re on the go or just too lazy to move that external hard drive to where you’re sitting right now (cough, guilty), you’re all set. With the recent upgrade, writing to your NTFS drive is now more like uploading to your local drive than ever before. If you’d like to add your comments or test results in the comments below, we’d love to hear what you think!

We’re tech addicts and as such, we know how much research happens before you decide to click the “buy” button on for a new product. After all the blogs and forums are read, Facebook pages scanned and Twitter updates checked, nothing is more frustrating than clicking that button and finding out that the gizmo you want so desperately is backordered. As a pre-emptive strike against this frustration, we’d like to let everyone know that we’re backordered.

It seems that our most recent order was snatched up quicker than we anticipated (thank you!), so we’ve put in more orders that will become available in late July. We know, we know- it’s disappointing. We could tell you the story from our perspective (small businesses making sound business decisions sometimes means delayed gratification), but we know that this won’t make the Pogoplug come to your house any faster. For those who are disappointed, we are truly sorry but on the positive side, we’re making improvements all the time. Hopefully by the end of July, you’ll see enough new stuff to make it worth the wait.

As always, we welcome your comments below. You can also follow us on Twitter (@pogoplug) or connect with our user community at www.pogoplugged.com.