CloudFuze 2.0 for parenting and to help get into the Guinness Book of World Records

As a marketing product person at Technology Company, product releases are a busy time. There are press releases, marketing material, web page collateral and updates to stakeholders including customers, partners, media/analysts and others.

But with the bulk of the marketing work for the 2.0 release behind me, the talk of hybrid storage models, multi-cloud cloud storage management and other industry terminology behind me, I arrived at a weekend that saw fewer new work demands. I finally had a chance to geek out a bit with 2.0. Like many of our customers, I primarily use the CloudFuze web app. I also the Android app for my mobile access for quick things here and there especially when traveling or during personal time. And since I work tech start-up hours, I also like to find occasional opportunities to harass my 3 kids in a way that counts as work.

With that, I would like to present two great use cases that enable CloudFuze customers who use the platform primarily for collaboration and productivity at work to bring CloudFuze into their personal lives. The first is as a parenting tool. The second is to chase childhood dreams.

CloudFuze as a document or file distribution system.

My CloudFuze account links to a Dropbox account that includes separate folders for work and personal. At one point I was using CloudFuze to link to multiple Dropbox accounts (1 personal, 1 for work), but I am actually back down to one. My children work (play actually) from mobile devices and are accessible via email or text. They are also from the texting and YouTube generation, so their digital interactions work better in 140 characters or less and even better with pictures. My wife has professed that they have zero recognition for the human voice and think “phones” are a historical feature on their handhelds that old people use. I also know that they regularly ignore me but pay a little more attention when I am funny which is incredibly rare according to them. Finally, they do not have their own Dropbox or other cloud storage accounts yet. And I long ago learned that the best path to communicating with them was via funny pictures with short text for messaging.

CloudFuze is absolutely WONDERFUL for this. I regularly take or find funny pictures and then resave them with my own captions and use the CloudFuze cloud storage collaboration features (“Share”) to distribute these files to my children. The new password protection function just adds another layer to my humor when I send a text along the lines of “Urgent, secret message being shared…Password DADROCKS”. I also usually include a few random letters with an exclamation point at the end of the text (i.e. DPWL!) to pretend like I am in the know and to get even for the random kid text generation abbreviations that they use to throw me off.

My children can easily retrieve the pictures. Though there is no real reason for it, I can secure the files with a password. And the process is fast and easy enough that I usually receive a sarcastic text back. Who knew that amidst the technology alphabet soup of cloud storage management, hybrid storage models and Dropbox, Box, etc. there was a path to interacting with text generation children?

CloudFuze as a way to organize the increasing volume of files and documents in my life.

Even before CloudFuze, I found myself building an increasingly dispersed empire of files and documents. For nostalgia’s sake, I still keep a limited number of files only on my local hard drive. The vast majority of my family’s personal files ranging from family pictures to other random documents are stored primarily on Dropbox. But I also have a Google Drive account for Google-centric files and to work with people who prefer that service over Dropbox. And somewhere along the way, I added a Box account that I use sort of as an archive for old files that I access less regularly. The natural trajectory of my life primarily for work but also personally already had me pretty immersed in the world of cloud storage management.

But since joining CloudFuze, I have expanded my usage of cloud storage partly for work reasons, but partly on a quest to sit atop the world of file storage. When I log into my CloudFuze web app and can access files from a dozen or so locations, even if some are demo/test accounts, I cannot help but feel a little like Ed Harris in the classic biopic Apollo 13 in which he plays Gene Kranz, the NASA Flight Director leading the massive team at ground control for the Apollo 13 mission. Sometimes when I am using CloudFuze at the office, I like to yell out great quotes from that movie. So as not to digress any more than the original intention, I included a longer list of my favorite Apollo 13 tech company appropriate quotes at the bottom of this blog. “Houston. We’ve had a problem.” This is of course loathed by the technical team since it is my personal code for finding a software bug. In addition to the feeling of Gene Kranz-like power, I also figure that setting a record for most file storage accounts accessed from a single CloudFuze control panel is my most likely path to meeting my childhood aspirations to get into the Guinness Book of World Records.

So while you are using CloudFuze to be more productive at work, I am using it to increase communication with my children, improve as a parent and the chase childhood dreams of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. But more seriously, the use cases noted above provide powerful capabilities to professional workers who must manage files and collaborate. “CloudFuze for document/file distribution” offers customers the ability to manage files across multiple storage services and easily share them with or distribute them to anyone. And “CloudFuze for multi-storage file access” can be an incredible time saver and organization tool. How many times have you searched for a file by logging in and out of multiple cloud storage services where you keep your files? How much time did this waste? With CloudFuze, that problem is eliminated. You gain the ability to access all of your files regardless of location from a universal control panel and search across cloud storage services. Never again will you inefficiently hunt around for a file/document.

As the number of places that files are stored increases and the need to manage files across multiple cloud storage services grows, we at CloudFuze hope to become a bigger part of your work life. If you also have goofy non-business uses like mine, please post them in the comments or contact me directly. Finally, I have included a handful of my favorite quotes from Apollo 13 after the _______

Apollo 13 is an incredible story first and movie second. Though obviously with less at stake (not lives), there are so many parallels to working at a start-up technology company – the intensity, the need to improvise and do it under pressure and with speed, the need to consider difficult challenges as opportunities for greatness, etc..Here are a few additional Apollo 13 quotes with noted relevance:

NASA Director : This could be the worst disaster NASA’s ever faced.

Gene Kranz : With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.

What could better sum up a challenging day at a tech start-up?  Growing small companies is challenging.  Challenges must be viewed as opportunities for greatness.

Gene Kranz : We’ve never lost an American in space, we’re sure as hell not gonna lose one on my watch! Failure is not an option.

See above.  “Failure is not an option” is one of my favorites!

Gene Kranz : I don’t care about what anything was DESIGNED to do, I care about what it CAN do.

Appropriateness: How true is that for a tech startup that designs a product for a specific purpose and then has to pivot and sometimes pivot again to find the use cases that drive value for customers?

Deke Slayton : They’re working on it now.

NASA engineer: I’ll get over there and get an estimate.
Gene Kranz : #*&!@!!! I don’t want another estimate! I want the procedure! Now!

Analysis and accuracy are good things obviously, but in fast-moving industries like the one in which CloudFuze lives, you need to move fast too.