Today Bitcasa, Disrupt Battlefield finalist, has announced a partnership with Samsung to offer Bitcasa’s infinite storage service to all Windows 8 devices sold by Samsung, save for smartphones. This includes tablets, desktops and laptops.
The company has had this partnership in the works for almost a year, according to founder Tony Gauda, but wanted to wait to share the news until consumers could actually go purchases these devices with Bitcasa pre-installed.
For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Bitcasa is a software service that opens up your hardware to have infinite storage in the cloud, with no lag to watch a stored movie or play a song. It works like this: Bitcasa only saves data that is unique to you, while saving only one version of all the redundant data in its system. You might think that the unique data outweighs the redundant, but it’s actually on the contrary.
As it stands now, Bitcasa charges users $10/month or $99/year for its infinite cloud storage, but users who purchase a pre-loaded Samsung device will get two free months of infinite storage space, along with 20GB for free over the lifetime of the device.
But what does this mean for Bitcasa’s revenue?
The company already has a huge influx of users interested in hopping on the service, as evidenced by the total of 30 petabytes of data stored on the site. But partnerships with major brands offers a more B2B-focused business model. This allows Bitcasa to focus on perfecting the service as opposed to bringing in new users, as the big hardware companies can now do that for them.
According to Gauda, Bitcasa has one of the highest free to paid conversion rates in the industry (without getting into too much detail), “but so many people don’t know we exist,” he added. In other words, the distribution here is critical.
Though Gauda didn’t specify the exact terms of the Samsung deal, he did explain that talks have already begun with other major brands to distribute the Bitcasa service. The idea is to have manufacturers spend less on their own hard drives and instead pay a small fee for every device sold with Bitcasa pre-loaded.
If you’re interested in checking out Bitcasa, head over here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/Xxxlxtqybtc/
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