Carbonite, a Boston-based online backup provider, has officially released the beta version of their Android app – Carbonite Access. This announcement expands their mobile portfolio, which already includes applications for iPhone, iPod Touch, and BlackBerry owners.
According to founder and CEO David Friend, the company has backed up billions of photos, documents, and songs. And with their backup technology well developed, Carbonite has turned to the access and sharing side of the storage equation – and considers mobile at its core.
In line with their tagline ‘Back it up. Get it back.’, Carbonite’s Android app allows subscribers to access their backed-up files right from their phones – and organized in the same fashion and folder directory as on their hard drives. Carbonite Access then provides users an intuitive and easy way to share their files over email, social networks, and other apps in the Android Market.
T-Mobile graciously provided BostInnovation with an Android device to test apps, so we signed up for a 15-day free version of Carbonite to test its app functionality. One of our favorite features of Carbonite Access: the ability to listen to your backed up music files instantly. We also liked the photo viewing functionality, allowing you to preview in bulk with thumbnails or full screen if you’re showing them to others.
Carbonite launched in 2006 and competes with another area company, Backupify, which also issued a product expansion announcement today but does not yet offer mobile products. (Read more in depth about Boston’s battle of the backups here.) The key difference between the two companies is that Backupify backs up your data using Amazon Web Services (so on Amazon’s servers in the cloud), while Carbonite backs up hard drive data on their own servers. The companies also offer different pricing packages, where Carbonite sets itself apart in offering unlimited backup for $54.95 a year.
Carbonite landed $6 million in Series A in 2006 from Common Angels, 3i Group and Keiretsu Forum. They went on to raise $20 million more in Series B in 2007 and a $20 million Series C in 2008. And in January of this year $20 million more was infused into the company — bringing its total funding to a hefty $66 million. Carbonite’s 11,207% three-year growth placed the company #9 overall in Inc. Magazine’s Top 500 list this summer. More recently, MassTLC named Carbonite their Private Company of the Year.
