The Space Monkey Kickstarter campaign has reached it $100k goal in only a few hours. The campaign launched earlier today and it"s designed to help Space Monkey ship and test the first large scale application of their cloud storage solution.
But what exactly is Space Monkey? The short version is that they"re a cloud storage solution with a hardware twist. Just like Dropbox or Skydrive they offer cloud storage to their customers, but unlike those services, Space Monkey actually ships you a physical device.
The small device is basically an external hard drive that you connect to your PC or Mac, set up and then leave connected to your network. Then you simply add your files to the Space Monkey folder on your device and they will be transferred to this external drive and then uploaded to the cloud automatically, without you having to keep your laptop on for hours until the files finish uploading. Once encoded and uploaded your files are spread out across all the other Space Monkey devices out there.
By distributing your files this way you actually have a lot more redundancy than you would by simply uploading them to a data center (or three). And the price of storage comes down dramatically too. Space Monkey, once it goes to mass market, will offer 1TB of storage for $10/month. That is considerably cheaper than all the other cloud storage services out there.
And, according to the team behind the project, there"s another perk in using Space Monkey: it"s green. At least greener than a data center. That"s because a large data center uses tons of energy and manpower for cooling, emergency systems, security and so on. This device only uses a bit of energy for the HDD while cooling and everything else happens passively. Of course that might be more marketing spiel than scientific data but if it"s true it"s definitely a nice bonus.
If this sounds like your cup of tea you can still back the Kickstarter project here, though most of the cool perks are already sold out.