YC-Funded AeroFS: It’s Like Dropbox, But It Runs Inside Your Firewall

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

I’ve been a fan of Dropbox for a long time. It’s convenient, it ‘just works’, and 2GB of free storage can go a long way. But it isn’t perfect — if you’re dealing with very large amounts of data, like movie footage, then you’ll quickly find yourself in the service’s most expensive tiers. And some businesses and professionals dealing with sensitive data simply aren’t permitted to store it on third-party servers for security reasons.

If any of these concerns sound familiar to you, you’ll likely be very interested in a Y Combinator-backed company called AeroFS. The pitch is straightforward: it’s basically Dropbox, but instead of using servers controlled by a third party to store and sync your data, you transfer the data directly between your own devices.

If you’ve used Dropbox, you’ll feel right at home with AeroFS. After installing small clients on your computer (the service supports Windows, Mac, and Linux), you drag and drop the files you’d like to sync between machines into a special folder, called a Library. Add a file to that folder, and it’ll automatically sync to your other devices, which send the data to each other through peer-to-peer connections rather than through a third-party server.

This setup a few benefits. For one, it means that your data is never stored on AeroFS’s servers, which makes it appealing for the aforementioned companies that can’t use cloud services like Dropbox. Second, it means you can sync as much data as you’d like without having to pay for additional server-side storage, making it appealing to people who deal with large amounts of data.

Of course, this peer-to-peer system has one downside. Unlike Dropbox, which lets you access and sync your data any time you have an Internet connection, with AeroFS there’s an additional requirement: you can only access a file that’s stored on a different machine if that machine is turned on. Say, for example, you edited an important document on your desktop machine at home, then jumped on a flight and attempted to access it a few hours later from your laptop. If you forgot to leave your desktop machine turned on, you’d probably be out of luck.

AeroFS founder Yuri Sagalov acknowledges this could potentially be an issue, but says that in many cases it isn’t really a big deal. One reason why, he explains, is that many offices already have servers and computers running all the time anyway; they can just install AeroFS on these machines and use them as their main datastores.

And AeroFS gives you another option for those mission-critical files: you can opt to selectively backup certain folders to AeroFS’s servers, which means you can access the files at any time. This feature is essentially a clone of Dropbox, and you lose the security benefits of a purely peer-to-peer sync. But it makes sense — you probably have some files that you’re fine storing in the cloud, and others that you’d rather keep inside your firewall. AeroFS gives you the flexibility to have it both ways.

The company says there’s a big market for this, particularly among healthcare providers, lawyers, finance firms, movie professionals (who can use it to securely share content between machines), and other companies who have data that can’t leave their internal firewall.

AeroFS also has an impressive list of backers. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham says that company is one of the most important from any of the firm’s batches. Other investors include Ron Conway, Ashton Kutcher, Andreessen-Horowitz, Ash Patel, Jerry Yang, Naval Ravikant, Chris Sacca, Ace & Company, Geoff Ralston, Paul Buchheit, and Maynard Webb.

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YC-Funded Launchpad Toys Looks To Create The Next Generation Of Early Learning Toys

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Assumptions are rarely safe. But I’m sure most of you will come with me when I go out on a limb to say that, by and large, kids love toys. Yep. And they also love cartoons. This has been true as long as either have been around, however, a more recent taste to trend among the world’s wee ones: Love for the iPad. Some even said it was the toy of the year in 2010.

A new startup from Y Combinator’s gigantic summer batch of 63 companies launching today, called Launchpad Toys, agrees that tablets are an incredibly effective educational tool for kids.

In short, Launchpad wants to bring toys into the digital age. The startup is building a suite of apps for the iPad that allow children to create, learn, and share their ideas through play in an effort to become “the Lego of digital play”. The apps the startup is creating look to bring classic toys like Play-Doh, Crayola, and Erector Sets to the iPad, but with an educational backdrop that is standardized and meets national educational standards.

The first piece in Launchpad’s suite is Toontastic, a game launched in January that enables kids to create and storyboard their own cartoons (choosing from a bunch of different characters and backgrounds) and even move their characters around the screen via touch and record audio to give them a voice. The goal is to help children learn about the art of storytelling, while getting to animate their own cartoon, before sharing it with friends and family — and even winning awards.

Toontastic has been featured by Apple four times since going live and was recently added to the App Store Hall of Fame, which in turn has seen the app attract over 40,000 paid downloads and has led to its users creating over 170,000. Check out how kids react to the app here; not surprisingly, they love it. (And so do their parents, apparently, as Toontastic was the recent winner of the Parents’ Choice Award.)

But Launchpad didn’t just want the experience to be limited to a standalone app, so the team created ToonTube, a global story-telling network, which allows kids to share the stories they’ve created on Toontastic with their family and other kids from over 100 countries. Users can browse the network from within the app, vote on the cartoons they like best, and interact with other kids. If a cartoon attracts more than 8 “likes”, then the creator of the cartoon earns a badge, while each badge collected unlocking new characters to use in their stories.

The Launchpad team, headed by co-founders Andy Russell and Thushan Amarasiriwardena (who both hail from Hasbro and the Boston Globe, respectively) said that they’ve tried to take a specific educational subject matter — in the case of Toontastic, it’s creative writing and storytelling — and match it with a form of play (puppets, in this case) to provide an experience that fuses non-pedantic educational material with the fun of games.

The subject matter in Toontastic meets with late elementary-level creative writing standards, which gives parents a sense of well being while watching their young ones on an iPad — not to mention that the iPad’s multitouch functionality gives the app a collaborative spin that encourages parents and friends to join in. Touchpad also creates a parent/teacher guide for its apps; check out the guide that explains some of the educational intricacies of Toontastic and how it matches up to National Standards for Creative Writing here.

Russell tells me that Launchpad has had some great reaction from teachers across the U.S., and though the startup designs its apps to be consumer-facing (not for classroom-only use), he says that touch devices give both educational and game developers an opportunity to design for schools and kids, which was previously difficult to do because of the barrier for entry involved in integrating game consoles, etc. into the classroom. Launchpad’s suite of apps will continue to be designed with the home in mind first, but the key, he says, is to tailor the experience so that it is optimized for both.

In terms of the future roadmap for Launchpad, the founders said that they want to continue building apps that merge learning goals with play patterns, using this formula to expand into other verticals. They also plan to enable in-app purchases in the near future, to enable kids to buy new characters and backgrounds. Using the iPad’s ability to save, share, and collaborate as a launchpad, the startup is looking to help create a new generation of early learning toys. So far, they’re off to a great start.

For more on Launchpad Toys, check them out here. Let us know what you think.

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