Day 1 at CloudOn

Today we launched our first release of the CloudOn workspace. The response was overwhelming – to say the least!

Our goal in this first release, was to pilot a mobile workspace that would allow you to manage your files and edit them using Microsoft Office® — bringing greater opportunity for productivity, especially when you’re mobile.

Unfortunately, we did not anticipate the thousands of people that would gravitate to the service in a matter of hours. Although we had planned to support a large number of users, the interest generated was beyond our expectations, and we have had a few teething issues with our platform (some of which we have already partially resolved). We have also made additional resources available to ensure that we can continue to support our current users.

We hope to learn how you think we can make this a better experience for you. If you have ideas, head on over to http://help.cloudon.com/forums/139638-ideas to share them – we are listening!

Also, due to the overwhelming demand we’ve taken down our app from the iPad AppStore and will return when we are confident we can support more users. While we don’t know exactly when this will be, if you’re interested in pre–registering for this release, please visit: http://site.cloudon.com/soldoutemailform/capture.html

The demand for the app has also generated several questions about CloudOn. Given the stealth mode we have been operating in, there may be concerns about the viability of our business. This is understood and we would like to share some additional information with you.

CloudOn is a company that is fortunate to have savvy investors, including Foundation Capital, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Social+Capital Partnership. We have also been fortunate to have built a team of twenty talented individuals between Palo Alto, California and Israel who share the same vision and belief of bringing productivity and brilliance to smart devices.

We also take both privacy and security very seriously.

We enable you to be productive without overstepping our boundaries as a platform. Our privacy policy can be found at: www.cloudon.com/legal/privacy. We follow this privacy policy diligently across every part of our system.

From a security standpoint, none of your files are stored permanently on any of our systems. Your files are pulled only when you need them. Once you’ve finished editing them, they are saved back to Dropbox and wiped from our systems. We encrypt your credentials and also have 256-bit encryption between our servers and your client. We take pains to audit our security processes and improve them on a regular basis.

Finally, we have decided to initially make the app available for free, even though we bear the cost for it. We believe we will receive valuable feedback that will in turn help us improve our service and define a pricing model that is win-win for all – offering parts of the application for free, while parts will be offered as a paid service.

Feel free to reach out to us at any time by emailing help@cloudon.com. And, as always, thank you for your support.