(c)iStock.com/ismagilov
Bitcasa, the developer-friendly cloud storage platform based in Mountain View, is ‘no more’ according to a statement from former CEO Brian Taptich.
The statement, which appears on the Bitcasa homepage and is redirected to from other pages on the site, is cryptic in tone, only noting that the company has “become a part of something much, much bigger.” A VentureBeat article reported that the company had been acquired by Intel, something the latter subsequently denied.
“We have no doubt that Bitcasa has found the right home to fulfill a mission that has driven the company from its 2011 beginnings – to eliminate the storage and computing limitations of your connected devices, however small, in the most secure and efficient way possible,” the statement from Taptich read. “We remain optimistic that, before long (and though you may not realise it), Bitcasa’s technology will yet contribute significantly to fulfilling this mission.
“Looking back, it seems impossible to simplify a Bitcasa experience that, at times, felt so complicated,” Taptich added.
Bitcasa started life as a single-user platform for unlimited cloud storage in 2011 – something of a rarity in those days – yet the company hit the news in 2014 when it announced the end of its unlimited storage plan, citing what it called “abusers” – in other words, businesses caning individual accounts – as part of the reason.
By coincidence, in the same week Microsoft announced its first unlimited OneDrive cloud storage packages, to Office 365 subscribers, yet almost a year to the day that was also nixed for similar reasons; users were taking advantage of the offer by backing up “numerous PCs, entire movie collections and DVR recordings”. Bitcasa announced it was pulling out of consumer storage in April last year to focus more on its platform business.
Speaking to this publication in November 2015, Taptich explained that Bitcasa had reservations about its unlimited plan as far back as 2013, as well as citing the company’s “small but passionate” user base. Referring to Microsoft’s decision, Taptich said: “I suspect Microsoft just learned that, however theoretical models may have supported the efficacy of offering unlimited storage of a fixed – and low – fee, in the almost entirely frictionless world of data transfer, the first users who show up to the all you can eat buffet break the model with their unimaginable volumes of data.”
For now though, the future of Bitcasa remains unknown. “Our hope is that everybody in the Bitcasa extended family – including our partners and end-users – feels as if they reaped some benefit, however small, from this remarkable and intense experience,” the statement concluded.
CloudTech has reached out for comment and will update this story in due course.