Transporter earned a lot of respect from me over the last 6 months. Some of it doesn’t really make a great story but let’s just say that the tech they are developing is improving a lot and they have some passionate people on their team. The part I want to share is something that should act as a model for other companies to consider, because it’s brilliant. Let’s start with a quick introduction of who they are and what they do.

What’s a Transporter?

A Transporter is a product by a company called Connected Data that provides independent storage devices. Their devices allow for your own Dropbox like service using their hardware. You plug their product into a network, do some configuration and you can have one or more devices syncing across multiple devices and computers.

Talk About a Heat Wave

As you may have heard, we’re experiencing a bit of a heat wave in much of California this week (while it’s snowing in Colorado?). As a result the temperatures inside our offices and homes are climbing unless of course we run A/C all day. I typically avoid running the A/C much because we have a whole house fan and in our area it cools down at night. While many A/C units are still buzzing away we use the cool air from outside to cool our house AND attic. My breaking point, where I go turn the A/C on, is 80 degrees where my office is. Using this strategy, we avoid having the A/C on most of the year, which saves money on utilities.

It’s Too Hot, Move Me!

Yesterday while the temperature was climbing outside all day and eventually inside late in the afternoon, I got an alert in my Email inbox from Transporter:

This might not seem like a big deal, but you would be surprised to learn that this is not the sort of feature many companies seem to take the time to integrate in their products. Particularly a very low cost and small product like Transporter. I was IT guy giddy when I got this Email. I started to immediately envision a world where more catastrophes where averted. You see, heat is the enemy of Computer Hardware. When it gets hot, things break and often with spectacularly devastating affect. I’ve seen servers where the cables going to the hard drives literally melted. The expenses for recovering from these episodes is usually very high. The reason for it is the hard drive itself is the part that usually suffers the most in these situations and that’s where your data is, not good!

How this is normally handled

Typically IT assets that I’ve managed have software running that monitor all sorts of hardware and software conditions. This allows some warning about things going wrong before it reaches the melted cable point. The problem is this sort of software is very commercial and not typically used by the average small business owner or remote worker unless they have a very pro-active IT department.

Why this is the Future

This type of innovation is very valuable, many companies look at the cost of a $2 sensor chip and $1,000 worth of code and aren’t prepared to take leadership to make their product right. Customers of Transporter will have devices that fail less often as a result of their leadership and willingness to integrate a simple but important feature into their product.

My Opinion, Not a Paid Endorsement

This is not a paid endorsement, nor have I ever sold a single transporter to a customer as of this writing. This hat tip was earned by the Transporter team and paid for with their hard work and innovation. I call it like I see it, and I see a positive trend here that will save IT guys from some fire drills in the future. That will allow companies like Arment Dietrich (client) to stay “virtual” without heavy IT requirements. I have been known to showcase my clients with some link-love, also disclosed. 🙂