ProtectMyPhotos – the lean, mean, photo backup machine

Picture 4.pngIf you were an angel investor who had lost your entire photo collection not once but twice, and a bunch of bright, successful guys come along with a prototype of a dead-simple web-based photo backup solution, what would you do? Yeah, he funded it along with the founders.

It’s called ProtectMyPhotos.com and it does just what you think it will do. It’s really simple to use (c|net calls it the “simplest photo backup ever“), and you can backup 40GB of photos for $40 per year. And, it uses some pretty bad ass ajaxy UI to get the job done.

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Although the Boulder-based company launched in August, ProtectMyPhotos co-founder and CEO Cliff Shaw told me earlier today that things have really taken off since the recent TechCrunch coverage of the product.

“We literally got thousands of users signed up in a two day period. Since the article, we’ve been blogged in more places (ten-fold) than we were ever blogged about before the article. We couldn’t appreciate the TechCrunch coverage more.” – Cliff Shaw

The other founders are Ryan Spohn and Chris Shearer Cooper who along with Cliff worked on their previous projects at Pearl Street Software which makes one of the top genealogy products on the market (Family Tree Legends). They’ve since added Kip Schauer as VP of Sales. Kip was previously the OEM division manager at Pinnacle Systems.

Competitors include Carbonite, Earthlink Weblife, Xdrive, and many more. Cliff points to ease of use and international support as key differentiators.

“We want to be the easiest way to back up your photos, movies, music and documents than anything else on the market. ProtectMyPhotos is now in 14 languages, and many of these markets (such as China & South Korea) are significantly underserved and are growing many times faster than the U.S. market.” – Cliff Shaw

Unfortunately (for me, I guess) it only works with Windows so far. Cliff told me that they’re at least 6 months out before they’ll deliver Mac support, but it is planned. Cliff also hinted that major partnerships with a top retailer and a top photo editing application are just around the corner.

file under: Blog, Startups