The GoPC Blog

GoPC presents to Silicom Ventures - Stanford University

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:44:08 +0000

GoPC was selected as one of 5 finalists this week to present on stage to the main body of the Silcom Ventures 2009 Summit at Stanford University. http://www.silicomsummit2009.com/ The Summit included key notes from industry luminaries such as Meg Whitman (ex CEO eBAY), Vinod Khosla (one of Silicon Valley’s most successful and respected VC’s), amongst others.

This was an amazing opportunity for our company to present to an international conference of 350 technology investors and Venture Capitalists as we reach out for our next stage of investor funding to fuel growth of the business and to establish supercomputer nodes in other continents.

There is huge interest from Silicon Valley VC’s in the field of cloud computing and GoPC is certainly in the sweet spot with one of the leading technologies. We have now repositioned our company message slightly as the term “cloud computing” is becoming so misued that we are concerned it will shortly become a meaningless term.

So here’s the new pre-positioning statement:

At a high level:

GoPC is a “Delivery Framework” for cloud computing.

It handles everything a user needs for their IT: security, data, applications, and social technology.

It does this by hosting everything in a distributed supercomputer and delivers a service to the user by means of a virtual desktop interface (VDI), by use of web applications (eg. Zimbra), to the mobile phone, and to other external systems on the internet.

At a user level:

GoPC is a complete replacement of your personal computer.

Your desktop, applications, data and settings run in the cloud.

Whatever physical computing device you have is used simply as a viewer, without any dependancy. Mac, PC, Smartphone …

In includes full desktop functionality and applications to rival a typical PC/Server network,
a cloud delivery system to rival simple web based apps,
and online storage to rival any storage provider … and does it 10x faster.

Web apps, full desktop experience, fully managed, and extremely low cost.

Having trouble logging in?

admin — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:57:52 +0000

Some customers have reported login/password issues on the new version. We cannot tell you what your password was but you can recover old or forgotten passwords yourself off the main landing page of the website.

First, try and login to your account from the website www.gopc.net.

If you are not logged into your personal control panel within a few seconds and returned to the website again then please use the “Recover Password” button underneath the field for Username and Password. This will send an email to the email address you used when first signing on which will allow you to create a new password.

The GoPC Support Team

Cut Over Successful

admin — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:01:20 +0000

The cut over on 30th April 2009 went exactly to plan and was flawless. This was a huge project and crystalises about 18 months R&D from the whole team.

My thanks to the GoPC Team, and particularly to our CTO Chris Hoy Poy for the enormous effort in orchestrating this project and pulling it off so successfully.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder

New GoPC version 4.0 upgrade scheduled for April 30th 2009 (Expect brief outages)

admin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:17:18 +0000

Finally, after months and months of testing and data migration, we are ready to cut over all users to the new GoPC supercomputer infrastructure.

The change over will occur progressively over the next 24 hours. There will be a couple of brief periods where all users will need to be logged off. This will be the first complete outage of the system affecting all users since we migrated the data centre in June 2006. It’s a record we’ve become very proud of but we’ve got to move forward. There are so many improvements on the new system, not the least of which is the time to create a new user account which drops from the current 4 minutes down to about 10-30 seconds. Login times should also halve. The next stages which will follow from this upgrade will be the rollout of new supercomputing nodes into North America and Europe and this will see a huge improvement in screen responsiveness for users closer to those regions (particularly Europe and Africa).

We have done our utmost to minimise the impact of this outage. There are some areas which we have not been able to test until the live cut over is complete and there is the potential that we will encounter teething problems in some areas. We will rectify any issues as soon as they arrise. If you do experience any teething issues after the next 24 hours please contact us through the contact from on the website or email (support [at] gopc.net).

Once the new infrastructure is running we will start announcing a lot of rolling improvements to the system. There will be a lot more choice available to customers, and a lot more freedom within some of the account types which we will have available. Many thanks to those customers who have been answering our surveys and offering constructive feedback.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder

Major upgrade to GoPC version 4.0, imminent

admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:26:18 +0000

The problem with being a perfectionist is that one doesn’t want to mention anything until the pie is completely cooked, taste tested, and absolutely ready for presentation. The problem with Internet technology is that it’s never finished . . . But after years of refusing to announce anything until its actually running, I’ve agreed to put out this bulletin of what we’ve got coming down the line, just before it actually goes live.

I created GoPC in 1995 and we are now many generations of GoPC technology further down the path. The complexity in each new release grows exponentially. What becomes simpler and more useful for the customer requires a massive effort, discipline and very deep structured thinking on the part of the developers. I want to say that the GoPC team is the most intelligent, committed and brilliant team of people that I’ve ever worked with. It’s these guys and gals who have created the most incredible advances in GoPC for this upcoming release.

A special acknowledgement is also due to the remarkable people who create and contribute to Open Source, the thousands of developers who are responsible for the applications we’re able to provide via GoPC’s supercomputing framework at no cost to our customers. It’s our goal to add value to the work of these peoples by making their products much more available to a much broader audience.

The upgrade we’re about to undertake is a Major rework of the whole supercomputer. It’s new hardware and systems (approximately 100 separate servers not counting the expandable front-end nodes which carry the bulk of our processing load), new network infrastructure, the latest application versions on the desktop and a host of new very cool technologies. We have always made extensive use of virtualisation, and there is far more fail-over capability than ever before.

One of the most exciting advances from the new system is our ability now to fragment the supercomputer into separate pieces and distribute these geographically. This upcoming version of GoPC will become a distributed supercomputer with a footprint on each continent, all managed centrally. Changes and upgrades are automatically reflected across the entire infrastructure - thus effectively creating one global footprint. For customers who currently experience high levels of latency to the GoPC supercomputer in Australia (particularly users in Europe, Africa and Middle East where Internet routes go via the USA and can often exceed 400ms) this will have a dramatic improvement on screen responsiveness. We are currently negotiating with interested parties for financing and partnership involvement to achieve this quickly. Technically it is now about 10x easier than it was last year.

The new GoPC will give more granular control allowing us to tailor solutions for specific customer groups. Our premium enterprise customers and perhaps others will have the power to tailor their own solutions. For example they may choose from a simple pick list which applications their organisation will have; select another layer of data encryption technology on disk, add and remove users daily, select more server side storage, or recover a selected file from a last months backup straight from a window on the desktop. Godrive (GoPC’s online Drive) will seamlessly integrate with local PC desktop and you’ll be amazed at how fast this operates.

We have had countless requests since first going live in Dec 2004 with our open source version of GoPC, for a command prompt, for shell access and for the ability for people to install their own applications. This will soon become available and we will also allow customers to operate a complete virtual Linux desktop instance in their own virtual data centre.

This major upgrade crystallizes about 16 months of Research and Development by our team. Because of the scale of it, it has taken several months to migrate customers data and prepare everything for the big bang cutover. GoPC has run at 99.999% uptime since going live in Dec 2004, the only complete outages we’ve had was when we physically moved the data centre. At each upgrade we’ve only ever taken down part of the system at a time. We’re anxious about the change over because there are likely to be teething issues in areas which we could not have foreseen. But we have to move forward and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that any issues that surface are resolved as speedily as possible. Once we’ve switched over to the new system we plan to wait a few weeks to ensure things have stabilise and then start rolling out these new solutions which we’ve been wanting to bring to the customers.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, that everything will be running a lot faster. New customer sign-ups which currently are taking up 4-5 minutes, should reduce to around 30-40 seconds. The new GoPC works like lightning. We hope you’ll like it.

The ETA is any day now.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder

The Age reports Cloud Computing hitting the mainstream

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:46:23 +0000

Kate Cincotta at the Age has got onto the trend in growth in Cloud Computing throughout the world.

She writes “In theory, outsourcing in this fashion means we can say goodbye to endless back-ups and software upgrades, and scale down to cheaper, low-specification computers. The all-knowing, all-seeing cloud also promises to connect us to all of our technology baggage from any computer terminal in the world.”

One of the people she talked to was Paul Murphy, who talked in a practical sense about how Cloud Computing is helping his business.

Manhattan-based Paul Murphy, a technical partner with design and technology firm Juicy Orange, has found the cloud a godsend - both financially and logistically. A year ago, he moved his company’s client sites to Amazon’s EC2 Cloud and he hasn’t looked back.

“Moving to the cloud was like dying and going to heaven. Not having to lay out money for servers is a big deal for a business like ours. This allows us to ‘rent’ everything, on an as-needed basis: CPUs, memory, disks, firewalls, bandwidth … we turn machines up and down as needed, we can store data at many levels, move IP addresses between machines, change firewall rules on the fly - all very boring stuff for most people, but to someone who’s been managing software in data centres for almost two decades, this is magic.”

For business owners, those people who are interested in setting up franchises, not for profit organisations and for individuals who just want much easier computing at home, Cloud Computing, particularly using GoPC makes huge sense.

Last week we were contacted by a small business who were looking at buying a server, all of the desktop licences and then having to back that up and also get support. they had quotes to do that for between $12000 and $18000. Once they looked into GoPC’s solution and ran the numbers they were amazed at the difference in costs.

For business owners with 5 licences or more, we are currently providing a free setup service. Contact us to find out how easy it is to get started.

A cloud of fresh GoPC applications

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:38:33 +0000

Recently we have released a major upgrade of GoPC.

All of the great applications in GoPC have been upgraded to the latest releases. Most notable are Firefox 3 and Open Office 3, plus there is plenty more there as well with new tools for project management, graphic design and more.

GoPC gives you Open Office 3 and much more

The upgrade process has already commenced, and to ensure the upgrade is triggered for you if you are an existing customer, please log into GoPC via the www.GoPC.net website. If you have any trouble logging in, please try recovering your password from the website (which helps to reset the account) and try again which should resolve the issue. Our helpful support team are on standby to help you with any questions.

The new flavor of the GoPC desktop is sitting upon new supercomputer infrastructure. This translates to a faster experience for you, but also means we can accommodate and ride the wave of rapid growth in cloud computing.

Please provide a comment below if there are other applications you think should be added to GoPC, or your feedback on the new release. Your feedback helps us to make GoPC better for you.

New supercomputer underpins Cloud Computing with GoPC

admin — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 06:37:36 +0000

Our latest release of GoPC is being made available to our clients now. It sits on new supercomputer infrastructure within our datacenter.

Our latest release of GoPC has been developed with a view to being able to rapidly roll out and scale GoPC to millions of users around the world. In order to do that, and to ensure we can respond to spikes in growth, we needed to develop our implementation of GoPC such that we can duplicate our Perth datacenter infrastructure incredibly quickly.

It also provides new capability for us to be able to customize our offering and provide greater flexibility to customers as well. This means we have more flexibility going forward which will mean we can customise solutions for particular markets.

Our customers will notice more speed. GoPC is already fast, but our new release makes it even faster.

In addition, new and updated applications have been added to the GoPC desktop. For those people who haven’t looked at GoPC before or not for some months, it is well worth trying GoPC either as a replacement to your current desktop software solution, or to compliment and provide a mobile solution to your existing desktop software.

GoPC is really starting to make a move worldwide and are in discussions with major partners to provide similar supercomputer infrastructure around the world including Africa, Asia, India, North America and Europe. So, this will be great for people who are after a fast cloud computing solution.

We hope you are as excited about our new release of GoPC as we are, stay tuned for more developments…

GoPC Interview with CEO Graeme Speak

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:28:13 +0000

Recently Graeme was interviewed by Vishal Sharma about the journey of starting up GoPC and his thoughts on business leadership and success. That interview has been picked up at Webtoplog - a French blog site that includes a number of articles on web operating systems and desktops.

The interview is as follows:

Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests?

My name is Graeme Speak. I’m the CEO/Founder of GoPC and currently based in San Francisco/Silicon Valley. I also founded and run another company in Australia, Central Data, which operates a data centre and specialises in Outsourcing projects (network and software development). It’s now been running 26 years. I studied Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science and Management. These days I have a strong interest in big picture thinking, philosophy, social evolution and particularly Micro Loans.

My recreational passion is Kitesurfing. I broke my neck a while back hitting by coming down upside down on the beach and after recovering joined the WA Kitesuring Association as an office holder to actively promote kite safety awareness. I’m proud to have been one of the founding organisers of Kitestock which is now the biggest kitesurfing event in the southern hemisphere, and along with the other committee members grew the WAKSA membership from 140 to 540. I believe WAKSA would have to be the most organised kitesurfing organisation world wide.

What is the name of your venture/company?

GoPC www.gopc.net or virtual tour http://virtual.gopc.net

Please tell us about your venture/company?

GoPC is next generation “cloud computing”. It is your entire PC desktop along with your applications and data, but runs across the Internet from a super computer and projects a screen image to any device you happen to be sitting at. You no longer need to own or have anything installed on a single physical PC. The floating PC desktop, applications and data are compatible with standard file formats like MS Office and others, but without any licence costs. So it is a fraction of the cost of setting up a normal PC or network and gives you the freedom to run your floating PC in the cloud from anywhere.

GoPC has the most comprehensive “cloud computing” solution in Silicon Valley today, virtualising not only the desktop, applications and data, but also virtualising the complexity of the entire corporate network in the “cloud”.

We first started developing the technology in 1995 and were a pioneer of what became known as an Application Service Provider. GoPC was spun off as a separate company in 2005 and has now been running live 4 years with 99.999% uptime. The world media has recently picked up on the term “cloud computing” and this has dissolved our biggest barrier to adoption – peoples’ awareness.

Who are the people behind this and how it started?

I’ve always been an inventor and entrepreneur at heart but with the day to day distractions most of my ideas were never given enough resources to be finished. I was determined to make sure this one did.

In 1995 I thought the Internet had plateaued. A few guys working in Central Data had left to go start different ISP’s and had become very successful. Their problem was the burden of supporting the home users who mostly had terrible PC’s. I decided to marry a Citrix Winframe/Microsoft server network with a ISP. I couldn’t afford to buy the ISP so set one up myself. It worked. But the cost with Citrix and Microsoft licenses was very high and the only people who could afford it were businesses. So from late 1995 that become our focus. In 1999 when the industry coined the term Application Service Provider (ASP) we had been doing it 4 years, had an Australia wide network with live paying customers. That business has been very successful and is still running today.

In 2002 I wanted to have another crack at doing the same thing with Open Source software. We had pretty deep technical skills and most of the data centre was running on Unix/Linux. It was originally geared at business customers as an alternative to a Microsoft/Citrix solution and would be a fraction of the cost. By 2005 it was flying. More scalable, more robust, equally functional.

We then set about building the business and working out how to market it. The penny dropped while I was visiting China. I had always been focused on the corporate sector. The two women who came to our hotel each day to work as our interpreters went to the Internet cafe each morning to use Yahoo email. I realised if I gave them a GoPC account each it would be better for them than owning a laptop computer and even though they had little money, if I could get 100,000 of their friends to pay something then we had substantial business. The friends I was travelling are also entrepreneurs and threw down the gauntlet saying I was dreaming and I couldn’t convince them there was a real need. I was absolutely certain I was right so committed fully to turning our technical project code named “Linframe” into what is now GoPC. Both these guys are now two of my biggest advocates and have invested in the company.

There’s been a large technical team over a number of years who have built and refined the business. Taking the product to market has been just as difficult a journey. This was helped along enormously by Mr Aidan Montague, the co-founder of Cisco Systems Australia, who became a Director of the company heading up marketing and business development.

We’ve now got a presence in Silicon Valley and have found enormous interest and support there for our technology. This has been crystalised with a new Advisor to our board in Mr Ben Lyon, a veteran of Silicon Valley with a number of successful ventures now including TellMe sold to Microsoft and Ingenio sold to AT&T. Ben will become a Director of GoPC once the company incorporates in the US. The business has taken on a new level of energy now having forged business relationships with industry giant Yahoo! amongst others I’m not able to disclose at this time. There’s very exciting opportunities now everywhere around us and we’re incredibly lucky to have someone of Ben’s calibre on board.

How long it took before it was up and running?

We built the technology over 3 years running in parallel with the existing ASP business of Central Data. We had the technical skills within the company running the data centre and created this as a side project. There was a lot of R&D and experimentation.

The hardest part for me however has been the personal journey, losing confidence in myself, risking everything I have, thinking the rest of the world is a lot smarter than me and knewsomething that I haven’t yet realised. Each week for years I would look over my shoulder to see if anybody else was doing this and couldn’t find anyone. Then occasionally we would get an an email saying how much somebody loved what we were doing. That was a joy to read these emails and just one ounce of encouragement is all it takes sometimes to keep you going. It was really only after moving to Silicon Valley and sing what others were doing there that I knew we were onto a winning idea and my finally after years of this my personal confidence started to soar. It’s been a real roller coaster journey.

In the last few months the world has suddenly adopted the term “cloud computing” and every media outlet is talking about this being the next wave. We’re an overnight success, although we have been doing it now for 14 years.

What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?

GoPC is a “disruptive technology” which changes everything!

It’s our purpose to empower people everywhere with either FREE or ultra low cost computing.

At present users who pay for the added services subside those users who can’t afford it.

What services it provides it for consumer or customers?

GoPC is a floating virtual PC desktop that does everything a normal physical PC does at a fraction of the cost. You can run it across the Internet from almost any device, anywhere. Being a full managed service running from a secure data centre it is far more reliable than a normal PC.

Individuals no longer need to upgrade their old PC, worry about viruses , spyware or backups. They will never want to carry a laptop again as you can run GoPC from home, work, campus, or Internet cafe straight from a web browser or using a USB key as a key to your virtual PC.

SME’s can set up a new network using GoPC within hours, not weeks. Users will have identical managed desktop environments accessing centralised storage with collaboration equivalent to MS Exchange. GoPC gives Local Area Network (LAN) functionality running over a Wide Area Network (WAN) for a fraction of the cost. Old PC hardware can be recycled or new low cost hardware can be sourced at about $100/device. There are large cost savings in the set-up but the biggest pay-off is the elimination of ongoing support costs.

Save 90% of the cost of a new PC,

Save 90% of the logistics in setting up a network

Save 90% of the ongoing support.

• What type of customers/people you are targeting?

GoPC is targeted at SOHO, SME, Enterprise, Education, as well as Not For Profit , Clubs, individuals and children. The markets are global spanning First World through to Third World countries.

What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?

We’ve been grooming an Internet marketing campaign but held back from releasing this to the open market over the last few years because we needed to throttle the growth of the user base. It would have killed us in the early days to suddenly having 100,000 users subscribe in a day.

We are now implementing a B2B approach having other businesses sell GoPC to their established customer base. We think this is a much smarter approach. Marketing is hard work, we know we’re not as good as we need to be, and it’s what other companies do really well. So it makes sense. We’ve got some huge interest and starting project now so will be making announcements as this progresses.

An example is the partnership with Yahoo! who are introducing GoPC to lead them into into large corporate accounts. The edge we bring is making their corporate products run many fold faster in addition to providing our other desktop and hosting services.

How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools in place to monitor the progress?

Yes, we use a lot of metrics. Basically everything, in every campaign can be measured.

Of course the main metric I’m interested in is customer numbers, revenue and growth rate.

We’re pretty open about most of what we do but we don’t publish those metrics.

What’s your thought on being an aspiring entrepreneur?

I’ve got a lot to say about this but will keep it succinct.

Being an entrepreneur is the greatest adventure in life that anyone can take. It far outweighs any personal development course and you’ll learn more doing it for real in one month than you’ll learn from any other job in a year. It’s good to think and talk about it, but nothing happens until you step forward.

Potential won’t get you anywhere, only action does.

If you’ve got an idea, and you think and dream about it enough, its inevitable that you’ll end up having to try it. Don’t risk everything on the first go. You need to be able to weather some failure. Learn quickly, play hard, always be fair with people and make friends not enemies. It is certainly possible to succeed in business keeping your integrity and there’s no satisfaction if you cheat. My personal goal is to contribute something of value to the world and I believe we all have something unique in us that the world needs.

My passion is micro loans in the third world, helping seed entrepreneurship. My hero is David Bussau from Opportunity International who at the time I heard about him had funded 250,000 micro businesses and indirectly helped 5,000,000 people get out of the poverty trap. This guy is incredible. And we can all do that. Check out Kiva.com.

How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up? Do you have dedicated communities in your city?

Silicon Valley has numerous industry seminars and groups. You can choose from a dozen to attend almost every day. I’m fairly selective in what I attend as they can be a waste of time, however the intangible benefits of a good idea sometimes are priceless. I try and do at least one a week.

Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?

I’m full of encouragement to anybody who wants to start a new venture. It doesn’t matter whether its big or small, so long as it stretches them to become a bigger person than they already are. It’s one of the things I love doing most - giving others encouragement to chase their dreams.

I’m also extremely pragmatic and grill them as hard as I can so we make sure they continue to refine their ideas so it will work. Dreams without a reality check can lead to disaster.

Bottom line is step forward but don’t ever gamble everything.

Taking a blind risk is just stupid and should be guaranteed to fail.

Treat people well and look after all your relationships. It’s people that will help you succeed or pull you down if they don’t like you.

GoPC enters Australian Startup Index

admin — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:35:28 +0000

GoPC has been picked up by the Australian Startup Index.

It is great to see the the pace of innovation has not slowed by the current financial markets - and neither should it. Innovation is created through necessity - and there is nothing like a little cost pressure to ensure new ideas are formed. There is a relevant post at the Technation site on why recessions are good for startups.

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