A couple of days ago my inbox was filled with emails without me expecting it. All of a sudden there were hundreds of emails on my iPhone. What is happening late at night on a Tuesday, I wondered. And it just happened when I attended the Norwegian Nordic Startup Awards at Mesh in Oslo arranged by Startup Norway. BTW, a great event!

I could see that all the emails came from our web site telling me that we had got yet another registration for our public beta of Ensafer (my startup) coming up shortly. Each email was a new user willing to test our solution on how to encrypt Dropbox. That is “Ensafer for Dropbox” that we launched in October at DEMO Fall 2012 in Silicon Valley. We knew from then that we had hit a big need in the market, and we have had a steady stream of registrations since then. But what triggered this rush?

A quick Google News search gave the answer: PCWorld in USA had published an article that evening called “FileLocker offers 25GB free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage”. This was an article about FileLocker and how they do end-to-end encryption within their own cloud service. Great stuff, but what has this to do with Ensafer? We found the answer at the end of the article saying this:

“With so many clouds storage services popping up on an almost daily basis, consumers may be reluctant to subscribe to yet another one — even one that offers end-to-end encryption. Those consumers might be interested in Ensafer, now in public beta. Unlike FileLocker, Ensafer is designed to work with existing popular storage services, such as Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive. It, too, encrypts files locally on a consumer’s device and can only be decrypted there.”

This shows us a couple of things: The media (at least big names like PCWorld) has tremendous impact on the market, and a short notice about Ensafer at the end of an article like this gives a lot of attention – and beta users in our case. The other lesson learned is that there is a market for Ensafer encrypting other services like Dropbox. A lot of professional users and companies are storing and sharing sensitive information by using this kind of services – because it is simple and efficient. But there are almost no services doing what we are now offering in our upcoming beta program, so it gives us important attention in our effort to make this a global service.

PCWorld could be right: “Consumers might be interested in Ensafer”. Around the globe. We think so. Here is the PCWorld article if you want to read the whole text. It’s good reading and a nice presentation of FileLocker. And please feel free to visit www.ensafer.com and take part of our beta program for Ensafer for some time.

Anyway, remember to secure your files when you store and share them by using the cloud. Someone you don’t know could be interested in your content.