The moment when he accidentally reinvented the personal cloud

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Right now feels like a bit of an awkward stage in wireless tech – wifi is everywhere, but many devices still don’t take advantage of it. Most external hard drives still need to plug into a USB port, and the same goes for webcams, card readers, CD/DVD drives, and others.

Yes, there are things like Klikr, which brings all of your old remote-based devices – TVs, air conditioners, and the like – onto the cloud. But what about things that don’t take remote signals, and whose functions are a bit more complicated than an on/off button?

Jeryuan Yan noticed this issue when he wanted to store and share more photos on his iPhone.

So he came up with the idea for a wireless SD card reader. The iPhone would tap into the SD card via wifi, allowing a phone user to save photos to the card, and share them easily with others.

But then more problems arose. The card reader was portable, but that meant it needed to be charged, which was a hassle. It also meant that the phone user had to carry around an extra gadget with them. And while cloud services aren’t perfect – the free ones have notable space limitations, and all of them are reliant on your internet speed – the wifi card reader was proving to have problems all its own.

In the way that sometimes happens, trying to fix one simple problem – I want to take more photos on my phone – spiraled into something much bigger.

Jeryuan and his team at NextDrive took a new approach to wireless storage. What if, instead of carrying around a wifi-enabled card reader, you just left it at home, but still had access to it on your phone? And if you can do that, why settle for a card reader – why not a full-blown hard drive? And why stop there, if you can attach other devices as well?

NextDrive aims to take all your devices, which aren’t necessarily even that old, and bring them into the age of the cloud.

A computer-less cloud

It has always been possible to create your own cloud using a server and some IP-address wrangling, but it requires a level of technical ability that’s beyond most people. But with NextDrive’s dead-simple setup, even the most technically-illiterate user can make their own cloud.

NextDrive works by cramming an entire Internet of Things computer into a plug about as big as the charging block for a typical laptop. With electrical prongs on one side and a USB port on the other, it’s a device that’s hard for a user to screw up. Just pop it into an electrical socket, plug in your USB device of choice, and that device is now accessible from your smartphone.

“It is a challenge to communicate the concept of the NextDrive Plug to the consumer,” says Jeryuan, who’s the startup’s founder. “Therefore our messages currently focus on some applications which are easy to understand, such as personal cloud and auto photo backup.”

Cashing in on the idea of a personal cloud