Here are some more interesting background information:
https://www.vivint.com/company/newsroom/press/space-monkey-acquisition
Vivint™, a leading provider of smart home technology, today announced the acquisition of Space Monkey, an innovative cloud storage company. Space Monkey uses a peer-to-peer network, rather than a data center, to offer greater speed, security and cost savings for personal storage.
Smart homes generate a surprising amount of data — for video alone, we are already collecting and storing more video data per hour than YouTube. To store that much data, Vivint built a vast storage network of distributed smart drives, which require industrial design, electrical and mechanical engineering, low-level system software, firmware, and device and security updates. It also requires expertise in erasure codes, distributed system design, and cryptography.
In an exclusive to Forbes, Vivint is announcing its acquisition of consumer-focused cloud storage startup Space Monkey. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Space Monkey’s consumer cloud storage works a bit different than competitors like Dropbox. Instead of syncing up all of your files on some remote server farm, Space Monkey puts the data on a networked hard drive in its customer’s home. And this isn’t just some external hard drive. Your small Space Monkey hard drive links up to all of the other Space Monkey hard drives to become a “distributed cloud.”
For an additional $10 more a month, your starter Vivint subscription fee turns into the Smart Home Video service plan, which includes 30 days of continuous DVR recording for up to four cameras if you’ve purchased a 1TB Vivint Smart Drive for $250.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713952/000119312520090305/d899195ds1a.htm
For example, in August 2014, Legacy Vivint Smart Home acquired Space Monkey, a distributed cloud storage technology solution company, in 2019 Legacy Vivint Smart Home completed a spin-off of its wireless internet business and in 2020 the Company consummated the Merger.
In May 2019, the Company acquired majority ownership interest in CrowdStorage, Inc. (“CrowdStorage”), a distributed cloud storage solution company.
https://mutable.io/marketplace/vendors/crowdstorage
The Utah-based company currently offers two core products:
“Device Backup” utilizes unused space on Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices to create cloud storage through “virtual” data centers. When consumers store data through this solution, CrowdStorage splits their data and stores different pieces on NAS devices across different businesses and consumers’ homes. It’s marketed as a win-win solution: in exchange for cheap backup, users agree to free up their excess space only to the extent that it is unutilized. It also appeals to those with security concerns: completely encrypted and sharded, no individual device is able to access or read the data where it is stored. As there are no infrastructure or operational costs typically associated with traditional brick-and-mortar data centers, data storage is available to consumers at a much lower cost.
Their second product, Polycloud, is geared towards enterprise clients looking for traditional cloud storage backup. The solution is simple: data is still stored in data centers, but across multiple North American public cloud providers like Google, Wasabi and Backblaze.
CrowdStorage’s algorithm shards and tiers data with a level of efficiency that standardizes redundancy and geographical dispersion as premium multi-region storage offerings such as Amazon S3; mitigating potential damage for enterprises should large scale outages occur.
One of their core partnerships is with leading data technology manufacturer Western Digital, launching as a cloud backup solution to their “My Cloud Home” device - one of the most popular network-attached storage devices.
All of this gives a good idea about how the company started, who owns it and what they offer. I have to say, that it is pretty clever of a smart home company to own their own distributed datacenter. I had previously already suggested that Storj should have a look into the cctv market.
And Crowdstorages deal with WD is ingenous even though it seems that they are no longer partnering: My Cloud Home: 3rd Party App CrowdStorage Support Notice
The CrowdStorage app is no longer available for installation on My Cloud Home products.