Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you use popular cloud storage and sharing services like Box and Dropbox, you trust your sensitive information to third party data centers.

OwnCloud, the startup that positions itself as the open-source alternative to Box, is the newest contender in the cloud storage wars.

To expand into new verticals and grow its user-base, the Lexington, Mass. based startup pulled in $2.5 million from venture capital firm, General Catalyst. The firm’s Managing Partner Larry Bohn will join the company’s board of directors.

OwnCloud claims to give its 650,000 users a drop dead easy tool and more control over their data. Its server is typically deployed on a company’s servers or trusted service provider’s servers, and integrates well with existing security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools.

Young companies are increasingly positioning themselves this way in the wake of security breaches that may undercut the market leaders in the space. With its hybrid cloud solution, Egnyte is another young cloud storage vendor that emphasizes advanced security and user experience.

The technology works a little differently than the competition — IT users can store information in their cloud of choice. IT gets to decide whether files from services like Amazon, Dropbox or Google are shared with a broad spectrum of users — or accessed by just a small subset. In a recent update to the product, file owners can set expiration dates on shared files and password-protect the URL to a shared link.

The company will use the funds to expand its 70-partner strong channel, aggressively push into the enterprise, and support service providers who implement file sync and share based on OwnCloud.

“There’s no one in this increasingly crowded market that can do the things OwnCloud does — integrate closely with existing IT, innovate at lightning speed and offer choice of storage locations,” said Bohn in a statement. “With those capabilities already in place differentiating it from the competition, we’re confident that OwnCloud will succeed.”

Cloud storage image via Jules 2000 // Shutterstock

Personal.com stands among a growing class of Dropbox competitors. But it’s taking a different course, following that age-old wisdom, “If you can’t beat em, join em.”

Today, the consumer cloud startup announced an integration with both Dropbox and Evernote, and it released a set of new features so users can exchange and store their most private information, like health or insurance records.

The Washington, D.C.-based company has been around since 2009, and it has carved a niche in the market for storing highly sensitive data — both on web and on mobile. It doesn’t hurt that the service is available for free (the company is still in beta). No doubt, it will soon introduce a Dropbox-style freemium model.

Personal.com’s free Android app has been available since November, and the iPhone version was released last week.

The pitch is simple. We need to store a growing amount of personal and professional information: birthdays, bank account numbers, Social Security information, tax records, allergy information, alarm codes, and so on. Wouldn’t it make life easier if you could save all your data — including the private information — in your personal “vault”?

The company has specialized in storage, but its users wanted to share and manage their data, too. As of today, anything that you store on Personal can be shared with a friend, family-member or employee, as long as they’re a registered user.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Green explained how the company stores your most private information securely in the cloud. ”Personal doesn’t store the password to your vault, only you know it, and only you have the ability to decrypt your files and photos,” he said.

No doubt, the Dropbox integration is a means for the company to pickup millions of new users — “it is a great company with a hugely loyal user base,” said Green. Now, you can store your notes, files, and photos in Personal or link to an existing Dropbox account. Files uploaded to Personal’s secure data vault are encrypted for added protection. The benefits of the partnership go both ways – Dropbox has been called out for its frequent privacy glitches.

Other new features include:

• Secure encryption: Your uploaded files will be automatically encrypted through Personal whenever they’re stored and shared.
• Secure sharing: Owners can safely share important notes, files and documents with other registered users, whether it’s a family-member or employee.
• Free data, notes and file storage: Users can securely upload unlimited data and notes, and up to 50MB of files and photos.

Personal picked up $7.6 million in July, 2011 from Grotech Ventures, Revolution, among others.

Mobile security image via Shutterstock