A Company Was Born

Photo: Geeman Yip

First order of business as a newly unemployed person was to figure out what this company was going to be about.

Over the past decade, I have amassed gigabytes of data by this time. I have digitized everything along the way from bills to music to movies. I also learned that the average lifespan of hard drives was the warranty itself (if your hard drive was out of warranty, you are on borrowed time). Because of this, I came up with the idea of cloud storage to backup my digital life.

During this time, the world was nowhere near where it is today. In fact:

• Amazon EC2 just came out months earlier (August 2006)

• Box.net was on the market but wasn’t really known

• Dropbox didn’t exist yet

I believed that cloud storage would be commoditize one day and that someone with more money than me (think Microsoft or Google) would just give it away. My idea was to give away cloud storage and using it as a gateway drug. Once all of their digital assets was on my cloud system, I could data mine them and offer digital and physical goods in a marketplace. For example, I could edit a photo with Picnik, edit word documents with Zoho or send a photo directly to a print shop. But before I created this marketplace, I would accumulate petabytes of files from users so I could figure out which services to offer first based on what people were storing.

Now that I’ve got an idea, now I need a name. My requirements were:

• A name that mapped 1:1 with a domain name

• Something that related to what my idea was

• Under 10 characters long

• Easy to say and spell

• .COM domain name

I think I spent about a week brainstorming on a name. Just about everything you can think of is registered. I began to brainstorm words that represent what I did like bits, bytes, files, storage, cloud, etc.

And that was when BitTitan was born. We were the “Titan” of all your digital “Bits” that were stored in the cloud.

Original BitTitan Logo