As you may know last week, we added HFS+ support to make our drives more Apple friendly. What we didn’t tell you is that we’ve also been working to increase our transfer speeds for NTFS drives. These upgrades make remote uploads so fast, you may not notice that your drive isn’t attached to your computer.

How fast is fast?

To answer this, we conducted tests in the Pogoplug lab, pitting the old drivers against our swift, new make. Using the Pogoplug drive application and we measured the difference in speeds for a large file and multiple small files. Here’s what we’ve found:

Test 1: Uploading a large file (4.77 GB) to an NTFS drive with the upgrade is 600% faster than before!

Test 2: Uploading 10,000 small files (ranging from 1 kb to 977 kb) is 25% faster than it was for multiple small file uploads.

So whether you’re on the go or just too lazy to move that external hard drive to where you’re sitting right now (cough, guilty), you’re all set. With the recent upgrade, writing to your NTFS drive is now more like uploading to your local drive than ever before. If you’d like to add your comments or test results in the comments below, we’d love to hear what you think!

We’re tech addicts and as such, we know how much research happens before you decide to click the “buy” button on for a new product. After all the blogs and forums are read, Facebook pages scanned and Twitter updates checked, nothing is more frustrating than clicking that button and finding out that the gizmo you want so desperately is backordered. As a pre-emptive strike against this frustration, we’d like to let everyone know that we’re backordered.

It seems that our most recent order was snatched up quicker than we anticipated (thank you!), so we’ve put in more orders that will become available in late July. We know, we know- it’s disappointing. We could tell you the story from our perspective (small businesses making sound business decisions sometimes means delayed gratification), but we know that this won’t make the Pogoplug come to your house any faster. For those who are disappointed, we are truly sorry but on the positive side, we’re making improvements all the time. Hopefully by the end of July, you’ll see enough new stuff to make it worth the wait.

As always, we welcome your comments below. You can also follow us on Twitter (@pogoplug) or connect with our user community at www.pogoplugged.com.

Since we launched our iPhone app, we’ve been focusing on other ways to make the Pogoplug work better with Apple products. So, today we’re pleased to announce another feature that’s going to make life a lot easier for Apple lovers- and everybody else: we’re now supporting journaled HFS+ formatted drives. Since journaled HFS+ was the last bastion of unsupported formats, this means that Pogoplug works with any type of drive. Which means anybody who has any USB drive can plug into Pogo and access their media from anywhere in the whole wide world. So now, be you a PC or a Mac (or if make your own out of various pieces from TigerDirect), you can get your drive on the Pogoplug.

Now that you can access your data, we’re looking at assisting remote backup via the web. While we don’t support Time Capsule and other remote storage devices yet, our end goal is to have the Pogoplug play nice with these guys and allow our users to back up to their home drives automatically and regularly. However, there’s something to be said for taking things one step at a time- that’s how you get things done right! We’re excited about this step and invite your comments and suggestions below.

Great inventions are rarely static – even Leonardo DaVinci was forever tweaking his creations.  Pogoplug is our greatest invention, but that doesn’t mean we’re finished.  Often there are things behind the scenes only we can see need tidying, but every now and then we make a change that we want to show off to our community.

Today is one of those days.

We have a lot of cool new features to simplify your life as you search and share.  First, we’d like to introduce our new search function.  Users can now find specific files using their iPhone/Pogoplug web app without having to manually search through their entire drive.

We’ve also simplified sharing by allowing users to input multiple email addresses at a time, and you can even include a personalized message when you share files with friends and family.

Also, we’ve opened up support for the Pogoplug drive application, so all sorts of operating systems can install the Pogoplug drive, including:

• 32-bit Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7)
• 64-bit Windows (Vista and Windows 7)
• Leopard (10.5) on Intel and PowerPC
• Tiger (10.4) on Intel and PowerPC
• 64-bit Linux
• 32-bit Linux

So now with all those changes integrated into Pogoplug, we’ve got a few more exciting things in the pipeline for Friday.  First on the list, we’re tackling the number one complaint we’ve seen from our users: we’re getting rid of that pesky 26 character Pogoplug ID.  We have a new auto-discovery feature that will automatically input your Pogoplug identification code when you register at my.pogoplug.com.

To complement our new Search feature, we’re adding a Sort function so users can sort by file name, size or type in both ascending and descending order.  And finally, we’ve added Media RSS feeds which will allow users to gain access to their home hard drives using any supported Media RSS client.  This is great news for Boxee lovers who can now use their Pogoplug RSS to watch movies (or listen to music) directly from their home hard drive.

All of these updates are free!  For current Pogoplug users, these updates will take place automatically (in fact, some already have) and new users will get their Pogoplug updates as a part of the registration process.  We think these updates are a great step forward, but this doesn’t mean we’re finished!  Let us know what you think about these updates or make some suggestions about what you’d like to see in the future.

Our team started Cloud Engines to build a new kind of consumer company; one that builds innovative connectivity products that reach everyday consumers. We want to involve our community at as many levels as possible and break the industry’s rules of being defensive and stubborn. As CEO of our company, however, I get the hard questions like “how do I know you will stay in business” and “how are you going to stay ahead of the competition.”

Today we are announcing that we have closed a round of venture financing with Foundry Group (their blog post on it is here). Aside from being cool and creative people, the Foundry team has helped to build lots of consumer products and services including Slingbox. As part of the financing, we have the pleasure of adding Ryan McIntyre to our Board of Directors. Ryan is a co-founder and Managing Director at Foundry Group, and is well-known as one of the founders of Excite. Ryan began his VC career with Mobius Venture Capital in 2000 and is one of the most hands-on, creative, and supportive investors I have met. (He is also a pretty good musician from what I hear. You can check out his personal website at www.ryanmcintyre.com).

Our funding doesn’t make us rich; it’s still up to us to innovate, be scrappy, and involve our community to make the best consumer connectivity products we can. However, it ensures that we have longevity in the marketplace and that Pogoplug will continue to thrive as a consumer brand and experience even during this tricky economy.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Daniel Putterman

CEO