Status Update 26.08.2024

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the new Filen Status Update. As always, here is a quick rundown of everything that has been keeping us busy since the last update.

At the end of this status update, you will find a link/button where you can give your thoughts on the topics covered in this update. You don’t need to read the whole update, but can potentially just skip straight to your points of interest and give us direct feedback. There will also be no attached giveaway. This is simply an opportunity for us to collect anonymous & encrypted feedback or community tendencies on given topics. Feel free to check it out.

But let’s get started:

Table of Contents

• Finance
• Infrastructure Investments
• The New Desktop Client
• What happens next?
• The New Filen Web Drive
• CLI “Official” Beta
• Our Publicly Documented API & the SDK
• Black Friday Sale
• Certificate Decisions
• Public Appearances

  YouTube Videos

• Marketing & Affiliate
• Q&A
• Survey Evaluation
• Final Words / Conclusion

Finance

One of the overarching topics of today is financing and investment. We are far enough into the year to create a realistic financial forecast for the fiscal year 2024. Therefore, we are now entering the planning phase for managing our partially forecasted 2024 year-end surplus and the related expenditures starting from Q4 2024. The following sections will discuss our decisions, tendencies, and remaining open questions.

Infrastructure Investments

As we did at the end of last year, we are planning significant expenditures on our hardware and general infrastructure. For our 2024 investment, we are currently planning to add several new server suites & pods for our server racks in our geo-redundant datacenter locations. These should provide us initially with ~19.79 Pebibytes of additional storage capacity based on the planned configuration. However, beyond that, these spaces will provide us with excellent flexibility in scaling our storage capacity for future investments, extending into the range of hundreds of pebibytes.

This ensures that we are optimally prepared for Black Friday, upcoming marketing projects, and your overall growth. Of course, the rest of the infrastructure will also need to be adjusted accordingly. This includes, for example, new server locations, new cooling systems, network connections, etc. Those of you who are familiar with industrial-scale server hardware know how much is involved in this process.

To put it as briefly as possible: in the last quarter of this year we expect to spend a large portion of our time and resources on the extensive infrastructure planning and project management required. Since one of the founders will, as always, be personally on-site for all server operations, this will involve a significant number of business trips to our locations. For security reasons, we will, of course, not disclose the locations of all our sites, even though some clever users among you have already figured out who we are working with on these projects. We have not yet fully decided how many financial resources we will leave open for staff expansion and marketing. In our internal annual financial statements at the end of the year, after all server investments and calculations, which will also include our retained earnings and other expansion costs, we will decide how large our marketing budget will be for the start of 2025.

The New Desktop Client

For those of you who didn’t read the section in the last update, here’s where things stood:

In the meantime, development has progressed significantly, although internally, we would have liked to have made a bit more progress. Integrating—or rather, developing around—the Zero Knowledge encryption has once again required a lot of brainpower. Additionally, onboarding new employees and fixing bugs took up a considerable amount of time. As a result, the current state of affairs is that there is still no ETA for the official release. However, the first beta version was released not so long ago. You can participate in the beta by joining our Discord, but it will soon be publicly available for everybody on our GitHub.

Here are some screenshots of the new client:

One of the biggest changes you’ll notice first is that the Desktop Client now provides the real Filen Drive interface. The Client is no longer just a synchronization tool but a full alternative to the Filen Web-Drive. To achieve this, we had to completely redevelop the Client from the ground up. After the Mobile App and the Web-Drive, this marks our last complete overhaul of our main products.

What happens next?

As we move toward the release of the new client, we will publish a detailed list of all new features and a “How to…” blog entry. For now, three keywords should catch your interest, aside from the features you know from the old client and the browser-based Web-Drive: Virtual Drive Mounting, WebDAV & NAS Server Integration. We are looking forward to this release and the opportunities it brings, as it will allow us to shift our attention to new topics and set the course for Filen’s future. Of course, bug fixes and fine polishing will be our top priority in the time immediately following the release.

However, with all of our products (for the moment) in their final form, we see the opportunity to focus on general company expansion with a clear conscience. The time will then come to take care of certifications, audits, and various marketing-oriented operations. Here you can see a rough oversight of our “near future” business plan. Please note that all information is without guarantee, things can happen / change quickly.

Along with the launch of the new client, there will also be another update:

The New Filen Web Drive

First of all, the Filen Web Drive was not completely redeveloped from the ground up like the desktop client, but it has still been very heavily updated to connect to the new client. The changes will mainly be noticeable in the repositioning of features and UX/UI adjustments. But in the backround we also fixed many bugs and reinforced the Web-Drives stability and security even further. The Desktop Client and the Web Drive have been visually closely aligned and will be identical in many aspects. This is intended to create a unified and intuitive user interface across all our products. Since we are open source, screenshots have already appeared on Reddit where a clever user hosted our code as their own instance and then took screenshots of it. Therefore, we’re going to be lazy and simply refer you to their comment instead of creating our own screenshots.

https://www.reddit.com/r/filen_io/comments/1ez312n/new_filen_design/

Of course, official screenshots, the website images and our marketing material will be updated / released for the official launch.

CLI “Official” Beta

CLI “Official” Beta

Last Status Update we announced the new Filen CLI, as a work in progress project. Now we are entering the public beta with the new Version v0.0.8. Feel free to participate, as we are happy about every found and eliminated bug.

You can find it on our GitHub under the releases section. But remember that beta products should be used with caution as we can’t guarantee a smooth user experience or potentially severe bugs. All of our new releases go through an initial beta phase, which we will extend until we a sure that every part is thoroughly tested.

For everybody who missed what a CLI is:

Our GitHub:

Our Publicly Documented API & the SDK

As always, transparency and security are at the core of everything we do. We understand that developers and businesses need clear, accessible, and reliable tools to work with/integrate our encrypted cloud service. That’s why we are excited to announce that our API will be publicly documented, ensuring that anyone can easily understand and implement our secure solutions into their workflows.

The key aspects why our API will be publicly documented:

• Accessibility: Anyone, not just developers working directly with the company, can access the documentation. This allows developers to explore and use the API without needing special permissions or approvals.
• Transparency: Public documentation promotes transparency by showing how the API works and what it can do.
• Ease of Integration: Developers can more easily integrate the API into their own applications or systems because they have access to all the necessary information. This includes details on authentication, possible errors and how to handle them, and the exact parameters required for requests.
• Community Contribution: Since the API documentation is public, external developers can provide feedback, suggest improvements, or even develop their own extensions and tools that use the API.

The publicly documented API is the next step in our Filen SDK project, which we mentioned in the last status update, and released the latest version, v0.1.157, today. Our publicly documented API will provide detailed instructions on how to use the API's functions and data.

The SDK (Software Development Kit) will include this API along with additional tools, libraries, and examples that make it easier and faster for developers to integrate the API into their applications. Essentially, the API provides the "how-to," while the SDK offers a complete toolkit to implement it efficiently.

All this is a big step to advance the development and especially the integration of Filen into other media in the future.

Black Friday Sale

We have received many questions about the Black Friday Sale through various channels. Therefore, here is a summary of the current information:

Yes, there will be a Black Friday Sale.
It will likely start between midnight 0:00 and 3:00 AM (CET, UTC+1,2) on Black Friday and last at least a week.

As in previous years, we will again offer Lifetime Plans at attractive prices.
However, it is possible that this year we will limit the quantity of larger plans.
We will publish more detailed information as we get closer to Black Friday.

Certificate Decisions

As mentioned in the last update and above, we are still considering which certifications will be in our final decision process.

Our decisions will be based on the following criteria (not listed by importance):

• Cost
• Effort
• Reputation
• Scope
• Timing

We have already gathered a significant amount of data to narrow down our list, but one thing we are particularly interested in is how you, the users, feel about it! Which certifications do you know? Which ones have more or less reputation in your personal opinion? Here you can find a link where you can participate in our decision-making process by telling us how you think about different certifications their scope and timing. It is the same link as for the Q&A and else. Just navigate to the part you want to participate in.

Public Appearances

Another topic that has accompanied us since day one is, of course, our reputation. We offer security as a service. Security doesn't come without trust, which is why, aside from status updates like this one, we would like to step a bit more into the public eye. By this, we mean showing personal presence, attending more events, entering into partnerships, and generally participating at the forefront of the poorly protected privacy sector. The first instance of this will be a talk that our COO & CMO will give towards the end of the year on the subject of encryption and cloud integration. Since we are still in the planning stages, we won't reveal too much yet. The talk will be in German, and we are currently checking with the event organizer all further conditions, including to what extent a digital transmission or recording will be available. More information will follow, as always.

But that’s not the end of the topic, as the next two points also fall under the umbrella of what has been mentioned.

YouTube Videos

We wanted to check with you how you feel about video content. Would you like videos with behind-the-scenes insights or tutorials about our products? Or would they potentially help you?
For us, the core options that would be feasible are as follows:

• General tutorial videos about our products.
• Specific videos that thoroughly explain and demonstrate particular features in real-world applications and showcase their potential.
• Entertaining videos that follow the team at events and other activities
• Our regular status updates in a spoken format with a personal touch.
• Entertaining videos generally related to the themes of cloud, business, and tech.

Depending on the situation, we would either outsource some of these formats or try to design them ourselves in parallel. It all depends on how much you can stand a heavy German accent.

 Decision criteria are again:

• Effort
• Potential Costs
• Added value for users

But what is even more interesting is, of course, what you really want. So, once again, you can vote anonymously here, in just a few seconds, on what you would personally like to see:

Marketing & Affiliate

We are currently planning a redesign of our affiliate system because we are not really satisfied with it in its current form. Most users are unaware of it, the payout threshold is too high, the effort per user is too high due to the lack of automation from a tax and accounting perspective, and many other small problems plague the current system. We are currently working on a concept that will be satisfactory for everyone in the end. In the first steps, we will gather experience data by entering into affiliate-based partnerships. You might come across one of them in the future. What we least want is to turn this into a …VPN promotion. Still, the affiliate marketing format is indispensable nowadays, especially in the Software as a Service sector. That is also, because it creates an indirect win-win situation with little risk for the creator/influencer, the advertising company, and the customers. We pay based on performance, the influencer has little effort implementing the ad, and customers get potential discounts while also supporting their favorite influencer.

However, since reality is unfortunately not always as ideal as just described, we still need to approach the topic cautiously. One must never forget that in such partnerships, the credibility and trustworthiness of both parties are interdependent. And untrustworthy advertising can also be a bad thing. Feel free to give us your anonymous opinion on this by clicking the button:

Q&A

In the spirit of our surveys, we thought we would use the communication through the included link to start a community Q&A. We always read a lot on our social media channels, but some questions often fall through the cracks or are no longer answered because we have answered them many times before.

Therefore, here you have the opportunity to ask the questions that interest you the most. Whether it's about technology, business, the future, or us personally, all types of questions are welcome. Of course, we know there will be too many questions to answer them all, so we will answer the 10-20 most frequently asked questions and publish them on our blog as a post. To make it easier for us to sort the questions, we will group them by keywords and theme groups. Therefore, we ask you to please select or type in the broad topic area of each question in advance. You can still ask multiple questions. However, submitting the same question multiple times to push it up in the voting will not work :)

Survey Evaluation

The last survey is completed, and we will contact the winners in the coming days. Feel free to check your emails or spam folders, so you don’t miss out if you win.

As we did last time, we will evaluate the survey internally and then provide you with a rundown of the conclusions we draw from it. The evaluation will also be published on our blog. We will probably also announce it on other social media channels.

Final Words

Thank you very much for reading this post. We hope you are generally satisfied with the development progress and the current state of our products.

We are happy that we are slowly reaching the point where we feel like we can really get going. We are close to all the pieces of the puzzle falling into place and creating the overall picture that we have been working towards for so long.

As already mentioned several times in this update, here you can find the buttons to give us direct feedback on the topics of this update and to ask us questions for the coming Q&A. Everything you ask or say via the buttons is anonymous and encrypted.

Thanks for reading, best regards and see you next time!