{ "cells": [ { "cell_type": "markdown", "metadata": {}, "source": [ "# Lab2 - Drop Out & Start Up (Cloud Data Insurance)\n", "\n", "\n", "#### Authors:\n", "\n", "v1.0 (2014 Fall) Rishi Sharma \\*\\*\\*, Sahaana Suri \\*\\*\\*, Kangwook Lee \\*\\*\\*, Kannan Ramchandran \\*\\*\\* \n", "v1.1 (2015 Fall) Kabir Chandrasekher \\*\\*, Max Kanwal \\*\\*, Kangwook Lee \\*\\*\\*, Kannan Ramchandran \\*\\*\\* \n", "v1.2 (2016 Spring) Ashvin Nair \\*, Kabir Chandrasekher \\*\\*, Kangwook Lee \\*\\*\\*, Kannan Ramchandran \\*\\*\\*\n", "\n", "Your best friend Ben Bitdiddle is convinced he's got a great new start up idea that's going to change the world. He's encouraging you to drop out and start the new company `Bitdiddlers, Inc.` with him. Before joining his start up, you'll want to do some analysis of your own to make sure his ideas are sound.\n", "\n", "`Bitdiddlers, Inc.` will be a company in cloud data storage, which is already a pretty crowded field (Dropbox, Box, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.), so you are understandably skeptical. However, there is one wrinkle to Ben's business model which he claims will help lower costs and **#disrupt** the current cloud storage model.\n", "\n", "One thing that drives up the cost for cloud storage companies is ensuring that customer data is not lost. You never hear about Dropbox losing your presentation, or Facebook losing your photos from that bachelor party (even though you may want them to), or really any instances of customer data loss associated with cloud storage services. This is because storage companies incur an enormous overhead of replicating customer data many, many times over in order to ensure an extremeley low probability of data loss.\n", "\n", "Ben Bitdiddle has decided that this expectation of 100% data integrity is increasingly unreasonable as humanity transitions deeper into a digital era. Digital goods, not unlike physical goods, are prone to permanent loss. Thus, Ben has taken inspiration from insurance companies, which help mitigate the pain of financial loss usually resulting from lost earning potential, goods, crops, shelter, etc.. Rather than promise 100% data integrity, which drives up costs and is inevitably a promise that cloud storage companies **will** be forced to break, Ben proposes that `Bitdiddlers, Inc.` will break ground in the new frontier of Cloud Data Insurance.\n", "\n", "