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In the wake of the charred devastation wrought by the Witch Creek fires in San Diego two years ago this week, Dina Moskowitz and Marc Zimmerman saw something that made them wonder.
Was there any service available to the homeowners that could have protected them from losing highly valued items, such as birth certificates, memorabilia, family photos and videos and business records?
They found that plenty of services offered digital document storage for large firms. But they found nothing for homeowners needing digital storage of their documents and interior videos that could be privately accessed via the Internet.
Combining their experience in real estate, business and technology, they came up with the idea for their San Diego-based startup, Critical Digital Data Inc.
“It was clear people did not have the best way of organizing and taking care of their most important information,” Moskowitz says.
Their research showed that 19 percent of Americans have been evacuated from their homes at least once.
Virtual File Cabinets
By May of last year, company CEO Moskowitz and President Zimmerman raised “about six figures,” in start-up cash from friends and family, and developed a prototype. In August they rolled out their main product, HomeDataGuard Online File Cabinet.
It allows users to scan, upload, organize and retrieve all their home-based valuable information. Password-protected items such as documents, videos, images and any other digital files can be retrieved at any time from any computer with Internet access.
With graphics and sound effects of a traditional metal file cabinet, HomeDataGuard is designed to put the non-technical at ease.
The company charges $99 to video the rooms of a home for digital storage, and $150 for two hours of home-based document scanning. To put the data in a secure hosted server online, it charges $4.95 a month or $49.95 a year.
Marketing efforts have begun with direct mail, public relations and newspaper ads in the area. Meanwhile, 30-day free trials of the digital filing product are under way. Moskowitz and Zimmerman declined to disclose how much revenue the start-up has generated so far.
The company recently registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to trade shares under the symbol CDIX.OB. Its latest financials show the company posted no revenue for the nine-month period ended June 30, and a net loss of $59,873. It reported 4.1 million common shares outstanding, and a 1 cent loss per share. Since the company’s inception in May 2008 through June 30, it posted a net loss of $69,828.
There are five employees and in addition to outside business consultants.
Long-Term Plans
The company’s long-term marketing plan includes selling their digital file service wholesale to Banks, finance companies and insurers, which would then offer the digital file product branded as their own.
Critical Digital also plans to offer a service that enables consumers to look at key parts of real estate documents online for due diligence.
In Ramona, Nichole Booth, a mother of five who lost her home and everything in it to the Witch Creek fires, says she and her husband got a lot of mop-up help from neighbors and the Salvation Army. The volunteer organization found an unused manufactured house that was moved to the Booth’s property.
Pregnant at the time of the fire, Booth discovered medical ordering forms for her quadraplegic eldest daughter were lost in the fire, and she went through plenty of frustration replacing them.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she says. “We lost photos and VHS tapes of the kids, even our back-up disks (for her husband’s business) burned.”
Through the Salvation Army, she was put in touch with Critical Digital Data, which voluntarily scanned her home documents and video recorded her home’s contents.
That information is now safely stored online.
“It’s a huge area of relief we don’t have to worry about,” she says.
Mark Larson is a freelance writer for the Business Journal.
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