(re-publication of public email response)

Hello!

About a week ago on Friday, a message went out from my prior company that drove a lot of people to our site (which I’m very glad about). If you’re not one of them, please ignore this message (you’ll still hear from us with our next general update).

First of all, thank you very much for reaching out. Welcome to Root (formerly ppl).

Since I’ve already responded to most of the questions that have come to me individually, some of this information is redundant, but hopefully it’ll fill in some gaps too.

Here are the highlights:

Clearing up some confusion about the message “from me”.
How to “transfer” your Daplie purchase or buy Hub with “Clear Coin”?
Why should you trust “us” again?
How is Root (formerly ppl) different from Daplie?

Context is King

The message that you got “from me” is one that I wrote, but about a year ago. It was written in regards to being removed from Daplie during the last fundraising round in November of 2017, at which time I was strongly opposed to the changes in direction regarding Indian Healthcare, Blockchain, Dapcoin, etc, and not in any way related to the recent decisions involving Clear.

There's no relationship between Daplie and Root (formerly ppl), and Root hasn’t received any of the IndieGoGo or WeFunder funding, nor “Clear Coin”. The original vision of the IndieGoGo was mine and that’s what we (Root) are still pursuing, but there’s no relationship between the two aside from that I started both.

I know a lot of you reached out to me simply because mine was the only contact information that you had. I had asked someone to post Clear’s contact information in the IndieGoGo comments, but it was quickly removed (as with other messages I’ve tried to relay in the past). If you want it, here it is:

Bryson Hill
(800) 977-0574
ClearCenter, Corp.
1145 S 800 E
Suite 300
Orem, UT 84097

Clear Center Customer Support
(800) 977-0574
support@clearcenter.com
https://www.clearos.com/clearcenter-listens
https://www.clearcenter.com/community/contact

If you’re not able to get in touch with Daplie, you might try reaching out to them with any questions or comments or feedback in regards to Daplie, Clear, Clear Coin, etc. It may also be valuable for them to hear your feedback directly to help influence the direction of their home server.

Getting Hub without Paying Twice

As stated above, neither I personally nor Root as a company have any of the funds or hardware assets from the Daplie IndieGoGo or WeFunder.

Here are two things that I’m thinking we could do:

As we develop our home server, I believe we’ll be able to make a version of the software that could be downloaded and installed on a spare laptop or desktop to convert it into an always-on home server.

If there's a way that I can take the "Clear Coin" without there being disproportionate legal or technical complications, I'd be happy to do that when the time comes and just handle the issue of converting that to “regular dollars” on our end (assuming it can be done).

3rd Time’s the Charm

I got a few emails asking something to the effect of “why should I trust you now?” The good news is that you don’t have to trust me (or Root). We’ll be making some services available as we build and we won’t be doing pre-orders for products that aren’t already usable.

With Daplie I thought that if I got a “business guy” on board and was able to get backers and funding that I’d be able fulfill my dream of huddling a small team of 4 into a garage to create a home server - banging out a product the old fashioned way. But that got away from me and, other than the extremely, extremely valuable experience I gained, I don’t know that I ended up any further ahead than if I had just stayed focused with the resources I had back in 2015 and moved forward until that small team gathered around - and I think that would have also gotten the people who believed in that vision (all of you) further ahead as well.

With Root, that small team has gathered around and we are - more or less - banging it out the old fashioned way.

This time around we’re taking it slow and steady… which brings us to the next point:

Things Have Changed

A year ago when I wrote the message you got I was thinking that we’d get funding and make quick work of the Hub prototype.

Also at that time we had a soft offer on the table that very well could have been enough to get us all the way to a working prototype again, however, we were concerned about what it would cost in terms of company ownership and how that might affect future product direction and focus, so we decided as a team to not take it.

Choosing not to take on additional funding at that time means that we still don’t have a home server prototype today. It also means that we’re not going directly into the home server market right away. Instead, we’ve been working on shorter-term products that are the pieces of that bigger puzzle (some of which already has enterprise adoption).

That means that instead of having 0 users of a not-quite-ready-to-ship home server, we have a few thousand customers (mostly developers) of completely usable software pieces that are necessary for building a home server.

So the vision is alive and kickin’, but we’re making more of a zig-zag path to get there rather than a bee line - most of our userbase doesn’t know that a home server is our end game.

We’ll be sending out updates from time to time. If you’d like to follow our progress, stay subscribed to our early access list. Otherwise you can unsubscribe, and we’ll still send out a one-time message when Hub itself is ready.

Feel free to reach out for more information and to share this message with others.

Stay tuned,

AJ ONeal

Update #30 from Daplie: Connection without the Cloud

Hello again,

We understand there may be a few of you who are not interested in our new direction as a CLEAR company, getting a refund from Daplie in CLEAR currency, or waiting any longer for what we started at Daplie. The other co-founder of Daplie, AJ ONeal has been focused on building a similar product at his new company. If you would like to tag along, he may have a path that interests you. We support AJ 100% in his future endeavors and hope you do too!

A Message from AJ ONeal, Post-Daplie

Hi Everybody, This is AJ ONeal. It’s been a hard transition and there’s still a long road ahead, but I’m excited and grateful to be able to introduce you to ppl, and our secure home cloud, Hub.

We already have tens of thousands of developers using some of the core components of our product, including folks at IBM and Beaker Browser, as well as source contributions from a number of companies, including Mozilla IoT and Digital Bazaar.

We’ve just recently launched our website, and I hope that you’ll take a second to sign up for Early Access to our progress updates and demos, or drop us a line so that we can say hi and let you know when Hub is ready for purchase.

We already have a few updates, including demos of working product features which we’d love to share with you, so that you can see our current status and have confidence in our continual progress.

"Hub", The Personal Cloud 2.0

I still have every intention of creating the product I envisioned over three years ago. It’s part of who I am. Hub will fulfill the goal, albeit by a different name, and a more focused development path.

The purpose of Hub is connectivity – Allowing you to connect between your existing devices, your existing drives, and (spoiler alert) existing friends and family - your "ppl", if you will.

We’re reusing much of the software I created as part of the original "Cloud" platform, which will drastically reduce the development timeline, but we’re not yet ready to announce a product on Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

If you’re the kind of person that would like to buy one of the earliest working prototypes and be in our testing loop, please send a message to evangelist@ppl.family.

Developers Welcome, Now

I know a number of you are developers that are interested in tinkering with the earliest alpha versions of useful software and hardware – The functional pieces along the way to a fully working product.

For those of you that are currently familiar with web and IoT development, I think you will truly love the first set of code, documentation, and video tutorials that are ready to use now.

Send a message to developers@ppl.family and you can expect to hear back from us with meaningful code, docs, and demos that you can use in your weekend projects.

Ask Me Anything, Anytime

This is my personal phone number and email address:

[removed] [removed]

There are almost 2,400 of you in total. I’m only one person, but I expect that this is a small enough group that I can reasonable hear and answer all of your questions, comments, and feedback. I only ask that you keep in mind that I am a real person in the real world, so please be considerate of that.

I’m genuinely excited about the road ahead and I hope that you will join with me again in taking back the Internet.

Sincerely,

AJ ONeal Founder https://ppl.family

By AJ ONeal

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From Daplie to Hub: What to Expect