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OPI. It is Small, It is Pretty and It is Your Digital Safe.

OPI is a small box designed to keep your private information private.

No matter where you are, you should be able to access your information, but you should still be in control of who has access to it and where it is stored.

OPI gives you all this. And it is encrypted too. It is your digital Safe.

OPI is your private cloud with no third party eyes on your information. Still OPI will also allow you to share information with others, on your conditions.

We want to offer an alternative to cloud services such as Google for those of you that want to take back what is rightfully yours and have control of your information.    

How Does It Work?

Place OPI in a location where you have control over it, presumably your home. It is then connected to the Internet and you can use it to store your personal information and access it from all over the world.

OPI is a multi user platform and will handle different user accounts that can share information with each other, such as calendars, files and photos.

OPI will let you sync a number of things across your different devices such as:

• Calendars. Create private and shared calendars to help keep you and your family updated on what is going on.

• Email: OPI can retrieve email from many external accounts and keep them on one location, giving you access to this either using your standard mail application on your smart phone or computer, or by accessing it through the built in web mail client.

• Contacts. Keep your contacts up to date on both your smart phone and your computer and have the same information available everywhere. Even if you loose your phone, you will not loose your address book.

• Files and photos. Take a photo with your smart phone and it is immediately uploaded to your OPI where you can share it with others or just making sure that you have it even if you loose your phone. Access files and documents as easily as on Dropbox on all your different devices.

• Everything on OPI is encrypted. Without your password, no one will have access to your information, even if they gain physical access to the device.

How Do I Access My Information?

There are many ways to access the information stored on OPI.

1. For Android phones and tablets, install our free app from Google Play (yes, we do use Google where it is appropriate, but not for our personal or company related information).
   This will add accounts in the background and let you use your standard calendar application and contact editor.
   It will also let you access files stored on your OPI, have the possibility to automatically upload photos taken with you camera.
   We also provide a pre configured mail application that you can use to access emails stored on OPI.

2. For IOS and Apple devices there are already very good built in support for the different services provided by OPI. Apple devices uses the same protocols natively but you currently have to add the accounts manually. We will of course provide documentation on how to do this. (And yes, an IOS configuration app is high on our “todo” list.)
   

3. Access information from your regular desktop clients. Mail, contacts and address books can be accessed from a number of applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Thunderbird, Evolution and more. We only use standard protocols, and some applications will work immediately, and some will require a plugin to enable access.

4. Access your information using a web browser with OPI's web interface. OPI will provide access over an encrypted connection to your information. Email, calendars and any other information can be accessed regardless of your location.

To be able to always have access to your OPI, OpenProducts offer a dynamic dns service. This means that you during the setup will be offered to choose a name that you can use on Internet to find your OPI from anywhere in the world. All OPI’s will be granted names under the domain “op-i.me”, so an example would be to enter testopi.op-i.me to access the device named “testopi”.

What It is?

OPI is basically a small server. It is a system running Linux with a bunch of open source software on it.

With a lot of knowledge and time, you could build this your self. But most would only get halfway before time or interest has run out and you would be sitting with a system that would maybe work, but only as long as you do not touch anything…

Then add more users to the system and it will only get worse.

Not to mention keeping the system up to date and secure…

So what we do is to offer a system that is easy to setup, maintain and keep secure. Because we have done the hard work. Our unit will automatically backup your information and install necessary updates. And to top it off OPI only uses about 1.5Watts.

To understand more about the system, Tor has written an “Under the hood” article that explains more in depths of the system setup. And here is a short technical specification with hardware and software specs.

What It’s not

OPI is not a router or firewall. It does not anonymize your Internet behaviors. It does however keep all your information encrypted at all times, and it makes sure that your information is encrypted while it is passed to your computer or smart phone.

Why Should You Use OPI?

The most common comment on this is: “I don’t have anything to hide”. The problem with that argument most often is not the information you share, but the interpretation of the same. You let others interpret your data as they please without your consent. Be it advertisers, hackers, or governments.

So why should we use this and not the “free” online cloud services?

1. No third party provider should have the powers do deny access to my personal information.

2. No third party should have any rights to use my information for their purposes. Have you read the fine print of the cloud services?
   From Google terms and conditions (http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ May 31^st, 2014)”When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”

3. I do not want anybody to scan my emails. By sending mail directly to your OPI on “user@testopi.op-i.me”, emails are delivered directly to your OPI and not scanned or indexed by any third party.

4. I want to be 100% certain that my personal information, such as photos does not spread without my blessing.

5. What is something does go wrong with the information? I want to be able to “pull the plug”. I doubt that any of us can make Google do that for us…

Who Are We?

OpenProducts is founded by Tor Krill and PA Nilsson in 2011, and we are working full time with this project. Before starting OpenProducts, we were co-founders of another company that in 2006 put one of the first home servers on the market. Our previous products have been featured in a lot of magazines, but to just give a glance at what we did develop, check out this test review of The world’s best Linux home and small business server on "Linux User & Developer". Another magazine that tested our units is Computer Active that even published a video. That company is still up and running, but a couple of years ago that company changed focus and we decided that we wanted to do something different.

Prior to that we have worked on many different consumer electronics projects for many different companies, Tor with focus on embedded Linux and PA on hardware. A couple of examples that we have been involved in are:

• In the dot com time, we built managed switches, unfortunately way ahead of their time…

• Prior to smart phones being in every mans hand, we built a system to receive terrestrial broadcast TV to feed to high end phones

• We have built systems to wirelessly connect a number of sensors that then can be monitored online

Why Do We Do This?

We feel that this is what we want to use ourselves and decided to make it available for others as well. If you share our thoughts, help us Change the game. 

Project Status

The current status of the project is that all items are ordered and we are waiting for all components to arrive for final assembly.

We then need to test the units for any fabrication faults, and we should be ready to ship the first units by the end of June.

Those of you that have already contributed are of course first in line and we will ship the units as soon as we can.

On the software side we are now working hard on testing and to tie the last components together and make your life as easy as possible.

There is a video in the gallery section, or directly on vimeo, when the bottom part is being painted in production.

Join us by contributing and help spreading the word of OPI.