| Enter your email address
and receive our FREE computer care tips! |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Moms mean business in backing up PC files - Newsday article
If necessity is the mother of invention, what does it mean when a mother does the inventing? It means that two longtime stay-at-home moms get to dust off their MBAs so they can help not only their college-age sons, but other students as well.
The story of how longtime friends Maggie Tolkin and Amy Motschwiller became partners in StudentBackup.com, an Old Bethpage company that sells a service that automatically backs up students' computers daily and saves the data centrally, begins with Tolkin's son Ryan, then a freshman at Duke University. Ryan never backed up on the flash drive his parents bought for him. Then came the lost-in-a-crash term paper.
"When we got that hysterical phone call at 3 o'clock in the morning, there was very little that we could do," Maggie Tolkin said. That got Tolkin thinking. She and Motschwiller began doing research. They learned that 70 percent of college students never back up; the main hang-up was remembering to do something every day. They developed their product based on that research.
Lesson two was in marketing: The target had to be parents. Hawking the product on campus produced tepid results. ("Even though $49 [the cost] is a very nominal amount of money to spend for this, they'd rather take the $49 and you know, that's 10 beers," Tolkin said). So they contracted with a company that sells items like linen services and refrigerator rentals to parents. They're also putting the software in major stores and on educational Web sites. They have more than 2,000 customers.
Why was this the product that got them to return to the workforce? "Timing is everything," Tolkin said. Both had sons off at college and other children old enough to be left alone. And, Motschwiller noted, it was "having an exciting project versus some of the things that other people I know are doing that I couldn't see myself doing."
She added, "But also, it's doing a great service for people. Maybe that's the mother in us."
Moms mean business in backing up PC files
A.J. CARTER
August 7, 2006 |
