Personal Server Startup Changes Name

The Mountain View, Calif.-based software, services and appliance vendor announced the move at "Silicon Valley 4.0: The Future of the Future," a forum produced by Garage Technology Ventures and The Churchill Club. The one-day event, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, gathered industry thought leaders to discuss high-tech innovation and funding.

Mirra is a personal server designed to allow PC users to easily manage, protect, remotely access and share digital content such as documents, photos, e-mail and other files. "Mirra was created with supreme ease of use in mind. Today, we're making it even easier for customers to remember our company's name and Web site," Mirra CEO Richard Mandeberg said in a statement.

The Mirra product made its debut last month at the DEMOMobile conference in La Jolla, Calif. Dubbed a "digital file genie," Mirra combines an appliance with software and free services, providing backup/restore, remote access and file-sharing functions for digital content. The Linux-based unit contains a 120-Gbyte hard drive; backup/restore, remote access and sharing applications; a 10/100 Ethernet connection; USB 2.0 ports; and audio/video connections.

Plans call for Mirra to ship at the end of this month at a price of $399. Targeted at the consumer, SOHO and small-business markets, the product initially will be sold through Mirra's Web site (www.mirra.com), with broad channel and retail distribution to follow in early 2004 after January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where the company plans to actively recruit resellers, said Leslie Latham, vice president of marketing at Mirra.

VARs can sell Mirra as a "network in a box" or bundle it with other products as part of a bigger small-office/home network solution, Mandeberg and Latham said in an interview last month. Other potential channel offerings around Mirra include remote storage, backup and archiving services, as well as customized backup, remote-access and file-sharing solutions for vertical markets such as law or accounting, they said.

Mirra was founded in June 2002 by Chairman Tim Bucher, who also serves as vice president of Macintosh systems development at Apple. He previously was vice president of consumer products at Microsoft and vice president of hardware engineering at WebTV Networks, now owned by Microsoft.