The Cocoon Blog
The Internet as it should be: private, secure and virus free

It’s been a wonderful and wild week! We’ve gotten some great exposure from a number of blogs, and learned a ton from both commenters posting on those sites as well as feedback from the many signups we’ve had. I’m thrilled to say Cocoon has been well received and held up well to the crush of traffic with only a few minor glitches being reported.

Shortly after Lifehacker posted about our launching, we also had a great review from switched-downloadsquad, and some great links from The Awesomer and a few others. People all around the world have signed up to use Cocoon.

Cocoon users world wide

What have we learned?

We’ve confirmed there is a demand for the features Cocoon is offering. And, the people who are trying out Cocoon have been terrific – even when reporting a problem people have been very positive and even excited about the product (Feedback offers the option of including your emotional state).

Cocoon Feedback

We did learn about a few issues we hadn’t seen before. After a year in beta there were still a couple of add-on conflicts we had not experienced and there was an issue with custom font sizes a few people had set within Firefox that Cocoon didn’t retain. The developers were able to fix those issues, we’re testing them now and we’ll be pushing an update early this week.

We’ve also learned people are passionate about their privacy. Comments on the blogs have shown people making the effort to read our privacy policy and comment on it. I’m glad to say we have heard your comments and are working at re-writing the policy to more accurately represent what our policies are, rather than what the lawyers say. I’m sure there will be some give and take on just how simple we can say this: “Our business it to protect your privacy. We do not share your data with anyone unless required by law. Inside Cocoon we do not track where you go or what you do online. Your data belongs to you. If you close your Cocoon account all your encrypted data is removed from the system.”  I’ll let you know how things shake out and post a link to the new policy as soon as it’s available.

In closing I want to say thank you to Lifehacker for helping us launch, and a special thank you to all the users who have signed up and are providing the feedback we need to grow and improve Cocoon. There are many new features and improvements coming – and if you’d like to be involved in testing them we’re looking for some advanced testers -  let me know via kris(at)cocoonemail.com.

After two years of work, Cocoon is about to go live with the beta, providing safe, secure browsing. I’ve been lucky to get to use it while the engineers have worked out the bugs and smoothed the rough edges. Last weekend the servers were installed and have been being tested ever since. Everything is now running shockingly fast. It truly is amazing Cocoon can filter and or transcode each website, wiping away any viruses or malware and do it with no discernible delay. You need to see it for yourself.

But being safe from viruses and malware is just a part of Cocoon. Additionally you can manage spam by creating random and anonymous email addresses when registering for online services or making purchases. Cocoon keeps track of all address and messages you receive and makes it easy to manage them. You can even have the email address expire at a set date.

Browsing is easier too. While doing research I’ve enjoyed being able to save the tabs that I have open for future use. I can access all my history and saved tabs on any computer I use, and I can make notes that are saved to specific web pages that I can reference anytime I go back to that page.

I’m truly jazzed about everything Cocoon has to offer. And I know it’s just going to keep getting better – but I’ll save those improvements for another post. For now, go check it out yourself by signing up for the free beta at www.getCocoon.com and start enjoying safe, secure and virus free browsing. Oh, and tell your friends too please!

CocoonApp will go live before the end of October! It will be a limited availability launch as we ramp up.  If you want to get on the list, stay tuned for our invitation site link to be posted here.

Meanwhile, ongoing testing of the rapid development is going great. Sure we’re learning and changing things, but that’s the point. Usability is improving daily, and feedback shows people want to browse with privacy effortlessly, while avoiding spyware, malware, and viruses. What’s fun is to see people recognize how complacent we’ve all been with the status quo. They now expect browsing should be private and virus-free. Imagine that . . . coming by the end of October.

In two hours I’ll find out when CocoonApp launches its limited beta trials. It’s hard to imagine and impossible to explain how much needs to get done for this to happen.

What is CocoonApp? Imagine an application that would let you browse the web with nothing touching your hard drive. No malware or spyware to ever bog down your machine again, privacy from websites that want to spam you, or anyone you share your computer with. Why? Because with CocoonApp, you’re not browsing the net on your computer, you’re doing it on our servers. We just show it to you on your computer. You interact with the web the same way, but with the peace of mind of knowing you are protected. Hence one of the tag lines we’ve considered: “Peace of mind and the internet together at last”. Well, when we go live it will be “at last”… I’ll let you know.