It’s been fifty days since we publicly launched Soluto at TechCrunch Disrupt, and they’ve been a wild fifty days… The response we received to our first beta feature was overwhelming to say the least. Interest was so strong and exceeded our expectations to such a degree that we had no choice but to remove our download button several times when spikes of traffic brought down our service.

We sincerely apologize to all of you who came to find out more about Soluto, but couldn’t immediately download our software. We’ve been working very hard to survive future spikes.

Another thing that caught us by surprise is the extent to which users are trying to get involved with and contribute to Soluto. This means a great deal to us, we think it’s far from trivial, and we’re incredibly excited by it.

So if you’d like to take part in our little history, here are a few ways you can lend Soluto a helping hand:

1. Join our alpha team: Would you like to receive early access to an Alpha version of Soluto? Join our alpha team! Simply sign-up, here.

   One thing though: If you’re a reporter or blogger, we kindly ask you not to publish anything you find out from the Alpha release before it’s made public. If you do publish – we won’t be friends with you and won’t invite you to our parties. And we throw very cool parties, don’t say we didn’t warn you…

2. Help out on our support community: Would you like to contribute to our open support community? All you need to do is answer questions users have and help them out as best you can. To start helping just go, here.

   The rules for taking part in our support community are very simple: be nice, be patient, and remember many people are not as experienced as you.

   If you need some help from our team, email us at support@soluto.com and we’ll help you better understand Soluto so you can start helping others. If you show special dedication in helping others, we could make you an official rep of Soluto (if you’d like us to of course…)

3. For hardcore techies: Are you a hardcore techie that wants to take part in our journey and contribute your time and knowledge to Soluto? Write me a note at roee@soluto.com, tell me who you are, what you do, why you would like to take part, and I’ll see what we can do.

I would like to thank all our users for being so patient with us and providing so much feedback. Please always feel free to contact us at feedback@soluto.com, or write me directly at roee@soluto.com, or on Twitter.

Yours,
Roee

The entire team here was excited to learn over the weekend that Soluto was chosen to be among AlwaysOn’s Global 250 Top Private Companies!

It’s a great honor for a young company such as ourselves to be in a list that includes the likes of Facebook, FourSquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as friends like MetaCafe, aniBoom, Clarizen and Kaltura.

From the announcement:

The AlwaysOn Global 250 represent the top emerging companies in the Global Silicon Valley that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, and greentech.

The entire announcement and full list of 250 companies is available, here.

That’s right! Soluto was featured in the Business section of this weekend’s edition of New York Times. Anne Eisenbreg did a great write-up of what we’re up to. Here’s a nugget:

I tried the Soluto program, and by following its recommendations, cut my boot time to 1.44 minutes from 2.40 minutes. I removed some applications from the boot sequence, letting them run after the boot was over. I “paused” other applications that I don’t use on a daily basis — for instance, an application that automatically updates Google products. Instead, I’ll wait until the company lets me know when there is an update. (Soluto divides the possible changes in the boot into “no brainers,” “potentially removable apps” and “required, cannot be removed.”)

Robert Scoble is quoted in the article, here’s what he said:

Soluto’s approach to PC frustration is novel and highly promising, said Robert Scoble, a video blogger and a former Microsoft employee. “This is innovation at a deep level; they are bringing in the crowd to augment solutions to Windows problems,” Mr. Scoble said.

Even Ed Bott chimed in:

SO far, the company is doing an intriguing job, said Ed Bott, author of many books about Windows. “The need they’ve identified among users really resonates with me,” he said. “They have a long-range plan to address many issues of frustration. It’s an original and promising approach.”

Thank you to everyone at the New York Times that made this article possible. And thanks to both Robert & Ed–we appreciate your excitement over Soluto!

Roee Adler – @roadler

It has come to our attention that malware applications are disguising themselves as Soluto software and are being seeded and downloaded on BitTorrent.

These applications have the intent of causing damage to users’ PCs and should not be downloaded.

We are therefore advising all users to download Soluto only from our main site at Soluto.com, or from well-known and legitimate download sites.

We’d like to thank Brian Baskin for bringing this to our attention.

Nearly two weeks ago, Soluto participated in Disrupt, a startup conference run by TechCrunch, the renowned technology blog. Soluto won the Battlefield which was the startup competition portion of the event. This was both a shock and a great honor. But this post is not about us, it’s about a very cool startup called UJAM, which came-in as runner-up.

UJAM was the first startup to debut its product on stage, and boy did they set a high bar. With UJAM’s app users with practically no musical talent whatsoever can create astonishing music compositions. One of its coolest features is the ability to hum or whistle a tune into a microphone and have UJAM morph the tune as if it was originally played by an electric guitar or piano. Very cool stuff. Hands down, UJAM had a stellar demo (We’ve embedded some of it below).

By the final day of Disrupt, the buzz among attendees was that the two major contenders for the top prize were UJAM and Soluto. We certainly didn’t think it was in the bag. Ultimately though, Soluto was awarded the top spot, and we are humbled now as we were on-stage when we received it. This is especially true since we befriended the UJAM guys—Peter Gorges & Axel Hensen—and were cheering for them as well.

So to the good folks of UJAM: Gentleman, it was an honor to battle it out with you at Disrupt! Know that the entire Soluto Team are huge fans of yours and will be rooting for your success

Well, the unbelievable has happened… Soluto won TechCrunch Disrupt! We are truly humbled by the honor.

It’s always a scary experience to launch a product into the world, but to do it at an event that draws so much global attention as Disrupt is, well, terrifying.

Clearly though, it couldn’t have gone any better and we couldn’t be any happier!

The fact that Soluto won a startup competition for PC anti-frustration software on the day that Apple’s market cap passed that of Miscrosoft’s, really does underscore the importance of what we’re doing.

We’d like to thank everyone that supported Soluto, from Alpha users, to all the great folks we met at Disrupt, to our friends and families.

Soluto, is going to make a billion people happy, and it starts today!

This is it… The big moment has come, we have just stepped off stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, where we launched our highly anticipated anti-frustration software!

Soluto Beta — available right now for free download — allows PC users to understand their boot and discover which applications are slowing them down. Soluto Beta not only cuts down your boot, it also improves your on-going PC performance for you.

Huge thanks to all our Alpha users for all the feedback and support. We couldn’t have done it without you!

But that’s not all! We just announced yet another product — the PC Genome, a one of a kind database housing frustration points for millions of PC users worldwide, and more importantly, the remedies that alleviate them.

The PC Genome is not yet available to the public, but I assure you, the Soluto team is working hard to get the data out to you as soon as possible.

The best way to keep updated on Soluto’s PC Genome and our anti-frustration software, is by subscribing to this blog (RSS), and following Soluto on Twitter.

Roee Adler, Chief Product Officer – @roadler

This post is coming to you from 550 Washington Street in New York City, because we can finally let the cat out of the bag… Soluto has been selected out of hundreds of startups to present at TechCrunch Disrupt!

Obviously, this is a great honor for Soluto, and the really great part is that we will be launching our anti-frustration software, live on-stage today on the morning of Monday, May 24th. Finally, we get to show you and the rest of the world what we’ve been working on

We’re represented here by myself and my good friends, Soluto co-founders Tomer Dvir and Ishay Green. Also with us is Or Yagel, one of our super talented IT experts. We’re all wearing our Soluto T-shirts so we’re easy to spot.

Following our on-stage presentation, we’ll be available at our table at the Startup Alley so if you’re at Disrupt, come-up and say hello.

We’ll be updating throughout the event via Twitter. So if you want to get a link to the live video stream of our presentation right before we go on stage, as well as all the pics and videos we’ll be taking on-location, make sure to follow our official twitter account: @soluto.

Huge hugs to the amazing Soluto team back at the HQ—we’re going to make you all proud!

Roee Adler, Chief Product Officer – @roadler

Can you imagine having to restart your car engine several times a trip?

What about a temperamental freezer that lets your meat rack defrost for no apparent reason?

Well, I guess we wouldn’t accept that…

So why are we so tolerant of our PCs?

With one billion estimated PCs across the globe, you would expect the PC experience to be top notch or at least as reliable as the other equipment a modern person depends upon.

Despite the 21^st century shiny exterior packaging with 3D in-store display units, colorful animated boxes and every metallic shade of aluminum you can imagine, unfortunately in some ways the PCs’ interior performance is somewhere back in the past, struggling to keep up with the modern mass-market exterior. The average PC still causes endless frustration for its users. Yet, somehow, most of us are just taking it.

The truth is, a simple comparison to the other parts of our daily lives reveals a sharp discrepancy when it comes to our tolerance levels. What people tolerate from their PCs would never fly with their home entertainment system, or even their $9.99 no-name kettle.

So why do we accept such low standards for our PCs, and tolerate these constant work disruptions?

You may simply answer “Get a Mac!” Well, although Macs are generally perceived as being more reliable than PCs, they are not free from problems (some Mac users are in denial on this point)… But in any case, this whole Mac vs. PC debate is an interesting subject on its own, so let’s leave it for a separate blog post…

Right now we’re exploring why the masses are so tolerant of their PCs. Here are some possible explanations:

The PC love-hate relationship

One possible explanation is that it’s the only friend we know. Our PCs help us do a whole lot more than we can with our human limitations – brains, fingers and even pocket calculators. So while PCs aren’t perfect, we’re willing to accept quite a whole lot of slack for lack of a better alternative. A kind of love-hate relationship. But then again, even though I really appreciate the keys on this keyboard and can’t really type without them… I wouldn’t put up with the Ddddddd just repeating itself over and over again for no apparent reason – so I guess that theory is limited.

It’s us, not them

Another explanation is presuming it’s us, not them. PCs were historically intended for tech- guys who, we all presume, can fix every problem their PCs present. The rest of us professionals and regular people may presume that it’s our computer literacy limitations causing these problems, and the systems admin guy, if there is one, will eventually sort it out.

But then again, most people don’t have the first clue how their fax machine actually sends images to a piece of paper on the other side of the world, yet they still expect it to arrive…  And even with very tech-smart people at our disposal, we all know they don’t always succeed in relieving an aching user from his PC pains as heralded by the dreaded ‘sorry, not much more we can do here – we’re gonna have to format the PC’. So that theory is also kinda holey.

We’ve all been trained well

A third possibility could be that we’ve simply been trained to have low expectations from our PCs and the software they run. From the first Microsoft Windows operating system, we were trained to accept certain fundamental principles; one being that your PC will always have bugs, delays, and crashes. Even though some aspects of the problem have been improved over the past few years, we still see frustration bundled with the experience of using a PC, and that’s just the way we’ve always known it to be… sad, but apparently true.

These are some of our theories trying to answer the absurd phenomenon whereby most of us are way more tolerant of our PCs than we would be of any other more complex or more simple devices we rely upon. We are still intrigued by this and as you can see don’t have a clear answer (nor do we know if there is one).

So why do you think we’re all so tolerant of our PCs?

Roee

Let’s talk about PC frustration.

You all probably know what I’m talking about—you buy a brand-new computer, and within a few months it starts slowing down, applications freeze on you and the boot becomes incredibly long. It’s as if your PC is corroding.

We call this PC frustration.

Well, computers aren’t meant to frustrate. Quite the opposite – they’re  supposed to make us more efficient.

My name is Tomer Dvir, and I co-founded  Soluto together with Ishay Green to make PCs work the way they should. We decided it’s time to dig deep, search wide and really solve this problem.

After a long period of research, benchmarking, and endless trial and error, we’re ready to share with you our surprising journey revealing why PCs have become so frustrating, and what we can all do about it.

Our research: it’s not what you think

We started by exploring the sources of this frustration and first turned to the obvious suspects. The most frequently cited causes for slow PCs are bugs, viruses, spyware and bloated registries. But after analyzing dozens of PCs we realized that these, in-fact, are not the cause for most of the frustration.

It’s not bugs–most software vendors release fairly clean software–it’s in their interest to do so. As for viruses and spyware – they’ve already been taken care of pretty well by the various anti-virus and anti-spyware applications. And it’s certainly not registries slowing down our PCs. This may have been true in older Windows versions (e.g. Windows 95), but in the more modern versions (XP, Vista, 7) bloated registries no longer cause significant delays. When measuring PC performance before and after cleaning the registry we saw little or no improvement.

“It’s the applications, stupid”

After months of extensive testing we realized that the #1 reason our PCs are slow and unreliable is that legitimate software is hogging our PCs’ resources for no apparent reason.

Each application takes up the PC’s resources (CPU, memory, I/O) for its own needs, whenever it sees fit – at your expense.

Examples:

1. Why do certain applications perform heavy analysis or indexing during my boot and significantly slow it down, when they could just as well wait for idle time?
2. Why should two applications decide to execute a heavy I/O operation at the same time, making my PC unresponsive?
3. Why should my anti-virus software start some invisible scanning process exactly when I’m writing a document, causing my word processor to freeze?
4. Why do almost 100 (!) processes run during my boot? Which of them take excessive boot time? Which of them can I safely remove?

We could go on for hours, and in upcoming blog posts we will share many specific cases in more detail, with practical advice for PC users.

The more we dug into this the more we realized that many software and hardware vendors are way too liberal about hogging our PCs’ resources.

Why is that? How do they allow themselves to treat our PCs that way?  Because they can get away with it.

Any vendor can run various processes in the background or apply self-serving default settings and there’s almost no way to know which one is really slowing down your PC. Even the PC experts are limited to various complicated tools they use with trial and error to try and find which needle in the applications haystack is causing the problems.

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”

So, how do we solve the problem?

We figure out exactly which software is hogging your PCs’ resources,  expose it in a clear way, and leverage community wisdom to recommend the best solution.

We believe users are smart enough to open applications when they need them. We think users deserve to know what’s going on inside their computers. After all, it’s our computers, not the vendors’.

Anyway, that’s enough for our first post. Soluto is currently in closed alpha with hundreds of users testing and giving us valuable feedback. Every day we’re discovering amazing stuff. We’ll share our insights and discoveries in the following posts.  Stay tuned!

Tomer