A look at the people behind the numbers in area business:
COY CHRISTMAS FASETTO
Title: CEO, co-founder
Age: 39
Coy Christmas, CEO of Superior, Wis.-based Fasetto, said early positive feedback is driving demand for its Link device, which wirelessly stores and streams content among smartphones, laptops and other devices.
Link packs a custom wireless solid state drive, with its own operating system and the ability to upload and transfer content offline, into a black cube that's less than 2 inches in length and width and less than an inch thick.
Link enables users to store and access photos, videos, music or work documents and transfer them to and from Link regardless of their device or platform and without connecting to a wireless network or using mobile data, Christmas said.
Retailers and distributors have been asking to carry Link since it received favorable reviews in its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas, Christmas said.
Manufacturing won't begin until this summer and Link won't go on sale until the fourth quarter. The plan is to sell direct to consumers and possibly through online retailers for the first year.
Christmas and United Kingdom-based Luke Malpass, Fasetto co-founder and software architect, launched the company in 2013.
Fasetto also offers a cloud storage and communications application that has grown to more than a million users a day. Both Christmas and Malpass previously developed computer gaming equipment.
Fasetto, with 11 employees and up to 30 by year's end, has received financing from Wisconsin angel investors.
Q: Do you expect Link to appeal to GoPro users and other active consumers?
A: The camera user now is going to have an option of where to offload their video into a device that's very durable and waterproof. Yet they're able to have a tremendous amount of [storage] space so they can do a lot more shooting and easily access it with another device without pulling cards out and copying files over.
Q: How does having offices in two countries affect how you run the company?
A: In a business in which we're working with the cloud, it's helpful because if anything were to go down, there's always someone watching. Down the road there'll probably come a time where we can't do this round-the-clock stuff. But I don't see that in the near future.
Q: What is your exit strategy?
A: If someone were to walk in tomorrow and wanted to hand us a check, we wouldn't take it, because we want to see this through. … Talk to us in a year when the product is sitting out there and all we're doing is updates on the software.
Todd Nelson
