Ten years ago, Nokia was the number one mobile phone manufacturer in the world. The new millennium looked very bright for the Finnish company. It was creating a landscape of GPRS, 3G and MMS phones, its “Grand Valse” ring tone had become iconic, and its product line was expanding beautifully.

Nokia had just introduced the 3310, which became one of the world’s most successful mobile handsets. The 3310 was so successful that in the five years from 2000-2005, when mobile technology wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is today, Nokia sold 126 million phones. The iPhone has sold 129 million in four years (Q3 2007-Q3 2011).

But Nokia’s 3310, despite its popularity did not make it easy for us to switch phones. If you had any mobile phone other than a Nokia, switching phones meant trouble. To move information as essential as your address book, you had to have a computer with Microsoft Windows and use Outlook Express–which was deemed a common denominator by phone manufacturers–to bridge the transition.

When you wanted to switch mobile phones, you were guaranteed to lose some of your friends’ phone numbers and all your text messages. If you were lucky, you could salvage your favorite ring tone from some website for a buck. It was painful to move stuff from one phone to another.

It’s ten years later. You still cannot control your information storage and access it without performing mental miracles. You cannot lend a computer to a friend because it’s filled with personal data. You cannot lose a phone on a trip because it carries all that is precious to you. And yet we ignore backing up our stuff knowing what a chore it is.

Ten years later, technology still fails to solve this very problem. Our devices are fancy storage boxes, locked with keys we don’t own, controlled by guards we don’t know.

Here at Tazamun, we want to give freedom back to our ‘stuff.’