Services provided by cloud computing provider Joyent have been offline for three days following issues with ZFS. Strongspace and BingoDisk are amongst services that have been affected since January 12. Joyent CEO David Young said in a post to the Joyent forums that the service “got bit by a massive ZFS bug…that got onto/into the backups” preventing easy restoration. Data Knowledge Center has more, and you can see our review of Joyent’s Slingshot product here. The problems at Joyent follow ongoing difficulties at online storage provider Omnidrive, who saw its main website was down for over a week following suggestions that the service may be facing financial difficulties. At the time of writing Omnidrive’s web site is back up and other reports would suggest that the core storage service remained unaffected by the website issues; however, there are big questions about their long term viability. → Read More
Online office suite Zoho and online storage company Omnidrive (see disclosure below) are announcing a partnership today that extends the functionality of both companies. The integration leverages Zoho’s newly updated API. The partnership is allowing users to store all of their Zoho office documents within Omnidrive, giving them a centralized online file storage area. Also, clicking on any office document within Omnidrive automatically opens the document for editing at Zoho. It also allows users to collaborate on documents by using the sharing features of Omnidrive. This new partnership also means Omnidrive arguably now offers a complete link between making and editing files on your desktop and online. Omnidrive’s file linking causes updates made on your desktop or within Zoho Writer to update/sync the file in other locations as well. This linking is the main feature that caught our eye when we previously analyzed online storage services. For additional information, see the Omnidrive and Zoho blogs. For background on the companies, see our previous coverage of Zoho and Omnidrive, and see Webware’s recent coverage of Omnidrive here. Disclosure: In December 2006 Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, invested in Omnidrive. See TechCrunch About page for additional information. → Read More
The annual Web 2.0 Summit kicked off today at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference Summit, which has been sold out for months, is noticeably larger than last year and hundreds of people are milling about, seeing and being seen. The highlight of last year’s conference for me was LaunchPad, where thirteen young startups showed their stuff to the audience. See our coverage from last year here and here. Many of those companies are doing very well. Only one, Pubsub, has entered the TechCrunch DeadPool. LaunchPad this year was perhaps even more competitive than last year. Over 200 companies applied to present at the conference. Only thirteen were accepted, and each had five minutes to demo their product to the crowd. We have a summary of what each announced below. → Read More
We first wrote about Australia/Silicon Valley based Omnidrive, an online storage company, in late 2005. Since that time we’ve extensively reviewed various online storage services, including rumored products from Google and Microsoft, as well as Amazon’s storage API solution (update here) for application developers. This space continues to heat up, to say the least. Fast forward six months. Omnidrive is yet to launch, but they’ve continued to build out their service. Last week they invited in a new round of beta testers for their product, which includes an online and client interface (Windows only, Mac still in development). I’ve tried out the service and am posting a few screen shots. The online interface (which is all I have tested so far) works very well although there are still a few bugs. One feature that I really like is the ability to set up a special kind of folder, called a “live folder” that is associated with a URL that contains a RSS feed. Any enclosures in that feed (images, sound files, whatever) are automatically uploaded to that omnidrive folder. To test this, I uploaded the URL to my flickr page, and the images contained in the feed (the last 20 pictures uploaded) were now copied automatically to my Omnidrive account. As I add more pictures to flickr these images will automatically sync with Omnidrive. This will work just as well with podcast and videocast sites, etc. Omnidrive plans on sending hundreds of invites out per day until they open it up to the public, which they say will be sometime in September (expect delays). They have also released a web services API along with toolkits and example projects for developers to build applications that access Omnidrive storage. With the API a developer can either build applications that existing Omnidrive users can use, or they can create their own users and use Omnidrive purely as a backend. The API extends to being more than just saving and retrieving a file with user management, payment management, media handling and the ability for the users of a partner application to use their desktop tools to store, retrieve and access files. Pricing for the API has not yet been announced publicly but “will be competitive against S3 and other offerings” with a basic API account being free. Competitors Streamload and Mark Cuban-backed Box.net also have API offerings, and we plan a post in the → Read More
The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the bursting of the bubble) led to very high prices for a minimal amount of storage. Over the last year a slew of new services have launched (some are launching in February) with serious web 2.0 features, reasonable pricing (including free unlimited storage) and, in at least one case (OmniDrive), the ability to read/write directly to the file with local applications like Office, on the remote server. This last feature speeds the process of writing to files significantly by skipping the requirement to download the file to the hard drive first. The Online Storage Gang We looked at a total of thirteen companies. They are: AllMyData, Box.net, eSnips, Freepository, (the unfortunately named) GoDaddy, iStorage, Mofile, Mozy, Omnidrive, Openomy, Streamload, Strongspace and Xdrive. Another service, Zingee, has yet to launch and may also (or may not) have a compelling offering. Of the thirteen companies that we researched for this post, three really stand out. Australia-based OmniDrive (unfunded but not for long) is the clear leader in features. Box.net and Streamload are also very good choices. The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features – effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here. Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well. Web 2.0 Features Most of the new players (possibly with the exception of Mozy) are laser focused on key web 2.0 features. The best have multiple folders (private, shared, group, public), RSS feeds for each folder, etc. A couple, including Omnidrive, have also built features that allow subscriptions for RSS enclosures (such as podcasts), so that those files → Read More
There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day. I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by? So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web: Bloglines I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off. Del.icio.us I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon. FeedBurner I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page. Flickr I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect. Measuremap The Measure Map blog analytics → Read More
I’ve been testing Omnidrive‘s very early beta product over the last few days. Omnidrive will be launching in January, 2006. I’ve spent hours with it (and previously posted a brief mention) – significantly more than I spend with most products. The reason? This is a product that I and millions of others really need – a pure and functional online storage product with key web 2.0 features. Omnidrive is based in Australia, but is as good or better than anything else I’ve seen out of silicon valley recently. It has been in development for 12 months. Access & Features Users have two ways to upload, view and interact with files. The first is a web interface that allows for fairly easy file uploading. Users have three main folder options to start – private, shared and public. By placing a file in the shared folder, other people you’ve allowed in can see and download the file. If placed in the public folder, everyone can access the file. Omnidrive is also releasing a toolbar to assist with the web interface. The second way to access files is via a download (they support PC and Mac now, pocket PC later) that creates a virtual Omnidrive drive. This is THE way to upload or download big batches of files at once. Drag in a multi-gigabyte folder and Omnidrive will work away at it in the background until its fully uploaded or downloaded. The other features, some of which are still being built, include: built in media player to access media files set upload and download speeds to work in the background Omnidrive will pick up where it left off after rebooting computer RSS for folders tagging of files permanent URL for each file syncing of folders on a hard drive to the Omnidrive each Shared folder has separate access controls Pricing Pricing is a tough area for Omnidrive. They face storage and, more importantly, bandwidth costs that can be significant on a per user basis. In a post I wrote back in November (when I first heard of Omnidrive), I wrote that these services needed to give some storage for free, and “lots” for cheap. Founder Nik Cubrilovic responded in a post that my pricing needs were crazy, but agreed that there needs to be a compelling price point to get mass user adoption. Their current pricing reflects this thinking. They will give a → Read More
I’ve been talking to Nik Cubrilovic, the founder of Sydney, Australia based Omnidrive, since I posted about the need for a good online storage service in November (see no. 1 in that post). I’ve had the chance to test it over the last few days. It’s pre-beta but will be launching soon. They’ve solved a lot of the problems associated with storage away from the network, and has both an online and a desktop interface. Omnidrive will have a free version with a gig or so of storage, and paid plans after that. The feature set is awesome – it has everything you could ask for, including dealing with massive file uploads in the background. Full review coming soon – sign up for the beta announcement on the site. → Read More
