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.

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.

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.

3B

3B creates a three dimensional browsing environment based on input from a user, who can then create an avatar to explore the space, invite friends, chat with them, etc. A demo is here. In my notes I wrote “pretty, fun, completely useless.” On further reflection I can see people creating a 3B for various promotional purposes, but it won’t be able to compete with Second Life for virtual reality attention.

Adify

Adify allows anyone to create a vertical ad network – their software handles all of the details and allows publishers to determine prices, ad types, and monitor advertising metrics. They aim to help an estimated 500,000 advertisers fullfill their desire for targeted advertising on the sites they want. The Washington Post uses Adify with their Blogroll platform.

Instructables

Instructables is a site catering to “do-it-yourself’ers” and includes lots of step by step instructions for creating things. 30,000 people use the site regularly, the company says. Today they announced the launch of new collaboration features. More on them in the near future.

InTheChair

IntheChair is best described as turning musical instrument practice into a video game. It’s a web application that lets musicians practice their instrument alongside recordings of professional musicians. By hooking up a microphone to your computer, the application gives you real-time feedback about how well you’re hitting the notes and tempo of any song in their library. Users can also record sessions and share them with their teacher, grandmother, etc.

oDesk

See our previous coverage of oDesk here. oDesk provides an online marketplace for finding talented programming contractors. They launched in May 2006.

OmniDrive

We’ve covered Omnidrive for nearly a year…they announced their launch today at the conference. They have an online, windows, and mac client that allow you to seamlessly store and sync files from your computer to your online drive. Their open API also allows for more specialized implementations. See our previous coverage.

Sphere

We’ve covered Sphere, an blog search engine, for almost a year. Today they launched Sphere It for blogs. TechCrunch has integrated Sphere It into our template and a link is included at the end of every post. Click it to see contextually related blog posts and other information relevant to the story.

Stikkit

Stikkit, the “digital equivalent of a sticky note,” launched today – see TechCrunch UK for deeper coverage. Use it to take quick notes, and Stikkit makes an intelligent decision as to exactly what you are writing about and takes action from there. Mention a name and contact information and it will store it in an address book. Event information is stored in a calendar. Stikkit also supports tagging and other taxonomy structures. We’ll be following up on Stikkit.

Venyo

Venyo is launching a reputation management application with a couple of interesting twists. Not many details yet.

TimeBridge

Timebridge integrates with Outlook 2003 and helps businesses bundle together easy meeting coordination and project collaboration. Meetings are coordinated by sending out email invitations with suggested meeting times that match up with everyone’s schedule. Attendees choose their best times, and Timebridge finds the best time for the group. They’ve taken $6 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners.

Turn

Turn is a new advertising network that work on a CPA, or cost-per-action, basis, meaning advertisers only pay if some defined action occurs, like a sale or user registration. Turn computes how often an action actually occurs, takes into account the bidded payment per action, and distributes ads across its network accordingly. Looks like there’s a lot of technology behind this, and the executive team is strong.

Klostu

Klostu launched today. It leverages the 300 million people who have participated in Boardscape message boards and allows them to create a single sign on and identity among all of the boards. Turns each message board into a social network. We’re going to dig deeper on this one. Great design.

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 near future comparing all four storage API solutions.

Sign up for the Omnidrive beta on their home page. The release notes for the latest version are on their blog.

Disclosure: Omnidrive CEO Nick Cubrilovic has written guest posts on TechCrunch and is a friend.

Omnidrive Interface Screenshots:

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 are stored in the cloud instead of your hard drive.

And OmniDrive has one key feature that no one else matches: full read/write functionality on the file, in the cloud. Open a file from your Omnidrive, edit it and write it back to Omnidrive without ever downloading a local copy. Once they release their API, I imagine many, many services will mash the Omnidrive storage service into their applications. It is just too compelling not to.

AllMyData, unique among the group, is a full peer-to-peer solution with “grid storage”. This means you give up storage on your hard drive for other users, and you get theirs in return. Putting aside the fact that giving up storage is exactly what users don’t want when looking for a solution, the fact that others’ computers must be powerd up and online for you to be able to access your files is a serious service limitation.

Pricing
Pricing is all over the place, although I expect it to settle down as competition drives some of these companies out of the market.

Streamload is the most aggresive on pricing – offering a full 25 GB free to every user.

The obvious way to market these products, in my opinion, is to boldly offer unlimited storage for a nominal sum. Costs can be covered via a one-time sign up fee and through charges on download bandwidth (once I need the files, I’m willing to pay to get them).

I firmly believe that online storage should, and will, be packaged with new computers and applications like Windows. The amount of unprotected but hugely important media content out there on hard drives (music, movies, home movies, pictures), is growing every day. People need somewhere to back this data up for a reasonable fee, and it seems to me that Dell and others should package this service with the PC. All initial software would be auto stored, and users would have the option to continuously syncronize their hard drive with the virtual drive.

And while this business has thin margins, this is a multi-billion dollar per year revenue opportunity.

The Chart
The information above simply highlights the much more detailed information in the table linked to the left.

We were not able to speak to every company directly and the information available on websites is usually incomplete or hard to find. Therefore, we’ll be updating this table as more and better data comes in. Also, I’m sure I’ve left out any number of competitors in this space, so I will be updating the list of companies as well.

For the full feature comparison table, see here.

Research by Adam Bouskila
Research for this post was conducted by Adam Bouskila, a 17 year old genius who lives in Vancouver, Canada. I cannot thank Adam enough for his hard work, and I hope to work with him again on future posts.

Update: It’s clear to me from comments and emails that this space is exploding, and that I missed a lot of companies and features. I also hadn’t realized Fred Wilson posted on this subject last December, but he has an excellent post here.

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 tool created by Adaptive Path gives me incredible insight into who is looking at what on TechCrunch. They need to deal with the speed issue for larger blogs though (it takes minutes sometimes to pull up stats, or just breaks).

Memeorandum

Memeorandum is how I keep up on the blogosphere when I don’t have time to read all of my feeds. It has also changed what I blog about, and how. Memeorandum is a cultural phenomenon.

Netvibes

Yeah, there are a lot of Ajax desktops out there, but Netvibes seems to stay ahead of the pack on functionality. The flickr stuff is great. Plus, how can I not love a service that includes TechCrunch as a default feed?

Omnidrive

I’ve been waiting for something like this forever. I forsee a day when a service like Omnidrive comes packaged with a new PC, or is offered alongside web email solutions. I’ve only had it for a few days, but I’m smitten. And fair disclosure: there are some awesome competitors out there, too, that I am just starting to look at.

Pandora

I listen to Pandora whenever I write – sometimes for hours a day. I’ve discovered countless new artists from it.

Skype

What can I say? Along with Vonage, Skype keeps my phone bills down to next to nothing, and it is an integral part of my everyday business and personal life. I would trade application sharing for the new video feature in a heartbeat, however.

Technorati

I use it more than Google. No one has launched anything better, yet. And they’ve made great progress in search speed over the latter half of the year.

WordPress

I love WordPress. Actually, let me rephrase that statement: I love WordPress 1.5. Version 2.0 makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window. But it is an amazing piece of software, and all of my blogs run on it.

Yahoo Maps

I use Yahoo Maps because it allows multi-point driving instructions, something none of the others offer yet. This was incredibly useful when I had to attend three or four holiday parties on the same evening.

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 gig or two of storage for free, and sell 10 gb bundles above that for “not more than” $70 per year. That’s pricy, but way below the industry standard right now.

And of course there will have to be bandwidth throttles. Since files can be public, outgoing bandwidth can be a massive cost for them.

Pricing

I’m saying this flat-out. Omnidrive is in a position to dominate a market with tremendous pent up demand. I’ve looked at a number of competing services and no one is doing anything close to what they are in functionality and usability.

This service, or a white label version of it, should be built in to every new computer and operating system, and many web applications. With an appropriate API in and out, and rock-bottom pricing, Omnidrive can own a very large market niche.

The cost problem is not trivial, and for a self funded startup taking an up front cost with the promise of long-term customer loyalty is difficult to say the least. But the opportunity is there. This company needs to get funded and start acquiring users, immediately.

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.