The company, which is affiliated with online storage startup MediaMax (aka Streamload), should also be announcing a $12 million round of financing in the near future. It’s not clear exactly how affiliated Nirvanix and MediaMax are, and the company is keeping the specifics of the relationship quiet for now. There has clearly been a technology swap, though, and MediaMax is now using the Nirvanix service to provide the back end of its storage product. Also, former MediaMax CEO Patrick Harr is now running the show at Nirvanix (MediaMax founder Steve Iverson has retaken the CEO spot at MediaMax).

While the company is keeping quiet about the funding and exactly how it’s affildiated with MediaMax, they are saying that they’ll be filling some of the perceived holes in S3. Hopefully they’ll be offering a service level agreement (Amazon doesn’t).

MediaMax, meanwhile, has been trying to pull through a hellish technology transition (my guess is it was related to the changeover to Nirvanix) that plagued them earlier this summer. They’ve moved their corporate blog to a new site, and are talking openly with users about some of the problems they’re facing.

Disclosure: I am an investor in Omnidrive, which is also in the online storage space and can be considered a competitor to MediaMax and Nirvanix.

On June 22, more than a month ago, they began rolling out “significant improvements” to the service. Users were told in a blog post that some files would become temporarily unaccessible and to expect downtime of up to two weeks. “Please rest asssured [sic] that we are doing everything possible to minimize these service interruptions” they said.

Much of what happened since then is unclear, but things clearly didn’t go according to plan. On July 1 Streamload said they were back online. On July 2 they noted some issues affecting some users. Skip to July 21: another blog post noting issues. On July 24 another update, and users are welcomed to the “speedy new MediaMax database and user interface.”

Overall the blog posts don’t signal that much chaos was going on behind the scenes, but it is clear that things were not going as well as the Streamload blog suggested. Many customers complained in the comments to those posts about file deletions, outages and lack of customer service response to their questions. At some point Streamload turned off comments and deleted all existing ones, presumably to downplay the problems.

At least one user-created blog has popped up that reprints the blog posts, adds commentary suggesting that Streamload is hiding the facts, and allows users to comment. Some of the commenters are outraged at the alleged cover up:

Mediamax isn’t just hopelessly incompetent, its corrupt and borderline evil! It’s corrupt because its still taking money for a service that doesnt work. And its evil because it must be aware of the incredible stress this is causing to so many people but its doing nothing to ease that pain. Just a few honest words of understanding on their blog would help, instead of the BS and lies they are posting.

I’ve emailed Streamload for a response to get their side of things. I’ll update this post when I have more facts.

Disclosure: I am not an independent observer of these events – I am an investor and on the board of directors of Omnidrive, which is also in the online storage space and can be considered a competitor to Streamload. If people notice other coverage of this, please leave a comment and I’ll link to it here. Until now I have only heard excellent things about the Streamload service, and I am anxious to hear their side of things.

Update: Streamload responds via email:

Hi Michael,

We appreciate your willingness to hear Streamload’s feedback. Yes, Streamload has had a tough several weeks due to two serious issues on our part.

On June 15, Streamload had a major storage problem that has caused many of our customer files to become inaccessible. They are not gone forever, but it is taking a very long time to recover all the data because of the extraordinary amount of data stored. With our current recovery infrastructure, we can “only” recover about 10 terabytes per day, but we are adding more hardware to speed this process.

Combined with that, we had another project underway to move our entire infrastructure to a new datacenter with the goal of making it more efficient and cost effective for customers. The move did not go as planned since it took longer than we anticipated and there was much more customer impact than originally estimated.

With the new data center, MediaMax is backed with an all new technical infrastructure, which is fully redundant, has more capacity, and is faster. This new transition, as challenging as it has been, will ultimately allow us to provide better service and support more customers in the future.

On that note, your reader comments are right – a better job should have been done to communicate with affected customers. Though we may not have communicated quickly or with much detail, we are attempting to actively address concerns, and are exploring ways to address this issue and improve our customer service.

Having said that, three weeks ago I took over as CEO again and will be able to monitor the service and customer needs more closely and hopefully bring back the customer satisfaction that was built since I started the company 9 years ago.

-Steve Iverson

Since then I’ve been very “don’t let this happen to you” when I talk to people about backing up their files. The number of digital media files alone on my computer skyrocketed over the past few years and to lose that stuff would be devastating. You likely feel the same way about yours.

To that end, I decided to throw down some rules to follow to setup a successful file backup routine.

Pick A Solution and Stick With It:

Bad backup software can deter you from regularly saving your files and give you a false sense of security. A perfect solution not only makes it easy to save your files, but should make it painless to restore them as well.

As former software editor for Computer Shopper magazine, I got to see and test many backup solutions. Memeo AutoBackup remains one of the best, if not the best, I’ve used. I’m not the only one that thinks it’s great either. Seagate added the software to its new line of external drives. D-Link bundles it with its DNS-323 Network Storage Enclosure. And Buffalo Technology includes it with most of its external storage solutions.

Why I like it so much is that aside from a breezy setup it lets you maintain a backup routine without any hassle. Save to multiple locations, easily restore files with one click, encrypt and password protect your files and track changes to all of them as well. The list of features is lengthy for an app that costs just $30, but again, it’s its simplicity and ease of use that’s key. The company seems to understand that if you have to do much of anything to save your crucial data, you likely won’t.

Whatever you decide to go with though, even if it’s just dragging and dropping new files to a different storage location than your hard drive, you have to keep backing up regularly.

Another option is ChronoSync, an OS X solution with lots of set-it-and-forget-it-ness.

Pick A Location and Triple It:

Whether or not you’ve had a desktop or notebook drive fail on you, the fact is, they do. They fail all the time. Regardless of manufacturer, the price you paid, the length of the warranty—they can and will fail. Now think about what’s inside that external backup hard drive. That’s right, it’s a hard drive and it can fail just like the one in your computer.

The moral is, don’t rely on backing up to only one location. Weather catastrophes, forest fires, mudslides, house fires, burglaries—these things just happen. Backing up to an external drive is a good start, but saving to two more places means you likely won’t ever have to worry about lost files.

Keep a set of important files saved to CDs, DVDs or flash drive and give them to a friend or family member you trust or if you have a safety deposit box, keep them there. (You should of course encrypt the files if they’re really important.) Save a set to an external or secondary internal drive. Put some online; services like Mozy.com and MediaMax.com offer free and paid options, and Memeo has a storage service, too. The point is, one backup is good, three backups to different locations is best.

Pick A System Maintenance Plan and Use It:

Much like people tend to skip over their backup procedure with a click of the “cancel” button, they avoid system maintenance as well. Why is this important to backing up your files? Well, it will do you little good to save copies of your files to other locations if they are corrupt when they get transferred.

There are a ton of system maintenance products on the market. One of my favorites is VCOM’s $49.95 Fix-It Utilities 7 Professional. It’s bright-and-shiny interface is easy to follow for novices and the suite has almost everything you’d ever need for keeping your PC tuned and free from spyware and viruses as well.

The Help Key is a weekly article about making the most of your high-tech gear and appears every Monday. Read more of The Help Key here

Everyone wants in on the user submitted video game. More than seeking extra revenue, it may be a survival strategy. Old media’s dominance of video can no longer be presumed. Will short-form amateur video makers still seek the big audiences and validation of old, mainstream media or are the other options emerging too appealing and numerous to take that for granted anymore?

C-SPAN’s entry demands some comparison with CNN’s user submitted video site, launched in July and called Exchange. Exchange emphasizes fast street level action reports in a section it calls iReports but it also includes mundane questions like “How do you plan to stay sane during holiday travel?” that users can upload videos in response to. CNN’s Exchange is powered by Blip.tv (winners of the Best Video Hosting Vloggies Award) and requires Windows Media Player to view the videos, which must have been the media behemoth’s idea since the videos on Blip.tv are all in Flash. It’s hard to know how much traction Exchange has gained in the 4 months since it launched, but in the blogosphere the site has only seen around 20 inbound links in the last week.

In contrast, C-SPAN is asking for video replies to two questions, with submissions under 2 minutes in length. Right now the site asks for responses to a Question of the Week from the show Washington Journal and thoughts about the “fast approaching” midterm US congressional elections. The links aren’t all correct and some of the pages won’t load, so when they say it won’t be out until the end of the month that’s probably true.

C-SPAN’s Viewfinder will be powered by Streamload, a San Diego based multipurpose media storage service that offers very low costs, large capacity and a wide variety of white labeled services. Our previous coverage of StreamLoad is here. The TV network had discussed a partnership with Google Video this spring. In fact, PaidContent reported at the time, C-SPAN’s demand that the famous Colbert/Bush roast video be pulled from YouTube was a part of that experiment to see how partnering with Google Video could work. The fact that StreamLoad was awarded the ViewFinder partnership is probably something they are very proud of.

Will user submitted video sent to C-SPAN be interesting? Will a large number of people submit video? It’s a fascinating gamble. Could it be more obvious that old media is looking to incorporate new media, instead of battening down the hatches and rambling on about “objectivity?” I hope both of these mainstream news experiments with user submitted video are successful and we get to enjoy the benefits of both old media and new media. Hopefully the people in charge of selecting which videos will be shared and highlighted will exercise broad and fair editorial judgment. Selecting those videos could be a fun job, if people from across the political spectrum embrace the opportunity to submit video to these stations. Whether they will remains a question, when so many other sites are building up a large audience and don’t exercise editorial control over what is shown to viewers. It’s good that the C-SPAN TOS is for non-exclusive licensing.

For how long will video producers feel drawn the the audiences and validation of old media? Check out the startup video aggregation site The Daily Reel to see an example of another vision of the future. The barrier to entry just isn’t what it used to be (an understatement) and as video proliferates, alternatives just might topple the big old media instead of being co-opted. It’ll be a fun contest to watch, one way or the other.

Embarq customers will now have access to 25 GB of free online storage and a web interface for easy access to stored multimedia files. Larger packages supporting up to a terabyte of storage will also be available for purchase. Streamload monetizes increased storage space and quotas for file sharing.

Streamload is just one of many online storage options and the company has offered 25 GB of free storage for some time. The partnership is a smart one for Embarq, though, as the company seeks to preempt more high profile offerings from vendors like Google and Microsoft.

Earthlink offers a similar service, called Weblife. Weblife only comes with 1 GB of free storage, however. See also Mike Arrington’s recent review of Carbonite (which he says is the best option yet) for an overview of the online storage scene today.

Partnering with ISPs seems like a particularly smart move for online storage services; as prices fall and it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate based on features, competition may come down primarily to a fight for visibility. As user generated multimedia becomes increasingly common, bulk storage may become a standard offering for ISPs. Automatic online backup is set to become standard as well.

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.