Tag Archive for 'omnidrive'

Omnidrive just the beginning…

Published by Ben Kepes on May 6, 2008 in Design, IT, My businesses and Strategy. 1 Comment

I’ve talked before about Omnidrive - the dead, then reincarnated, then dead again and now in some sort of limbo - online backup application. RWW has the latest on the Omnidrive saga itself - seems there are some disgruntled ex-staff and angel investors calling for blood.

I’d like to look away from Omnidrive in isolation and see what it means for web startups in general. First a disclaimer, I’m not suggesting that we’re heading for another bubble - so what am I reading into the Omnidrive story?

Clearly we are in the midest of a constricted (and further constricting) economy. VC and angel funds are getting harder to access, for the very reason that these same funding streams have their upstream source of dollars drying up also - it’s a typical trickle down effect.

It’s similar to the SaaS/s and SaaS/v thinking I’ve articulated before. The big boys can always beat startups on price (well not always but generally) so under these conditions startups will need to be able to show (and quickly) scale, monetization and flawless execution to keep funders and staffers on side.

The diggerati get all excited arguing the usefullness or other wise of twitter, and discussing at length the different AIR add-ons to twitter and how “game-changing” they may or may not be. In a retrenched economy all that matters is providing real value to users - early, medium or late adpters though they be.

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The perils of online storage…

Published by Ben Kepes on May 3, 2008 in Governance, IT, New business, SaaS and Web x.0. 2 Comments

I’ve talked about online storage and sync in the past (see here and here). My perspective has always been two fold;

  1. Don’t store, but sync. Storage at one location only is a recipe for disaster - websites go down as much as hard drives fail. Syncing however means you create your own redundencies
  2. Do due diligence - there is a reason that startups IPO rather than self-fund (and reasons beyond money). Listing build credibility (as, it has to be said, does backing by well known VCs). With sync/storage options always check your supplier for potential future problems which could put your data at risk

I was reminded by this when reading Mike’s post about Omnidrive - the online backup service that seems to be dead and buried. Reading the comments on this RWW post (which foretold of Omnidrive’s demise) is a sad tale of woe, and a warning to both startups and users of new offerings.

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