Comments on: Omnidrive - Online Storage Perfection

By: Review of OmniDrive : Online storage with web 2.0 frills! | ReviewSaurus - The Techie Dino!

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 17:35:34 +0000

[...] OmniDrive is an online file storage solution. However, it is still difficult for us to find out if it is the perfect online file storage or not. Omnidrive has setup enough expectation as Michael Arrington (Techcrunch founder) showed enough interest in this service and has recently invested in the company and now is among the board of directors of Omnidrive. [...]

By: Synchronizer

Synchronizer — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:48:24 +0000

I have to agree with Ed!
I’m using Nomadisk too.

It synchronizes my data on my office and home PC, my data is backupt and I can share my data with my assistant.

I think you even can try it for free during 30 days.

(www.nomadisk.com)

By: sin

sin — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 04:29:41 +0000

How about AMD Live? 25GB of free storage? Same set of features too?
Reviewed here

They have few constraints on upload/download, but overall gives out lotsa freebies!

By: maestroalberto » Omnidrive: la perfezione dello storage online

maestroalberto » Omnidrive: la perfezione dello storage online — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 09:10:17 +0000

[...] Finalmente, dopo mesi di tests e una lunga attesa, Omnidrive è stato aperto al pubblico e mi è stato inviato un codice d’ingresso. Michael Arrington di Techcrunch lo ha definito la perfezione dello storage online. [...]

By: OmniDrive is here for you ! « Savvy ?

OmniDrive is here for you ! « Savvy ? — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 05:59:13 +0000

[...] TechCrunch praises OmniDrive as “Online Storage Perfection“. [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 14:23:45 +0000

You all should try Nomadisk instead.

http://www.nomadisk.com

By: Rooster's Rail

Rooster's Rail — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:02:32 +0000

Omnidrive to Launch in a Few Hours…

Just noticed that the Australian Company Omnidrive is about to move out of private beta and go live. The service has attracted a lot of attention over the last couple of months and being an Aussie myself I am proud to give it a mention here.
Omnidrive …

By: Webbomedia » Blog Archive » I väntan på Omnidrive

Webbomedia » Blog Archive » I väntan på Omnidrive — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 21:35:29 +0000

[...] Omnipage verkar mycket lovande och ser ut att ha de funktioner man vill se hos en onlinelagringstjänst och några till. Michael Arrington på TechCrunch har testat och har bara gott att säga om tjänsten. [...]

By: TechCrunch en français » Omnidrive: des captures d’écran exclusives

TechCrunch en français » Omnidrive: des captures d’écran exclusives — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 07:00:00 +0000

[...] Depuis que nous avons parlé pour la première fois en fin 2005 de Omnidrive (basé en Australie et dans la Silicon Valley), un service d’hébergement en ligne, nous avons analysé pas mal de services du secteur parmi lesquels les produits de Google et Microsoft dont certains on porté la rumeur en plus du service d’Amazon pour les développeurs d’applications. Ce secteur continue d’attirer les intérêts, c’est le moins qu’on puisse dire. [...]

By: relatively speaking » Blog Archive » MangoPie

relatively speaking » Blog Archive » MangoPie — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 22:51:40 +0000

[...] Here are some interesting things I read today, using my handy-dandy RSS aggregator: OmniDrive The first article was from TechCrunch - featuring OmniDrive. It seems like a neat tool. They’re going to release a program that allows you to sync files with an online storage system. While this isn’t new by any means (my website, for instance, is an online storage system) - it is very user-friendly. What I found interesting is that the writer of the article states “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.” That’s a pretty bold statement. Keep an eye out for this little diddy. [...]

By: TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Omnidriveのスクリーショット、独占掲載

TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Omnidriveのスクリーショット、独占掲載 — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 15:06:02 +0000

[...] オーストラリアとシリコンバレーに拠点を置くオンラインストレージ企業Omnidriveについては2005年後半に最初に紹介した。その後、Techcrunchではさまざまなオンラインストレージサービスについて詳しくレビューしてきた。さらに、噂に上がっているGoogleやMicrosoftのサービスや、Amazonがアプリケーション開発者向けのストレージAPIソリューション（アップデートはここ)も取上げてきた。この分野はその後、控え目に言っても、ヒートアップし続けている。 [...]

By: one man army’s blog » Blog Archive » Exclusive Screenshots of Omnidrive

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:57:03 +0000

[...] Posted in web 2.0, techcrunch | Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 | Trackback 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 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: Omnidrive [...]

By: Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Exclusive Screenshots of Omnidrive

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Exclusive Screenshots of Omnidrive — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 08:02:22 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: torgeir

torgeir — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 20:27:13 +0000

does anybody know if this project is still in development, or has come to a silent stand still?

By: Nik Cubrilovic » Omnidrive - Online Storage Perfection

Nik Cubrilovic » Omnidrive - Online Storage Perfection — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 08:25:10 +0000

[...] Omnidrive - Online Storage Perfection - Mike at Techcrunch has given us another good wrap: “Omnidrive is based in Australia, but is as good or better than anything else I’ve seen out of silicon valley recently.” [...]

By: Dan100

Dan100 — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:57:59 +0000

erm, storegate.com offers just 10Mb free.

By: Linus Romlin

Linus Romlin — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:19:31 +0000

Hmm, this sounds like a aussie copy of http://www.storegate.com, just that Storegate is a bit further and already established.

By: TechCrunch » Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without

TechCrunch » Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 18:33:47 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: n00dles

n00dles — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 12:05:10 +0000

Scott (fuzzyblog) makes a very insightful point. Working in this space, you can sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are people out there that will abuse the service by hosting illegal content. You could theoretically do some kind of content filtering, but it would piss people off for one, and the old privacy demon would rear it’s ugly head no doubt.

Probably the best way would be at the network level I guess… kind of like the default sharing on the Windows desktop - a max of 10 simultaneous connections are allowed. I think something like that would be a fair enough concession for the free version. I doubt this problem would exist with paid subscriptions, as these kinds of people can get all the free storage and fat bandwidth they need on usenet and all the leech sites that hang off it.

A combination of limiting concurrent connections and charging according to bandwidth use as opposed to storage would probably signifcantly reduce this kind of abuse.

But you would need to make sure you had adequate legal protection too. Take Kazaa for example - they just built the network and the application, they are not responsible for how it is used. But an Australian court didn’t see it that way, and they got taken down. You would need to be sure you weren’t susceptible to that kind of treatment.

But I’m sure Nik has thought of all this already

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 09:51:45 +0000

bobby: Omnidrive is not online backup in the sense that Alentus is. Omnidrive users just keep using their systems the way they are used to and a benefit of this is that the concept of backup no longer exists for the user.

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 09:47:46 +0000

Jeff I appreciate your comments but Omnidrive is more than just putting your files online. We are being boxed in with the ‘other guys’ and we are far away from being just a glorified FTP client.

You can mark a 500MB home video as being shared to me and within a few seconds I will see it on my desktop and be able to play it (or on my set-top box). It is all RSS underneath so just as easily new podcasts that I am subscribed to will pop up or any other content.

It’s not about having a separate online repository either, its about using hosted storage as your primary storage and at the moment Omnidrive is the only product that does this in such a way that the user has nothing new to learn and it is not an inconvenience.

But then again we will always have our doubters so I am not out to convince you of anything. Esp. considering you have not used the application yet.

By: lenkov

lenkov — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 08:31:25 +0000

Actually there is an easy way to solve the problem
with costly bandwidth/storage. We had the same problem
in SiteKreator few years ago, and we built a small
content delivery network over a grid of very cheap
servers (with 1000Gb of xfer) which you can rent from
1&1, ev1 for < $100. The software we build was just:
- uploading each file to at least 2 servers (for
redundancy)
- providing the closest URL to each user (locality
balancing)
- moving the unused files to a slower set of servers
where we don’t pay bandwidth and can add storage.

Of course we could use akamai, but this home-grown
network cost us 1/100 of what akamai could charge us.

If the guys at Omnidrive want to know more about it –
shoot me an email at lenkov (at) yahoo (dot) com.

By: Nivi

Nivi — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 01:50:14 +0000

I second Ryan Schwartz’s suggestion to take a look at StrongSpace.

By: Jeff Rogers

Jeff Rogers — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 21:59:09 +0000

Nik,

Sorry, this won’t work on a massive scale or as a business. Hate to be negative but this has the same theory as webvan.

Webvan thought they can roll out a service everyone can use. Sounds really nice, people got excited. But the bottom line, Webvan could not have localized themselves and compete effectively against the local grocer who sponsor the boy scouts, car wash, etc without a Wal-Mart level cash flow.

Same here. Any teenager can lease an SAN out of an local office (office condos are cheap in USA now) and offer similar service to his local community and get a higher profit margin (like video rental stores before Blockbuster era). How will you compete with that?

I would suggest making your service very feature rich and look at franchise licensing rather than building out this as a business…

By: FuzzyBlog » Mike Arrington Ain’t Often Wrong But …

FuzzyBlog » Mike Arrington Ain’t Often Wrong But … — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 21:48:35 +0000

[...] So Mike is wicked smart, has great traffic and normally gets it dead on. So why am I saying he’s wrong? Well he’s dead on that OmniDrive looks like a great product. The one objection that I have here is Mike’s focusing on why the product is great — which is fine — but not the inherent limitations of this type of market space. Every player in the “free online storage” space is ultimately, if not initially, overrun by pornmeisters, warezhosters, etc. These spaces self corrupt **FAST**. For me to believe that OmniDrive will make it, I have to see evidence that OmniDrive understands both the social mores of what they’re building and the enforcement model to prevent it from degrading into a morass of crap. That’s really, really hard because the people that want this will create shadow accounts upon shadow accounts and this kind of illicit traffic is hard to monetize. Now if its nothing but a “build it to get acquired” business then that’s one thing. Then ignore the controls and get the user count up but I suspect that all of the potential acquirers understand the dynamics of this type of business and will deprecate a large user count. [...]