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December 28, 2005

Omnidrive - Online Storage Perfection

Michael Arrington

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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 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.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 1:09 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 28th, 2005 at 2:20 am

    Thanks for the write-up Mike, you are too kind.

    I know some of you are frustrated with products being in private beta but there is a very good reason for it. In our case we are refining the product over the next few weeks and setting up the infrastructure that we will need so that we can deliver the best possible service to you all.

    In the meantime, you can signup at the website to get an account when we launch. There is a good chance that we will invite people in groups over time (first in, first served) just so that we can maintain a good level of service.

    I will be posting answers to common questions on my blog

  2. Rasmus

    December 28th, 2005 at 2:35 am

    Do you know if they have plans for releasing an API? This could be very well suited for an affiliate business model… I can think of lots of services that involve online file storage but doesn’t have it as a core function.

  3. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 28th, 2005 at 3:09 am

    Rasmus - the web interface and the desktop applications that we have developed are all implementations of our API which we plan on making public.

    There will be some form of affiliate program.

  4. Adam Bramwell

    December 28th, 2005 at 3:48 am

    Go Aussie! It’s good to see something like this come out of an area more than fifty miles from Mike’s lounge room ;-) yes, there are good ideas and dedicated people outside of silicon valley! Go for it Nik, I look forward to seeing what you guys do with the service.

  5. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 28th, 2005 at 5:51 am

    Hey thanks Adam!

  6. Seth Russell

    December 28th, 2005 at 6:33 am

    One way to fund such a storage grid and drive the price down would be to allow online storage users to sell files. Yes, sell files. You know, like the old selling CD’s and tapes … and if you go back far enough you might remember books. It’s an old concept I know but it might still work. The way to do it would be to allow authors to put a buy button with a price on any file. Clicking the buy button is like clicking a buy button over at an Amazon ZShop. Notice that Amazon takes your money, not the merchant selling the item. So the stroage grid makes it’s squeeze on all file purchases. Shucks, somebody is gonna make a billion on that idea. I’d do it myself, but don’t have enough of those round tuits. My echo of this comment (track back) is item 2349

  7. ThePef

    December 28th, 2005 at 6:58 am

    Are we there yet? I hope so, but I am not quite sure. I agree completely with the need for personal, offsite storage, but in the personal world this is mostly media files now that digital media has taken off. From personal experience, almost losing all my digital photos on an external drive, I would love to be able to offsite those files. But a couple of barriers come to mind:
    1) the reqs are huge; I have a small collection, and between my photos and videos I alone have about 40 gig. That would translate to $280 per yr.
    2) The bandwidth time to transfer, at least the initial transfer is quite significant, even at broadband speeds
    3) What is the company goes under? Are the files escrowed in any manner?

    I hope we can solve these problems, but quite frankly it is probably simpler for me to buy an external drive and hand it to my neighbor at this point, and cheaper.

  8. Ryan Schwartz

    December 28th, 2005 at 7:10 am

    Have you seen Strongspace?

  9. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 28th, 2005 at 7:11 am

    1. 40GB doesn’t mean 4 * 70 - not even close. Note the comment was ‘not more than’ 70. Even at that price nobody out there is cheaper but we want to bring it down much further than that to the point where it’s almost free.

    2. Omnidrive transfers in the background without interrupting what you do

    3. There is always that possibility but you have an offline cache. More people should ask this question about many current web service who don’t provide any way to get your data out

  10. ThePef

    December 28th, 2005 at 7:17 am

    Nik,

    Thanks for the clarification

  11. BlogReader

    December 28th, 2005 at 7:41 am

    Can’t google’s gmail do something similiar to this? They already have the infrastructure to handle terabytes of storage, gigabytes of data transfer, and a user authenication system to handle millions.

    For Omnidrive to succeed they have to target a market that isn’t going to be dominated by Google — for this space it is probably office storage. Or to be a PACS (digital xray) storage provider.

  12. hash

    December 28th, 2005 at 7:44 am

    I can see the value of this type of service, I’ve been using eSnips 1 Gb as a testing grounds for myself over the last few months.

    I hope that Omnidrive doesn’t go the way eSnips has and throttle the amount you can upload at one time in order to not let people upload chunks of movie files. It doesn’t sound like you are worried about that, and you shouldn’t be either.

    Michael is dead-on about the pent up demand for this type of service though. It does need to be very inexpensive, but ownership of this niche can still be had if you move quickly.

  13. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 28th, 2005 at 7:59 am

    BlogReader - if we all thought the way you did then nobody would ever release anything. No point in talking about theoretical competition that doesn’t even exist yet. Besides, its about the solution, not the infrastructure - i can rattle off 50 companies who had the infrastructure but were just bad solutions.

    hash we want people to publish and share video content

  14. the Web 2.5 blog

    December 28th, 2005 at 8:43 am

    Industry analyst on AOL acquisition of Xdrive.com in August 2005: “I honestly don’t know how AOL can make money.”

    http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=13046

  15. Erik Schwartz

    December 28th, 2005 at 8:57 am

    Interesting. In many ways like a crossplatform version of Apple’s iDisk for .mac users.

    Any thoughts to building in data encryption for the private areas?

  16. Brad

    December 28th, 2005 at 9:48 am

    Tremendous pent up demand? Well, Driveway.com also had a nice shell extension (that is, it was appeared to be just another drive in Windows Explorer) and offered some then-significant free space … six years ago.

    http://www.pcworld.com/news/ar.....222,00.asp

    I too have to wonder why the super-server big boys haven’t entered this space yet if there is, in the near future, such a big market to “dominate” and significant money to be made. A 2nd or 3rd harddrive is cheaper and faster.

  17. Mathew Ingram

    December 28th, 2005 at 9:57 am

    Mike:

    Have you tried Mozy, from Berkeley Data Systems? I’ve played with it a bit and it’s got a pretty good interface, useability is not bad, 1 GB for free (2 if you fill out a survey) — only Windows so far though. Designed primarily for automated file backups.

  18. Druish

    December 28th, 2005 at 10:47 am

    I’m eagerly awaiting the email that tells me I’ve been accepted into the beta program, as I too agree that this is a huge need. After exploring similiar solutions myself over the last year I found the price extremely prohibitive for a college student with 20 gigs of digital photography, 50 gigs of mp3’s, and another 10 gigs of general files. My solution? Foldershare.com. It’s a p2p application that runs in the background and synchronizes unlimited files and folders between my multiple computers. This solution’s big benefit is that it leverages my existing storage capacity to provide redundancy and instant access. And with a web interface I’m a couple clicks away from my files no matter where I am. My biggest complement for Foldershare is that it Just Works. After the initial installation and configuration I’ve grown to trust that the homework I was working on at school on my laptop will magically appear on my desktop that evening, with no noticable performance hit or other intrusion in the meantime. My point for all this wasn’t to steal Omnidrive’s thunder, and as Foldershare was recently purchased by Microsoft (along with Groove, anybody see a trend here?) then who knows if the service will continue to operate or function as well as it currently does, but rather if Omnidrive can get the pricing low enough then it is a superior solution, AS LONG AS the client-side application keeps itself in-sync with the remote server. Importantly, this synronization must work seamlessly, whether behind a NAT or firewall (as Foldershare does). Either way, good luck to you Nik, I strongly applaud innovation expressed in a quality product, and you appear to be doing both! (And if you want to send me an early invitation to the beta feel free :-) omnidrive dipsomania net

  19. jeevs

    December 28th, 2005 at 11:12 am

    How about a pricing structure based on bandwidth, i.e unlimited or near unlimited storage but limited download ability
    similar to streamload.
    I like the idea of having all my stuff backed up (relatively little cost to you) and then only having to pay to download/share it (where there is an actual cost to the service provider).
    Also, i’ve never really seen this before but i think that it could be enormously useful if i could transfer files from your server to my webhost without going through my computer (albeit much faster (maybe throttled) and also completely in the background afaic), this should be relatively straightforward, i would imagine, just needs to be able to engage a simple (s)ftp connection

  20. jeevs

    December 28th, 2005 at 11:42 am

    ideally, this could exist as a system of many distributed storage providers, all of which would want to store your data, with the hope that you would pay to download it from them.
    this competition would also drive better service/speeds/etc; and you could simultaneously maintian data storage redundancy
    I realize this is all years away, but I think that online data storage should exist as a paid-per-bandwidth and the storage would be a commodity, something the competing providers might offer for free.

  21. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 28th, 2005 at 4:23 pm

    Erik: we have built it so that the private area is encrypted on both in the cache and on the server. Not sure if we will run with this though since it makes things like the API a bit more complicated - but yes, its there, we might set it aside as a ’secure’ area.

  22. n00dles

    December 28th, 2005 at 4:25 pm

    It still surprises me that telco’s still don’t get this kind of stuff… the network is becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous… they need to start selling services that sit on top the network in order to attract customers. Like Telstra offering their customers free bandwidth to/from their file repository and game servers for example.

    I hope things go well for Omnidrive, and if any telco exec has half a brain, they will buy you, or at least try :-)

  23. Michael Arrington

    December 28th, 2005 at 6:46 pm

    I haven’t looked at streamload before today. Very interesting way of pricing things. I love that they have a “180 terabyte plan” for $50,000 per year, along with a fun fact: “15 TB is equivalent to approximately 1 ½ times the size of all the data stored in the US Library of Congress.”

    In the end, Nik, your pricing is going to be driven to the ground anyway. Go for the win now before someone else comes in and steals what is rightfully yours. You have the functionality, all you gotta do is have the willingness to make one more hard decision.

  24. Michael Arrington

    December 28th, 2005 at 6:48 pm

    I’m thinking about this more and more. Streamload is a great application, too. Nik, you’ve got to think about their pricing model.

  25. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 28th, 2005 at 7:22 pm

    Pricing on bandwidth is a good idea and we will do it on public only - after a free quota is breached. We are working on a deal now that will allow us to give away huge amounts of private storage and traffic and then have a pricing model on the shared and public data. We won’t go to market at that higher price (even though it is much much cheaper than what anybody else is doing at the moment) and by the time we do go out we will have the infrastructure to support a very large user base.

    It’s a big step for a self-funded startup to take but we are getting everything we need in order. The server model that we are using means we can save a whole lot and pass on those lower prices. I hope you all have the patience to see us through till this point - thanks for all the feedback.

  26. Trendy

    December 28th, 2005 at 8:06 pm

    Kinda makes me wonder if it’s all phoney. This guy, Nik, offers a virtual drive hosting, but he uses Flickr to host his screenshots. His blog is all about costs of hosting, blah blah blah… Are you for real?!?

  27. Bobby Kaplan

    December 29th, 2005 at 9:55 am

    The need is definitely out there. For many companies and individuals, security and reliability of “offsite” backup storage are huge issues; often trumping cost (within reason). As far as disk space is concerned, that expense is minor compared to bandwidth. I am waiting patiently to see a fully working release of “Omnidrive” so that I can compare it with “SecureStor” - an already released Alentus branded product that accomplishes similar things. If you have a need for this type of service and don’t want to wait, check out: http://www.alentus.com/backup . Sign up for the free trial, it only takes a couple of minutes.

    It may appear that I have a slightly vested interest in this, but in the end I really have nothing to gain personally by promoting SecureStor (except possibly more work).

    It should be interesting to see how this section of the industry shakes out in the next while.

    Bobby

  28. ThePef

    December 29th, 2005 at 12:30 pm

    Nik, just an addon to the comment regarding bandwidth pricing. Most people need offsite storage in a time of need. i.e. my drive failed, and I have to recover my files. That is one reason I bought a program to recover a failed drive. So, if you priced heavily on recovery, and hardly at all on the actual storing of the files, you might have a market that is willing to bear cost at a time of need, and look to low or no cost on backup.

  29. Mary-Ann Horley

    December 29th, 2005 at 1:22 pm

    Trendy: Flickr has the advantage of being socially connected, I’ve seen stuff from Del.icio.us and Bloglines on there and neither of those are hurting for cash and storage space.

  30. Jeff Rogers

    December 29th, 2005 at 1:59 pm

    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…

  31. Nivi

    December 29th, 2005 at 5:50 pm

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

  32. lenkov

    December 30th, 2005 at 12:31 am

    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.

  33. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 30th, 2005 at 1:47 am

    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.

  34. Nik Cubrilovic

    December 30th, 2005 at 1:51 am

    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.

  35. n00dles

    December 30th, 2005 at 4:05 am

    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 :-)

  36. Linus Romlin

    January 3rd, 2006 at 5:19 am

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

  37. Dan100

    April 11th, 2006 at 5:57 am

    erm, storegate.com offers just 10Mb free.

  38. torgeir

    June 26th, 2006 at 12:27 pm

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

  39. Ed

    November 9th, 2006 at 6:23 am

    You all should try Nomadisk instead.

    http://www.nomadisk.com

  40. sin

    November 12th, 2006 at 8:29 pm

    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!

  41. Synchronizer

    November 16th, 2006 at 2:48 am

    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)

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