If anyone has any suggestions for me, drop me a letter at:

vladzaharia[nospATnosp]gmail[nospDOTnosp]com

“It would be great if these new services would allow a user to “plug in” their own server on the backside if so inclined.”

We use basecamp as well, and do all file storage on our own ftp site. Let me pay for the value-add (Search, tagging, organization) and I’ll happily bring my own storage!

However, from a business perspective, holding the data gives them “lock-in”, so you can understand why fluxiom hasn’t implemented something like this.

amazon are offering a wholsesale storage price and anyone building applications on top of this will likely try and mark it up.

It would be great if these new services would allow a user to “plug in” their own server on the backside if so inclined.

Case in point: I’m in the process of downgrading to the free version of Basecamp. Because I used my Strongspace account for the file storage, I can walk away from the aforementioned service cleanly with all of my files intact. New services like Fluxiom should follow suit in my opinion.

This isn’t about online storage or archiving per se. This is about solving a business problem that has plagued companies for many years: the fact that designers, business decision-makers, and everyone besides engineers is completely unable to use source control systems.

I wrote about this issue two years ago.
http://www.jonathanboutelle.co.....e_des.html

As a business owner with creatives working in other countries, this product is terribly appealing for me. I balk at the price, but if I had the budget I would go for it. This is an “enterprise 2.0″ app, not a consumer thing. Price accordingly.

It’s about solving “file chaos” / “file sharing” effectively; a business objective which is actually a big software business industry (”DAM” > digital asset management) with solutions most often in the many thousand dollars per month category. I know many of these solutions from the marketing industry.

Fluxioum still need a lot to become a good enough alternative to reach pro market acceptance > being very in-expensive is of course OK > but not good enough. The team seems very talented and it’s a fine “version 1.0″.

That said > I don’t really see Fluxioum in this “high-end”, super-focused, top-level professional league at all - why at this point i join the category of people saying that Fluxioun at this point in time is a little too low-end to try to be high-end (actually mid-end > the pricing is NOT that high at all). But in time this might happen …

The interesting point is bandwidth costs. Consider the $0.20/gig of band. Now I doubt that it is a likely scenario with a service like fluxium that everyone using it in a single company is downloading every byte stored within a month so bear with me for a moment.

Let’s say I’m a 20 person company with 800MB stored on Fluxium in the 29 euro plan. 800MB is uploaded once and then downloaded once by all 20 people. That’s roughly $3.36 cost for bandwidth that month *just for what is sent to and from S3*. Add fixed cost of servers & rack space, bandwidth for the site itself which is probably significant considering everything is graphical, (add in the double hit on the 800mb upload twice when going to S3).

The point I am trying to make is that there is a more to the equation than simply $.20/gig band. The reason GMail is able to offer you 2 gigs is because for the most part your data is sitting there (where the attachments are probably zipped to a size much smaller than 2gigs anyway) and only *you* should be downloading content off of it (some people probably POP it down to three different computers every week but consider them a very small minority). When you get into the realm of theoretically unlimited people downloading X megs your bandwidth costs are multiplied.

S3 is cool though. Personally I believe it will give rise to some great applications (but I’m biased

As for not having a free trial. Considering their value proposition is organization of a team/organization’s digital content and keeping them in a space for you on-line — I can imagine a 20meg free, single user trial being more of a burden than a conversion tool. A demo interface preloaded with a gig of content (which you couldn’t actually download =)… that might be worth doing…

Sell the interface, not the storage. Since the value add is in the interface, why even get into the storage game?

While I know that online storage makes money today, this market will become an ultra competitive place to play in. “Lifetime” accounts are becoming more popular in web hosting & online storage alike. As more people sign up for them, the “switching costs” for customers will increase.

I’m no 37signals fan boy by any means, but am an advocate of using what works. Their Basecamp model for storage is perfect. They provide tiered storage for the person or company that doesn’t want to be bothered with worrying about it, at a mark up of course. They also allow the user to plug in their own FTP/SFTP server settings. (Both camps are happy).

That’s right! I think Fluxiom should outsource the online storage piece. They could “team up” with Box.net or Strongspace to provide the storage, while Fluxiom focuses on the value added UI. You can see some of this happening already with Box.net integrating quite nicely into Netvibes.com.

Oh! Evidently they also need to also bring the price down and add a free trial account for some of the other readership.

Costs are now perhaps the most important factor in businesses making decisions about products. Work is being outsourced daily to save $$$. US businesses will not throw money at fluxiom when there are cheaper/equivalent alternatives.

Having our data oversees in Europe someplace is certainly not to our advantage.

Also, the author’s comment: “Yes, Fluxiom has built a nice interface on top of their storage service, but this pricing is flat out outrageous.”… THAT is outrageous. Using that same line of thought, why doesn’t everyone just get a cheap account somewhere and FTP files back and forth? Or invest in thumb drives? Their product IS the interface. S3 is an interesting model, but it’s just storage.

Comparing it to Amazon is like comparing going down to the fisherman at the wharf and purchasing your fish as opposed to going to a restaurant where the fish is prepared for you. Most users can’t use Amazon’s service and Amazon has not designed their service to be used by anyone other than developers who will then mark up the pricing based on the value add they bring to the party.

Your comments are far too “2000ish.” I would have thought everyone learned the lesson that you can’t have wonderful online services for free. When comparing a service such as Fluxium to other cheaper services, you have to ask yourself how wonderful those cheaper services are if their business model won’t allow them to be around in three years. Just because its free or cheap does not mean it’s something that will survive.

Um, Strongspace has had that ability for quite a while. ”

And so has Storegate.
This guy gets payed to promote some and ignore others? This is some funny CRAP.