One of the greatest stumbling blocks that a start-up Web service company has to get over is customers' fear that the company will die and take their data with it. Manufacturers of traditional software can go belly-up without it immediately affecting a product's utility. And if General Motors went out of business tomorrow (I know, shocking), its cars would still be drivable. But Web services are different. When your cloud app goes under for the last time, it sinks customers, too.
In the best of the bad cases, when a Web service goes offline, the company in question is able to shut down in an orderly way and let its users know long before the servers are pulled off the Net. Large multiproduct companies generally do this well. When Yahoo shut down Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr, it gave users plenty of time to offload their pictures, or move them to another service. When Hewlett-Packard shuttered the cloud backup system Upline, it likewise gave users fair warning.
But smaller companies may not be able to keep their servers up when their companies begin to fail. Does that mean you can't trust them with your data? Not necessarily. One company that's planning for the worst is Pogoplug, the makers of the cool, simple network file-sharing appliance I covered in April. Pogoplug's doomsday plan is not exactly fail-safe. The servers won't magically spring back to life if the company goes under. It's more of a seed vault kind of thing, but it's a good solution.
Pogoplug has put the source code for its servers in escrow. If the company goes bankrupt, the terms of the escrow dictate that the code be released to SourceForge as an open-source library. Then someone could come in and restart the service. Pogoplug CEO Dan Putterman says the service is designed to run on cloud services like Amazon EC2, so whoever wanted to re-light the system wouldn't need a large, expensive infrastructure to do so.
It's worth noting that Pogoplug doesn't actually store customers' data files. Rather, the online component of the product is a service that connects customers, their storage devices, and the users they invite together so they can share information. Were Pogoplug to go belly-up tomorrow, nobody would lose data, only the access to the transfer service they paid to use.
If the worst happens and Pogoplug does shut down, whoever restarts the service would have to re-gain the trust of users, who would need to re-configure their accounts and get new passwords to use the service again.
Even so, I like the dead-man's switch aspect to Pogoplug's escrow plan. While it won't guarantee that the product will resurrect if the company dies, it does at least make it possible--maybe even likely.
I'm surprised more companies, especially Web companies that store customer data, don't have public doomsday plans. If you buy life insurance, it's not an admission of weakness. It does not telegraph that you expect to die tomorrow. But if you've got a family (of customers) to support, the insurance can be a smart thing to have.
The Pogoplug connects a USB hard drive the the Web.
(Credit: Pogoplug)The Pogoplug, which I first covered from the Consumer Electronics Show, connects any USB hard drive to your local network and also puts it on the Internet so you can share files.
As I said before, this is not a new idea, but Pogoplug is supposed to be uncommonly easy to set up and use. It's shipping today, and I've had a few days to preview the device to check out the claims.
It's a good product. It actually does combine the speed of a local drive with the convenience of Web-accessible storage, and it requires barely any geek skills to get running.
The $99 product (no monthly fees) has two connections besides power: USB and Ethernet. It should be pretty clear what you plug into each. Once connected, you go online to the Pogoplug site to register your particular unit based on its serial number. This gives you password-controlled access over the Web to the storage device you have plugged into it. If you attach a USB hub, you can use it to access multiple hard drives or memory sticks.
The real benefit of using the Pogoplug over the Web is that it's easy to share files stored on it. You can share directories on your drive just by clicking a Share button and optionally entering an e-mail address to send out invitations, and you can also get an RSS feed for any shared directory.
The Pogoplug Web service displays pictures and videos (first frames only) in nice slide shows, and it streams audio files. You can easily download files from it.
You can upload files to your Pogoplug drives via a standard-issue clunky Web form, or--much better--use the software driver that makes the Pogoplug emulate a local hard drive on a Mac or Windows system. With the driver installed, adding or managing files to the Pogoplug drive is as simple as dragging them with your computer's file manager. Files quickly pop onto the drive over your local network.
Pogoplug can be used for sharing files or just for personal use. For example, you could back up files to a Pogoplug-connected drive so you have access to your files when you're away from your home computer. However, no backup software for this is included (for PC users, I recommend SyncBackSE).
Finally, there's a nice iPhone application for the Pogoplug that makes it easy to view files stored on it, as well as to upload iPhone photos back to the drive. The iPhone app also streams music files from the Pogoplug.
Each Pogoplug gets its own Web site for sharing the files on it.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)This is a very cool and usable product, though there are version 1.0 snags. Photos uploaded from the iPhone to the Pogoplug can be made immediately available to your friends, but only if you give them access to the root directory of the drive, where the iPhone uploads. That's a rather big security risk.
The software driver works great on a Mac (I tried it on OS X 10.5.6), but there's no driver for 64-bit Vista; that should come out in about two weeks. I'd like to see more options for sharing, too, such as embeddable widgets to insert in blog posts or profiles page, or perhaps tools to synchronize Pogoplug files with sharing sites like Flickr. Or at the very least, the capability to easily find the static URL for each shared file (they're there, but buried). My test unit also ran a bit hot.
Compared to some newer network-attached drives, like Western Digital's My Book World Edition, or a Windows Home Server product like the HP MediaSmart line, the Pogoplug is light on the features. But it is a very good solution for quickly putting videos and photos online, especially if you already have them on an external drive.
Even if you don't, this product strikes a compelling balance between speed, ease of use, and low cost. The Pogoplug fits into a narrow niche in network storage, but it does its job well. It's the quickest solution I've seen for putting a hard disk on the Web.
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