With the falling price of storage space its no wonder that online storage has experienced a bit of resurgence. I like Mozy for backups, and I’ve used Streamload in the past as well. TechCrunch, of course, obligatorily weighs in today on how Streamload has partnered with an ISP to provide automatic backups.

Now Mr. Kirkpatricks’ post is short — and sweet. It doesn’t really offer a tremendous amount of opinion, or matter of contention. Yet — the second comment is quite fascinating.

Mr. Gio Hunt, the GM of Xdrive, yet another online storage solution, has popped up to chime in with his thoughts.

Xdrive is much more – it’s an online drive service. It’s like always having a network drive available, so you can get to your data and your files from anywhere using only a browser. There’s no client software required to use the service.

However, if you do download our Xdrive software, then you can actually mount the online storage as a real drive in Windows and drag and drop files to it and use it as if it were live storage on your computer. You can open and edit files directly from your “X:” drive. You can even upload your music to Xdrive and then stream it to yourself on any computer.

And you can’t really beat our pricing — 5GB for free. Period. Without any limitation on bandwith utilization. (Most of the other services out there which say they are free, including Streamload and AMD Live all put some limits on how much you can upload or download. But, Xdrive has NO limits on usage!)

Quite frankly, although they’re probably intended as being helpful, they come off as being an unsolicited ad for xDrive. Perhaps skirting into the realm of shameless self promotion.
What’s another word for that? Hmmmm.

Spam? How about “Spam”?

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As per my own thoughts a few days ago regarding the litigious left jab of Universal, it seems like Mr. Cuban agrees: the basis for YouTube’s success has been rampant unchecked piracy (but he also adds that the secret recipe may have also involved low to no-cost bandwidth).

One wonders if the success of YouTube represents major studios attempt at having their cake and eating it too.

What do I mean?

Well, now that YouTube has its exponential growth, probably only second to MySpace, and grumblings about its cash-cow valuations and potential, we’re only now seeing everyone coming out of the woodwork (yes, like worms) with their own solutions.

Amazon’s Unboxed. iTunes releasing Movie Downloads. NBBC.

But previously, it seemed like music labels, television studios and movie studios were allowing YouTube a free ride (to a greater or lesser degree): let their material circulate on YouTube. SHHHhhhhhh. its a copyright violation … but its also getting free publicity.

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• Does RSS and AJAX Make Pageviews Obsolete?
  A fascinating article on how we should be measuring (and NOT measuring) our website metrics. A good case for pageviews going the way of “hits”. Insightful.
  (tags: ajax.sys-con.com ajax rss hits pageviews metrics web2.0)
• The Next Contender In Online Backup
  Carbonite’s secret sauce? Unlimited storage capacity, apparently. And a flat rate of $5/ month. Mozy better watch out. MMmmmmm … competition. ;)
  (tags: web2.0 backup storage filesharing carbonite mozy)
• Get a PhD in the Web2.0
  People doing real research on social network sites. Academi-licious!
  (tags: papers academia research web2.0)
• God’s Universal Remote
  Presenting the Harmony 1000, the new flagship in the Harmony line. Gorgeous LCD screen coupled with a matte finish, its less a remote, and more like the hand of God. If he were to watch TV that is.
  (tags: uncrate harmoney remote awesome)
• Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things
  9 Reasons why they do dumb things; but even better: 10 ways how to fix it. Nuanced observation: Its not because of dumb people, or smart people doing dumb things. Courtesy of Guy Kawasaki.
  (tags: startup productivity management company strategy guykawasaki)
• How to Deal with an Angry Customer
  Which is really, “how to deal with an angry anybody”, courtesy of Seth Godin. Acknowledge, Ask What Will Solve Problem, Summarize. Conflict Resolution made simple. ;)
  (tags: customer angry communication sethgodin)

In a scrumptious move to monitor the startup hype news on TechCrunch, scuttlebutt around the blogosphere has a couple of german entrepreneurs setting up a site called TechCrush.com

The whole idea was spawned over at Steve Boyd’s blog, /Message, wherein he wrote previously:

Perhaps we need a dark doppelganger to TechCrunch — a TechMunch — a blog that religiously revisits every app that debuts in TechCrunch exactly six months later, and determines if these apps are now failures or successes. Of course, most apps are not unambiguously either, so TechMunch would be hard to pull off. Much harder than simply heralding new apps as they appear.

… which was followed by a reply:

Hi Stowe,

your idea of a TechMunch really sounded compelling to a colleague and me (two internet-entrepreneurs from good old Germany). In our opinion such blog would be a useful contribution to the blogosphere.
We will rise to the challenge with “Techcrush”. I guess we will launch this week at http://www.techcrush.com.

Check us out, cheers
Yves and Lutz

Fuckedcompany.com is a site which parodied the name “FastCompany” and follows the death of internet companies. Cynicism from the Bubble 1.0 writ large, one might say. ;) One wonders if that is the sort of direction TechCrush will take. Jaded criticism isn’t really necessary at this point — but some method of checks ought to be in order here to balance TechCrunch.

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