… if the Web2.0 Prom was really the Launchpad portion of the Web2.0 Summit, that is (And Sharpcast would, I suppose, be the Queen).

Matt Marshall goes on:

If we had to anoint a winner of Launch Pad, we’d pick Omnidrive. Sharpcast’s presentation hit several snafus. Omnidrive offers something similar; it saves to Omnidrive online when you save things on your desktop. The data from multiple sources gets saved all to one place. It also gives you a folder that shows you all your files from different services like Flickr. You can drag and drop files into the Flickr folder and they will be uploaded to Flickr as well.

Well, its always good to know that our own review was validated last week! And it looks like in spite of the few snafu’s during my own test drive, it seems like they ironed everything out in time for their presentations. Omnidrive showed a helluva lot of promise — in particular, look for their open API’s –  so congratulations to Nick, Jessica and all the crew over at Omnidrive.

For all of those interested, the public beta opens this thursday at 0001h Pacific Standard time to test drive the system yourself.

I guess Omnidrive *IS* ready for primetime after all. ;)

Omnidrive is an online storage service that I facetiously asked “where it was” because it seemed to be in private beta for a long time — and was it like the Gmail Drive Extension which is free. After that, Nik C was gracious enough to allow me into the private beta mere days before the public beta for Omnidrive.

Well, I have to report, some truly, some excellent stuff.

And I can safely say that it is WAY better than the Gmail Drive Extension!

Basically, it looks like you have a storage space on a central server somewhere (Australia?) that is accessible through their website. However, you’re also able to access it through your own PC at home provided you install a tiny bit of software, a shell client, that allows your PC to access that space like an extra folder or drive.

The website is quite a functional web application that tries to mirror the same UI you’d have on a typical windows PC, with a folder structure, the ability to “right-click” to bring up a menu, a drag and drop feature with files you’ve uploaded and so on. Uploading is fairly easy with a small menu which does allow you to select single files sequentially to upload at a time.

At this time 1 gigabyte storage space is available for free accounts as I understand it.

Once you install that shell client, an extra omnidrive folder appears on your PC’s root drive acting like another folder. Lo and behold, the things you uploaded via the web are present in your “omnidrive”. Sweet! Sure enough, you can upload through copying things into that folder, and then “synchronizing” the data to remotely hosted server. Its quite fast from what I can tell.

You could tell that it would be easy to share documents this way, in addition to its usual purpose as a personal online folder that is synchronizable from remote PCs.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been a few glitches here and there

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So, with a tad of fanfare, Zooomr announced that it was offering free upgrades to all “pro” accounts on November 1st.

How deliciously awesome was this?

Well, principally because they’re allowing bloggers of all stripes to become “pro” in their accounts for FREE.

Secondly, the “upgrade” involves bumping up the transfer limit to 4 gigs / month of absolute web2.0 picture-y flickr kickass-edly goodness that, quite frankly, I still giggle at when my wife isn’t looking.

I have to confess — in spite of my inclination to try most things web2.0, I’ve never tried Flickr to any extent.  Not because of its UI sucks, or that it functionally doesn’t work or anything of the sort.

Its because the restrictions on its free accounts are virtually ridiculous, bordering on being personally insulting.

20Mb per month? Are you kidding?

For someone interested in using Flickr as a serious photosharing service who has more than a passing interest in photos, I’m interested in uploading a few photoalbums.

Plural.

Lots of photos.

I expect that most people who enjoy photos are in the same boat.

One day of wedding photos might include more than a hundred photos for me; I like my photos “high res” — which are in excess of 1 megabyte/ photo (not really “high resolution” at all)
The result? I can’t even upload a single “album” for the whole month!

What’s even more baffling? The parent company “Yahoo” also has photo albums — no surprise — but there is no bandwidth or storage limits at all!

Four gigabytes per month seems like a more realistic feel for what I need to flex its app “muscles” — and Zoomr needs to be congratulated on it and the strategy for granting bloggers a free go at trying it out. It creates free “buzz”, and quite frankly, its a great little application.

Anyway, here are the ups and the not-so-ups:

The ups:

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