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Carbonite is a online backup company that is VC-Backed.  This was released while I was out of the country – but I had to post this story.  Carbonite with its major funding and large marketing campains loses data for 7,500+ customers.  Although Mozy (purchased then spun-out by EMC as Decho Corp) has a competitive product, Carbonite is the one that is pushing with full force in marketing.  Here is the article where I found the story at the Boston Globe:

Carbonite’s complaint charged Promise Technology with breach of contract, fraud, and unfair and deceptive acts and practices. The complaint charged Interactive Digital Systems with breach of warranty. It seeks unspecified damages against the two companies.

Promise’s hardware was meant to monitor multiple computer hard drives to assure that they were functioning properly to preserve customers’ data, according to the suit. Instead, the suit charged, “Carbonite lost the backups of over 7,500 customers in a number of separate incidents, causing serious damage to Carbonite’s business and to its reputation as a reliable source for backup data service.”

The suit said Promise engineers were unable to fix the errors. “The problems that have occurred have required Carbonite’s senior engineers, senior management, and senior operations personnel to spend enormous amounts of time dealing with the problems,” it said.

For full disclosure, I work for a company that provides online backups called FirstBackup, and we have had some customers convert to us due to this problem.  We are priced quite a bit higher than Carbonite’s $54.95/year for unlimited storage – but anything is higher than unlimited storage.  To supply decent back end systems and attentive personal support – I can tell you $54.95/year does not pay the bills.  We have used Promise in the past, and haven’t had any major problems, but enough little ones we did not continue our storage builds with them.

I get very worried when companies that are VC-backed offer products for almost nothing.  It seems that they are just harvesting customers to be later sold to another company or given a price increase.  Investors in venture capital firms are wanting a return on their investment.

I think Carbonite will weather this news, as it didn’t seem to get too much press for as much positive marketing that they are pushing out there.  (Check out this article about how Carbonite’s VP of Marketing started posting fake reviews on Amazon for their product)  I think the major loser in this mess will probably be Promise.  Businesses in the backup business make sure to watch their market, and a vendor with major problems and possibly not standing behind their product is a major blow.

Brent TechNews Carbonite, FirstBackup, Mozy, Promise

Apple is about to hit a billion apps download from their iTunes App Store.  Although I am not a fan on searching through the store to find apps (I will hopefully have a solution for that soon) - I love the idea of the app store.  I have not yet taken a look at the Windows Mobile or Blackberry app stores yet that are being created to hopefully get some of the Apple success, but I will soon and make a post on those.

Apple wants to celebrate the billionth app – so they are going to be giving out a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro.  You can be entered to win if you download an app from the store, or you can enter free at their website.

Brent Apple, TechNews AppStore, iTunes

I exclusively buy my music on iTunes well before I even had an iPod.  I love getting quality music very easily.  When Apple started offering the “Plus” music that was DRM free with better quality – I knew it was just a matter of time while they tested the market with the new pricing when they would move all pricing to the “Plus”.

This is a snip from the Wall Stree Journal:

Under Apple’s new pricing plan that will take effect in April, Mr. Schiller said songs will cost 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29. He said the “vast majority” of the songs will cost 69 cents, though people familiar with the matter said the most sought-after songs — which generate most of the sales on the service — will likely cost $1.29 as both Apple and the major record labels try to boost revenue growth. Wholesale prices charged by the record labels are likely to change to reflect the new price points; spokespeople for Apple and major record labels declined to discuss their agreements.

Reading this, I was actually excited.  No more DRM, which I didn’t have a large problem with, and possibly songs at $0.69.  I have YET to find one song that I recognized for that price.  All I did see what anything that is new or popular move to $1.29 immediately.  What “vast majority” could Apple be talking about?  Was the person who said that a large polka fan?

Lastly, I thought I would be excited since they no longer offer the older version of some of the songs I had – I was wondering if there is a free upgrade after seeing the link in iTunes.  Nope – a nice $0.30 to upgrade the songs they still have.  It would cost me about $60 to upgrade my library.  Hmmm…no.

I did use Amazon’s music service before (only to redeem my PepsiStuff points), and found the downloading difficult.  Once downloaded – it had a nice app that automatically imported the song into iTunes.  But with the 5 songs I got, I had to already contact their support to authorize a song for another download that didn’t work.  Apple’s smart – they know I will just suck it up and pay the extra 30% for each song that I want.  For others though – will this increase music priracy for those that were ok with paying $0.99 a song?

Brent Apple, TechNews DRM, iTunes

I’ve had a lot of people ask me, “So, conficker wasn’t as big a deal as they thought?”.  I too expected to see something happen on April 1st once these bots got their instruction.  But when we didn’t see any big actions by the instruction, that wasn’t a good sign.   I thought the Gizmodo blog did a great post on this:

What the April 1 update did was simple: It provided instructions for linking up with the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of new nodes registered by Conficker.c over the last few weeks, effectively growing the size of the p2p botnet to a point where it can not be stopped.

“It’s not about ownage, it’s about continued ownage,” says Kaminsky, citing a favorite quotation of one of his hacker buddies. “It’s not about how you get into the network, it’s about, ‘How do you be [there] a year from now?’” And the answer is: “You do a lot of the things the Conficker developers are doing.”

“This is not something where the guys wrote it, it’s out, then they’re going to go out and play Nintendo. They’re frankly trying to build something that is a sustainable network for months or years to come,” Kaminsky says.

Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response, raises another good point: “The first [of April] would have been a pretty bad day to choose [to do something with Conficker], because everyone was watching to see what was going to happen. Whoever’s behind this is as lot more patient than we are.”

So, I agree – I think the creator(s) are doing this very well.  They are going to use this worm for something a little more than a prank.  So, please people – update your windows & run the cleaner utility to make sure you don’t have this on your system.

Brent Microsoft, TechNews Conficker, Microsoft, Windows

I haven’t had an iPhone too long yet, but was very excited to hear that there will be some new things already coming announced today.  First, I love the numbers of the iPhone sold.  The market was expecting 10Million, and Apple blew them away by selling 13.7Million in 2008.  They next went to the AppStore where they bragged 25,000 Apps have already been approved, and that they approved 96% of all submissions from unpopular thought.  Lastly for summary information, they have had 800Million downloads from their AppStore already.  That’s quite impressive with about 50 downloads per phone with the numbers we have.

Ok, on to the iPhone OS 3.0.  Here are the major items that are going to be included in the release slated for this summer:

• In-App Purchaes: This allows a developer to sell items within their app like an eBook or another level in a game
• Peer-to-Peer: This will expand the ability to find other iPhones or iTouches that are using the same app by IP or Bluetooth
• 3rd Party Hardware Development: Apple is now allowing your app to talk directly to a device that is plugged into the device.  This can be used for such things as a heart monitor
• Maps: You can now embed Google Maps directly into your application instead of calling it outside your App
• Turn-by-Turn Directions: This is now able to be done, but you have to supply your own maps.  You cannot use Google’s due to licensing
• Push Notification: This should work how all developers hoped it would.  You pass notifications to Apple – and they in turn pass it to the notification service on the iPhone.  They still aren’t allowing background processes to be developed due to the battery drain it causes.  (Just install some of those Apps on a Windows Mobile device -ugh)
• Cut, Copy & Paste: They finally got this in their OS!  Hurray!  This is how it works.  You double click on the word you want to copy (must like in Microsoft Word) and continue to drag on all you want selected and it then pops up a bubble asking if you want to do one of the 3 functions.  You can just shake the iPhone to cancel (how like Apple to throw some fun in).
• Pictures: You can now select and copy and paste multiple pictures into other apps such as mail.  Bravo!
• Landscape Keyboard: Yes, they finally did it.  Across all their apps, you can type now in landscape for Mail & SMS!  All those big fingered folks out their are cheering!
• SMS: Not only can you Forward and Copy messages now – they are adding support for MMS!
• Voice Memos: Allows you to record audio from your phone to a file for later or to tag to an appointment or message.  I’m sorry for all those developers that have made an App for this.  Looks like you better make yours with more functionality
• Search: Finally – If scrolling through alphabetic lists wasn’t your style, they have added searching to your contacts, calendar, email, and SMS.  They claim it will be added to all of their core applications.  It’s a new application called “Spotlight” to search across all applications if you choose that route.

This upgrade will be free to all iPhone 3G owners, and a $9.99 price for the iTouch.  Engadget did a great job taking pictures during the presentation – check them out on their Live Blog.

My final thoughts are Bravo, Apple.  They included most things that really annoy us, and gave us some great new things to develop with.  I can’t wait to download the new SDK and start playing around.

Brent Apple, TechNews Apple, iphone, iPhone OS

When Google gobbled up DoubleClick I thought this was just another move of moving money around getting more space on the web.  I have always been impressed on Google’s vision (other than the space program, but even that I’m probably missing) and this is no different.  Being able to step up the offering in the online advertising from just AdWords was genius.  On top of that, they made text ads generated from their AdWords people are already using.

I’ve used AdSense on a few other projects and always liked the ease and fair revenue it had brought in.  The first time I saw the ads, I was impressed.  It actually looks at the page you are viewing to decide what ad to present to you.  Not the subject of the whole site, much like ad companies in the past had done.

Google is starting to take it a bit farther by actually using all of that history they are so good at tracking to present an ad of what this person’s likes are even if it isn’t the subject of the page the vistor is actually viewing.  Here is a snip from the email that was sent out:

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.

 

In this email, Google advises their publishers that this change in their system would also probably change the privacy policy of most sites, so they offered this help for Edits to your Privacy Policy.  As an advertiser wanting to reach as many targeted eyes as possible, and as a web publisher I want to have my vistors have ads they want to click on, but this is starting to scare me a bit about the privacy of your viewing.  I think today with users posting their every move on twitter and talking about every part of their lives in blogs, I think most Internet users won’t care, but I think it’s giving Google even more information about our surfing habbits when we aren’t even searching on Google.  I am not going to even get into Google’s Analytics harvesting in this post. 

So, I am very torn between getting good information that “I” will want verses what others would want.  However, that is a lot of information for one company to possess.  I guess, it would be a lot like the cell phone tapping in The Dark Knight - it did help them find the joker, but they also destroyed the system after that one use.  I don’t want Google to destroy themselves – I use them too much.

Brent Google, TechNews AdSense, Google, Privacy

In a post written by Wired they claim that with the new iPhone OS update they are also going to release a new update to the AppStore as well.  The rumor states that Apple will give special placement of a developers App if it sells for $20 or more.  Since Apple receives 30% of each App sale, you can see why they would be motivated to do this.  The thought it Apple doesn’t want these premium apps being lost in the background tocheap popular apps, since their sales will probably be less than a $0.99 app.

I have always thought it would be a very good idea for Apple to redo their AppStore since I get very frustrated on finding iPhone Apps inside iTunes.  That is why I am working with some others to help make that process a lot easier.  I will get into that in another post.

Just like in grocery stores or in the retail stores, vendors will pay for premium placement either at eye level or on the end of the aisle.  I think it only makes sense for Apple to set applications apart from others to help with better high-end sales.  I just hope they don’t make it too hard to find the other great inexpensive apps!

Brent Apple, TechNews Apple, AppStore, iphone, iTunes

Apple announces that it will be announcing what will be included or updated in their new iPhone OS 3.0 on March 17th.  I love Apple on how they do these.  Getting hype for the hype of something to come out later.  Genius.  After looking at a few sites I found this site on PCWorld that had some guesses of what will be included in this new release.  I have  included them below.

1. Push Notification: Although the mail client in the iPhone works pretty well, it still has to poll the servers to check for any changes.  To offer a push notification to the phone when something changes will really get this phone in the business space.
2. Adobe Flash Support: As any iPhone user would love to have flash on their device, this one I will be shocked if it becomes included.  I still think that Apple is trying to make some competitve player to flash (which I hope is not Quicktime) like Microsoft is doing with Silverlight.
3. Advanced Bluetooth Functionality: Some iPhone users are wanting Apple to add more functionality into bluetooth in the phone to be able to do connect more devices like a keyboard or be able to file share with other phones or devices.  I don’t think this is a very eye catching feature to add, so I think it might be something that Apple will overlook this round.
4. Copy & Paste Functions: As any iPhone user will ask – how can I copy and paste?  You can’t.  It’s something that users have been waiting for since the phone first came out.  Although I don’t copy and paste at lot using the phone – trying to copy a web address or trying to email the phone it does make for an annoying limitation.
5. Background Processing: With working on some iPhone applications on the side, a lot of what I first wanted to do required background processing, so I could notify the user when some event happened without keeping the application open.  As a developer I think this is required to be added to get even more rich applications to the iPhone.  However, as a user I’ve used a Windows Mobile device and when you let 3rd parties run code constantly on the device it slowed the device up drastically.  I had to reboot my Windows Mobile device almost weekly if I wanted to run any of those apps.
6. Horizontal Keyboard: This I do see them adding.  A lot of apps already have this functionality in the typing functions of their apps, but why can’t we have this for email or texting.  I’m not sure of a good reason.  This will ease typing with making the “keys” larger for minimal work on Apple’s part.
7. Video Conferencing: I often wondered why they didn’t build a webcam app in the OS that allow you to stream or record video.  I do not agree with PCWorld on this one, and think the best Apple will do is make it so you can record video from your phone to sync with your PC later.  I don’t think AT&T will allow Apple to put such a bandwidth h0g on their network.
8. Iphone Broadband Modem: With owning a Blackerry 8830 as well – I was very unhappy to find out that the iPhone could not be tethered to my laptop to serve as a broadband modem.  AT&T claims that it Apple who did not want to include it, which I agree since AT&T would love to charge extra for the service like Verizon does.  This has a large posibility of being added in 3.0.
9. Global Search: This could allow a user to search for all data stored on the device instead of just searching your contacts.  With email and text file attachments – I agree with PCWorld and say “Why not?”
10. Extra SMS Options: I really don’t use any SMS since you can find free ways to send those items, but they really do need to improve how these are handled.  Going out to a website is a unnecessary step.  If they improve on this too much I will feel sorry for all those app developers that have made some nice work arounds.

But again, who really knows?  Bloggers and Twitter will be going nuts on Tuesday with the news, I’m sure.

Brent Apple, TechNews Apple, iphone

I love it when Apple comes out with something brand new.  I always thought it would be nice to make something that was easier to use while riding a bike or running then trying to find the iPod in your pocket or waist.  I won’t be rushing out to replace my current Nano, but I think Apple will get some good response with the active croud.

Brent Apple, TechNews Apple, ipod, mp3, shuffle