Jason Ball's TechBytes

Mozy (aka how not to backup your files)

I posted a great review of Mozy 12 months ago. I even used the word "snazzy".

I just cancelled my account with them. I absolutely DO NOT recommend their backup service. (Please be warned, a rant follows.)

<rant>

My MacBook Pro hard drive failed earlier this year and I needed to restore from my Mozy backup. After following their restore procedure, it became apparent that many, many GB of information were missing. 

I should have known this was coming, and hey to be fair it was beta, BUT they saw no problem in charging me full price during the beta period (I did request a refund, but was told I could "have an additional two months of their service").

Here are some fun email extracts from the saga:

26th June 2007

Sorry to be a pain, but is it normal that I've been waiting 24 hrs for an 8 byte doc to be made available for restore?

That puts a great fear in my heart of what would happen if I needed to restore 18GB....

2nd November 2007

I'm using the Mac client and am trying to restore my "documents" folder. The online archive suggests a file size of 700MB and 4,000 files. When I get the restore email, it is for 200MB and 700+ files.

I've tried twice now, and online it says its restoring less files but then the download is for far fewer files...

2nd February 2008

I haven't used mozy since the problems in november. I've downloaded RC1- it's has caused kernel panics, uses excessive memory (1GB) and has crashed on every attempted backup. I'm even running a fresh install of 10.5...

I really am a very unhappy customer having paid for this service- which was useless when it came to restoring my machine and your support was very sad too. I test lots of beta products and you really shouldn't be charging for this software.

Their answer:

"I always suggest that as the Mac client does work wonderfully for many users, myself included, but there are those times where it doesn't work so well.

I can extend your account by a couple months if you wish to continue using our service."

3rd Feb 2008 (This was after the crash!)

The problem isn't just with the mac client- it was server side. Of the 50+GB i had uploaded, when it came time to restore, only 30-odd GB was available. The restore files that I configured online and downloaded contained a fraction of the files they should have.

And here's the answer:

Good afternoon,

I took a look at the restore that only was able to recover 768 of 5937. It looks like a good chunk of those files are bundles or packages, which weren't supported until 0.9.0.0. I'm not sure why the others weren't able to be recovered. When that happens, we can do whatever we need to do to get the files back.

Except that they DID NOTHING to get them back for me! 

And 768 out of 5937!? That's only 12% of the files I had backed up. I went back and did a double check and virtually zero files were packages (50GB were photos and music- the whole reason for using a backup service).

I've now complained so many times, that I am blue in the face. I have also told them that I'm blogging this.

Please, if you use a Mac and love your files, do not use Mozy.

</Rant>

Smartsynch raises $20 Million (Jackson, Mississippi)

It's not everyday that my hometown shows up in VentureSource, so I had to repost this:

SMARTSYNCH (JACKSON, MS) RAISES $20 MILLION IN SERIES E
--- Industry: Vertical Market Applications Software ---


Credit Suisse Customized Fund Investment led a $20 million round of
series E financing for SmartSynch. Other round investors included Siemens Venture Capital, Beacon Group, and OPG Ventures, Innovation
Valley Partners, Endeavor Capital Management, GulfSouth Capital,
Southern Farm Bureau, and Battelle Ventures. SmartSynch provides
smart metering solutions to the energy and utility industry.

SmartSynch’s solutions provide utility companies and their customers with the unprecedented power to take control of their resource usage. SmartSynch’s core product delivers actionable intelligence from electricity meters via public wireless networks and the Internet.

The Next Web

Good post over at Genuine VC yesterday covering the History of the Web:

...a transition among three distinct phases of consumers’ primary activity online from receiving, to hunting, and now doing...

Receiving, Hunting, Doing is a good indication of what we've seen so far- and I think we're going full circle to "Receiving" again- only this time from intelligent sources.

Two examples are Kwiry or Tripit. With Tripit, you email them your travel itneratry and they scour the web in the background and send you a nice package of maps, directions, thoughtful suggestions, etc. I've posted many times about "intelligence inside" which lives in the same neighborhood as the Semantic Web:

...I also think there's a huge opportunity to get to data sooner via the sensor revolution. When phones report location, when phones listen to ambient sound, when credit cards report spending patterns, when cars report their miles traveled, when we're increasingly turning every device into a sensor for the global brain, there will be more and more sources of data to be mined...

All of which means the process is reversing: doing by machines, hunting by spiders and receiving by users- remix and repeat.

My new pet monster

I was given a Moshi Monster phone charm by our "secret santa" this year. I was pleased to see that Mind Candy (an Accel and Spark Ventures investment) was behind the charm and that it linked to a virtual pets style website. I've now registered and adopted a monster, my new, if somewhat despondent, moshi monster called Alpi:

Moshi Monsters is kind of a Second Life for Kids with a tamagotchi thrown in... the puzzles they offer kids as edutainment are definitely cool -some of the brain teasers are very similar to nintendo's Brain Training game. I haven't spent long periods of time with my monster (and probably won't), but I can see where kids could really get into this. The site has just launched, so traffic volumes are still relatively low, but they are growing. Only time will tell if this turns into a monster of an investment ;-)

The End of Email?

Email looks like it might be enjoying the end of its reign as the de facto killer app.

The post and graph below from Hitwise really brings home where the web is going. For the first time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks (blue line) overtook visits to web-based email services (orange line). As the chart below illustrates, Hitwise's category of the top 25 social networks, which includes Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for Computers and Internet – Email Services, which includes Hotmail; Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, amongst others.

Moving to the wireless web, one of the key reasons I'm looking forward to buying an iPhone tomorrow is not just the "appleberry" that will be with me at all times, it's twitter, facebook, etc at my fingertips. Always on, all the time -

Tumblr Funding

Union Square Ventures announced blogged their investment in Tumblr yesterday.

I set up a Tumblr account in early summer and it's been silently collecting all my posts from TechBytes, my posts from Twitter, delicious links and Flickr public photos. It does give a good "global" snapshot of my online activity- which is a good thing.

I've been grappling with posting something on Twitter and posting on TechBytes- but Tumblr captures both. Blogs are about conversations- microblogs are about communicating and community. I have to admit, Tumblr gets pretty close to blog nirvana- but;

I haven't figured out if you can configure private messages and posts (for friends) alongside public info. Also if they can roll cocomment style comment tracking into the mix, they're really off to the races...

Intelligence Inside

I'm always on the look out for smart new apps that save me time.

Feeds2.0 is one of my stand-bys for RSS readers. It ranks incoming articles based on your previous reading patterns and tends to border on clairvoyance. Pretty amazing stuff.

That said, I'm up for trying new services. A few new ones I've come across this week are:
aiderss
feedhub
pipes
silobreaker (thanks Rob)

All of them are slightly different, but very useful. I'm trying out feedhub sent through Google Reader. We'll see if their results can top Feeds 2.0. Pipes is just so hackable, it begs to be loved and silobreaker is a news-junkie's best friend. Enjoy.

Coda- one window web development for OS X

I've been using Panic's Coda, everything-web-development tool, and agree with others, it is the bee's knees. Not only is it a great web development tool, it's five tools in one window: HTML Editor, CSS Editor, Terminal, FTP, Browser and Library.

One of the great features is saving your work on a "Site". When you close Coda, all the tabs you had open while working on a particular site are saved- essentially saving your entire workspace. Split windows are really helpful as well. Another useful (unless you're a ninja coder) is the Book Library integration. You have HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP reference manuals built right in- which means you can find specific code in 3 nano seconds.

The software is at 1.0.3, so it's very early days, but the software shows lots of promise. Ruby on Rails integration is (rumored) to be coming as well.

Twitter forth and multiply

I've been running Techbytes for about 8 years. Now I have vox blog too. And a twitter microblog. And now a pownce microblog and a jaiku microblog and so on...Will it ever stop?

Paul (and others) are asking "what's pownce all about?"

I think Wired has nailed a key reason microblogs work :

When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

One of the other cool things about vox and pownce is that posts can be private or public. The idea seems to be that the "next web" is all about transparency- I'd be wiling to bet it's about intimacy and privacy. Half of the posts on my vox blog are for friends only- same thing for pownce. Twitter is for all, and is a fun experiment, same thing for Techbytes.

I'm starting to appreciate that the platform that provides the best communication tool, while allowing users to determine who sees what will be the winner...

Jajah- laughing out loud

I've recently left behind my Skype headphones for the ease of use and reliability of Jajah.

<-- I see that Jajah have now released an "iPhone friendly" version of their service here. Because Jajah is inherently a web app, and not a local client like Skype, this could put them streets ahead of the competition.

Plus, there's the added benefit that jajah call quality is pretty high in my experience..

If you haven't tried jajah, give it a whirl. If you have an iPhone, enjoy your new found call freedom.