Copacetic

I attended TechCrunch 50 this year alongside my business partner Eamon Leonard and another presenting company, VidSchool which Sean Fee of Ifoods/LookandTaste fame is involved in.

Pat Phelan originally intended to join and we booked a Monster House on Fillmore and Fulton. Pat (the consummate deal maker) had to pull out at the last moment which left Eamon and I (of CloudSplit) sharing this mansion with Paul, Moneesh and Sean of VidSchool.

As failed entrants to the onstage event we had both been offered slots in the DemoPit. You get one day to showcase your company in a separate area from the stage through which the attendees have to pass to get to the auditorium. We chose Tuesday (as opposed to Monday) this gave us a chance  to attend on Monday and suss the place our prior to our full day.

Tuesday duly arrived and we headed down to the show. Its a brutal schedule with the show opening at 7.00am and running until 7.00pm the following evening. There is lots of advice to absorb on how best to pitch at TC50, but we followed some simple rules,

• Bring a pull up stand and put your message and pitch all in the top third. Nobody can see below this point. Many of the TC50 companies only used the default table logo provided by TC50. I found myself ignoring companies when I could not discern what the offering was.
• We brought along some tic-tacs that happened to be in the company colours. I don’t thing they got people to come up to our stand but being able to give something to people who listened did leave the whole presenting transaction with a nice soft end.
• You need two people. Otherwise food breaks/toilet visits leave the stand unmanned. There is always action in the DemoPit area so someone needs to be on stand at all time.
• Be prepared to get you pitch away in a few minutes

The Good

We went looking for validation of the CloudSplit offering and received that whole heartedly. We met key influencers at the investor, partner and customer level. This level of exposure to people WHO-REALLY-KNOW the software sector was invaluable.

Just the opportunity to present 200 times or more to genuinely insightful individuals who could really grasp what we were doing was a fantastic education. We now have a crystal clear vision of what we need to do in V1.0 and a goto market strategy honed by hours of feedback.

It also helped that the universal feedback was that CloudSplit was genuinely breaking new ground in a valuable and emerging market.

I would definitely target and time the launch of any new company so that it aligned with TC50.

The Bad

The DemoPit works as a competition in which the conference attendees get chips which they donate to the most interesting projects. The two with the most chips on each day get to present the product on stage. Its a nice idea but is open to all sorts of gaming ranging from booth hotties simply trading on their looks and accosting people for chips without pitching to wholesale buying of chips. Basically you can forget getting on stage on merit alone.

I can’t fix the booth hottie problem but it should be easy enough to fix the chip buying problem by making the containers piggy banks rather than jars so that once chips are donated they can’t be retrieved to be resold.

I also think there would be more liquidity in the market if the attending companies were compelled to donate their chips to other companies rather then bunging them into their own jar. This could be achieved by only giving chips to DemoPit companies on the day they are *not* presenting.

On plus side we got our first chip quite early on from Mark Kvamme of Sequoia so we really did care too much about winning or losing the competition after that piece of validation.

The Ugly

The awards ceremony was a shambolic disgrace. Mike Arrington threw all his toys out of the pram and stormed of stage. Why ? Who cares. It was an insult to the winners of the awards and made Arrington the story instead of the winners. It soured the whole event for me.

If I was Mike I’d be keeping a pretty low profile as well.

Had a great first Open Coffee in the Digital Depot, Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK was over and did a quick video of some of the hub startup founders. PutPlace provided the cakes and pastries and despite the weather we had a pretty good turnout.

Will definitely host again.

Hope to see you all at CrunchLudd tonight in 4 Dame Lane.

I see that the Auctomatic boys got bought by Communicate.Com. TechCrunch says they got $5m but Damien disagrees.

I’m happy for the lads that kicked off Auctomatic and my congratulations go out to them, but this was not an Irish company, this was an Irish idea taken to America for execution. Y-Combinator has a proven model and an excellent collection of catchers mitts for good ideas. We cannot hope to emulate that kind of investment environment in a country of 4m.

Anybody can choose to take their ideas to America and take their shot, I guarantee you any of the Paddys Valley companies would triple their chances of success by moving to San Francisco.

I and (and I suspect the others on Paddy’s Valley) have chosen to be successful here in Ireland and despite the difficulties I predict several of us will succeed.

This may also be unpopular but I think it should be said, the 2-3m USD valuation is hardly what I would call a spectacular world beating exit for a Valley company. It was a successful technology sale rather than the sale of a hugely successful company.

Mike spits it out after his “public lynching” (his words). He’s even cancelled Le Web 3. (Thats 2 and 0 for Le Web ’06 and ’07). What a hoot!

Via TechCrunch UK, this did make me chuckle. (Not Safe for Work!)

Chinese electronic equipment manufacturer Huawei has taken 3COM private.

Who are Huawei? Well anybody using mobile broadband in Ireland is using a Huawei connector.

 Great Video up on Crunch Notes. Good stats on how the world is changing faster and rate of change is changing faster than ever before.

The following is a update on a previous review I did of virtual storage and backup vendors backup in March 2006. I’ve limited the set of vendors to those offering pure play virtual storage and those focused on pure play network backup. This excludes offerings from the photo sharing sites (Flickr, PhotoBucket et al), hosting vendors (e.g. GoDaddy) and social networks (MySpace and Bebo). I’ve also excluded those who are currently in beta and are not advertising price plans or business models.

Since I did the original survey the whole virtual storage market has exploded with rumours of both Microsoft and Google entering the fray, new entrants raising significant VC and a dramatic drop in prices for the major players.

Full size picture

The companies surveyed are summarised below, this is somewhat arbitrary selection based on Mike Arrington’s original Virtual storage review and my own experience of the space.

• AllMyData: Pure Play virtual storage with the added benefit of being able to share your own internal storage in order to contribute to the AllMyData storage grid. You get back what you offer on a roughly 10 to 1 basis i.e. for each 10MB of local storage you donate you get 1MB of secure virtual storage. This is a nice plan but it depends a lot on end-user trust. Tricky sell, when the world is telling you how unsafe the Internet is. Still benefits from being the cheapest kid on the block in terms of overall storage costs, regardless of whether you contribute to the grid or not. Their costs are probably dependent on a substantial proportion of their users contributing to the grid. Good luck guys!
• Streamload/MediaMax: Used to be called StreamLoad but are rebranding as MediaMax. There plan is to be your personal online media host. To this end they offer a whopping 25GB free for all registered users. BUT read the not so small small print. File sizes are capped at 25MB for the free plan (no storing your videos or DVDs please) and you can only download 1GB a month. So don’t expect to stream directly from here into you home wireless network (well not for more than a few hours). The pay-for-storage plans remove the file size restriction and increase the download limits per month to 10GB (premium), 25GB (elite) and 100GB (professional). Hmm, is it cooler to be elite or professional, oh the agonies of market segmentation.
• Amazon S3: I include S3 purely as a  price mark as it is just and API for developers at the moment. However ,while the ordinary Man in the street can’t use S3 directly, Jeremy Zwadony has collected a great list of S3 providers that you can download and attach to your S3 account. Most are free. The stinger with S3 is the bandwidth charges. Most of the other virtual vendors ignore the bandwidth costs because end-users can’t grok them, but Amazon wants other people to hide those costs for end-users (i.e. people like me). Still for the security of a big name vendor combined with a great price, S3 is hard to beat.
• Xdrive: XDrive was one of the bad boys in our previous survey coming in at a whomping $100 a year for 5GB of storage. However AOL obviously shook some sense into them and now you can get the same 5GB absolutely free. They also have a nice downloadable client that setups another labelled drive for access just like windows explorer. This is great for windows users, but the absence of FTP, WebDav or other access mechanisms means this client must be installed before you can use the software. This can be a pain if you are away from your own PC, and of course Mac users need not apply.
• Box.net: One of the first of the “new boys”, first with an API, first with a chunk of free storage (1GB) and recently in receipt of a nice chunk of change from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. You gotta love box.net who just do storage plain and simple. A big cheer for the little guy!
• iBackup: One of the old school (I was an iBackup customer until XDrive started throwing 5GB chunks around the place like confetti), iBackup’s strengths are in ubiquity of access. HTTP upload, FTP, WebDav, you name it they do it. This means they work real pretty with those lonely in the corner platforms like Linux and OS-X (the Mac O/S). Of course, they just can’t get used to the fact that somebody kicked the stool from under the virtual storage market so their prices (although dropping) haven’t kept pace with market trends. Still I bet they have a whole pile of incumbent customers paying top dollar ($20 per GB per year) who haven’t heard the news.
• Strongspace: Virtual space for superman surely! Strongspace people are big into security and won’t tolerate a virtual vendor that even considers using ftp. SFTP only Ma’am and you’d better know your gibibytes from your gigabytes. Of course all this security comes at a cost and with prices like $15 per month for 5GB (doh! I mean Gibibytes) maybe they are targetting the DoD as a potential customer. The rest of us should consider a lower priced vendor.
• iStorage: Now to make StrongSpace look cheap you have to get up pretty early in the morning. That’s no problem for theses fellas. They stayed up all night drinking so as to make StrongSpace look like good value. Each time I do this I have to double check my figures and gasp in awe and the audacity of these bad boys. Oh, hold on, wait a minute, now I get it, THEY’RE HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS. I can just see the meeting where the head of sales say “make sure those software boys don’t undercut our overpriced but lucrative disk business”. Don’t worry buddy, they didn’t.
• Fluxiom: You are taking the piss, no come on now, this is a satire site! The fact that you price your storage per MB ($36 per MB per Month) should be a giant RUN AWAY sign for anybody who comes near your service! I couldn’t even put you on the graph because all the other vendors disappeared in comparison.

There are a host of other services emerging as we speak. OmniDrive and MyFabrik to name two and of course if Microsoft and Google make good on their network hints then we could be in for some craic. Expect more upheavals in the near future as the Virtual Storage Vendors try and morph into network backup vendors and vice-versa.

The full table of price comparison data is available.

Next week, Network backup vendors.

Techcrunch reports that BlogBeat has been acquired by Feedburner. I have used BlogBeat for the past few months and love its simple and intuitive stats. Its also real-time unlike Google Analytics.

Well done Jeff!

FYI : Blogbeat is a stats package for bloggers that you can actually understand.

…Heatseek, (via techcrunch) a porn focused browser , I guess its the oldest money making business on the Internet…