Update 2 (05/05/08):
According to an email that Nik Cubrilovic sent Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web, Omnidrive isn’t dead yet — he claims a domain change is in the works, and that a new version of the app is on the way that will use Amazon and Google for storage.
Update:
Clay Cook, an early angel investor in Omnidrive, has posted an open letter to founder Nik Cubrilovic in which he describes some of what happened after he invested $100,000. According to an email exchange with Nik that he has also posted, as recently as February the Omnidrive founder said the company was in the process of being sold and that his investment would be doubled in value.
Was Omnidrive simply too big a swing, as Ben Barren argues? Perhaps. There’s no question that the remote storage game was a pretty crowded space even when the company started, with a number of established providers like Mozy, Carbonite and others — and then along came Amazon’s S3, which reduced the cost of such services by an order of magnitude, and Windows Live Drive not long afterward. At some point, Omnidrive obviously became uneconomic. Maybe some day Nik will emerge to tell the full story of what happened to the company.
Original post:
According to Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web, the “cloud storage” company formerly known as Omnidrive is no more. The domain now goes to a hosting provider’s standard “parked page” message, and users who have commented at RWW say they have been getting error messages for months when trying to access their accounts on the system. The first signs of trouble started showing up about six months ago, when RWW reported that the CTO had left the company.
At the time, CEO and founder Nik Cubrilovic responded that everything was fine at Omnidrive, and that the company was not only profitable but had gotten a new round of financing. The departed CTO told a different story, however — alleging that he was hired to build out a team and told there was financing, but never saw any money, and that he and the entire engineering team quit because they hadn’t been paid. The whole thing had an uncomfortable similarity to the Blognation debacle, involving Sam Sethi and some non-existent financing.