{"id":2485,"date":"2008-06-11T16:23:45","date_gmt":"2008-06-11T20:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2485"},"modified":"2008-06-11T16:23:45","modified_gmt":"2008-06-11T20:23:45","slug":"omnidrive-not-dead-yet-thanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/06\/11\/omnidrive-not-dead-yet-thanks\/","title":{"rendered":"Omnidrive: Not dead yet, thanks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I noticed a post<\/a> by Mashable writer Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins on his personal blog about Omnidrive — the troubled “cloud storage” company founded and run by Aussie entrepeneur Nik Cubrilovic — that seemed to have been jump-started by a post at<\/a> Duncan Riley’s Inquisitr, after someone at TechCrunch put Omnidrive into the CrunchBase deadpool. After some back and forth between Duncan and Nik in the comments<\/a> at the Inquisitr post, the deadpool reference was removed; Nik, who has been writing for TechCrunch for awhile now (and who counts Mike Arrington as an investor in Omnidrive) said it was a mistake by an intern.<\/p>\n

For anyone who is just joining this story, Omnidrive was a highly touted “Internet hard drive” service that launched in 2007, but late last year it started having some serious problems — users reported that they couldn’t access their files on the service for days at a time, that support requests went unanswered, and so on. In December, a post<\/a> at Read\/Write Web said that the chief technology officer had left the company; in a comment<\/a> on the post, Nik said that everything was fine, but a subsequent comment from the CTO said that<\/a> the company had run out of money and laid its entire staff. <\/p>\n

From there, the story quickly descended into soap-opera territory: the company’s website, blog and user-support forums disappeared from the Web, then came back, then disappeared again. Finally, Omnidrive.com redirected to a static Network Solutions landing page and it appeared the company had in fact entered the deadpool. To add insult to injury, a prominent investor in the company said that he had been promised<\/a> his money back, but that Nik had reneged on the deal. The Omnidrive founder then responded to an email<\/a> from fellow Aussie Richard MacManus at Read\/Write Web and said the company was still in good health and was over its problems, etc.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, Omnidrive.com is back up and appears to be working — although when I tried to log in I got an error that said the site’s security certificate had expired, and I got a similar error when I tried to reach the support forums. I can’t vouch for the actual service itself because I don’t use it (I use Amazon’s S3). A couple of weeks ago, after I saw Nik’s byline start to show up on stories at TechCrunch, I wrote him and asked if he had any comment on the various allegations and the state of things at the company, and here is what he said:<\/p>\n

“Hi Mathew, we are still working on it, back to a small team of us – we recently rolled out a new backend and we will be rolling new frontend stuff out over the next two months (starting this week). We shifted direction based on what we learnt over the past 2 years and we are focusing on the API and developer tools (authentication, storage and contacts).”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It sounds as though Nik is trying to incorporate some of the lessons he has learned over the past year and a half and turn Omnidrive into a functioning company again — but there are still some pretty big skeletons wandering around, to judge by posts like this one<\/a>. For some extra insight into Nik’s viewpoint on the whole mess, and that of some of his critics, pay particular attention to the comments.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I noticed a post by Mashable writer Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins on his personal blog about Omnidrive — the troubled “cloud storage” company founded and run by Aussie entrepeneur Nik Cubrilovic — that seemed to have been jump-started by a post at Duncan Riley’s Inquisitr, after someone at TechCrunch put Omnidrive into the CrunchBase deadpool. After … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Omnidrive: Not dead yet, thanks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}