I swear Glenn Petersen is my doppelganger. We are interested in all the same stocks, he lives in Chicago, we follow the same privately-held companies, etc. Yeah, I'm quite fascinated by Storage Networks. More specifically, about the market in general, all part of THE NETWORK BECOMING THE COMPUTER. Which is one reason why I've been so berserk about ASPs since last summer.
i-drive, x:drive, NetFloppy, and FreeDrive are the network storage firms I'm most familiar with. There are bunch of places emphasizing MP3 storage, for obvious reasons.
I haven't started using them yet (I'm still trying to figure out which one to commit to). But, on a related note, I started using bookmarksplus.com last July. Then I switched over to clickmarks.com a few months after that.
Now, I keep most of my bookmarks (I have approximately 1000 bookmarks, unfortunately temporarily divided among 3 locations) at backflip.com, which will be a totally killer app once they incorporate an auto-history compilation feature (logging in and indexing the full text of every single site you've ever visited for a personalized search engine). I've been proselytizing people about this company since last year...think about it, an average person will only view less than 0.0001% of the webpages that exist on the WWW. So if you need to reference an old webpage you've seen, it's a hopeless needle-in-a-haystack endeavour. Well, it's a big deal to me because i do so much research online.
Backflip CEO interview:
radiowallstreet.com
I posted my enthusiastic thoughts on it a couple months ago on the Steve Harmon thread: Message 12467543
I'm surprised no portals have been aggressively acquiring these startups, but they will, consolidation will happen (although Backflip is in no hurry to sell out, judging by the interview, which is a good thing for now). I want to access stored files, MP3's, weblications, bookmarks, etc all in one place. So, regarding consolidation, also keep your eyes on mywebos.com, and desktop.com. Anyone tried Sun's StarOffice portal? Though unlike B2B ASPs, consumer-oriented ones don't really have quite an infrastructure built out so, for example, it takes an eternity to cruch spreadsheets online.
Another thread hitting on this stuff:
Subject 32027
- Netconductor.com
>>Glenn Petersen wrote:
"Maybe you and Glen and Michelda should start a mutual fund consisting entirely of IPOs."
Actually, George and I would probably find it more interesting to start an incubator. We would probably get bored watching IPOs pop two or three hundred percent all the time. LOL.
You might want to check out the recent filing for STOR, which is providing companies with online data storage capabilities. I am hoping that this IPO doesn't attract a lot of attention. This is going to be a hot sector later on this year. While not a direct competitor with STOR, I expect a company named Xdrive to file an S-1 within the next two months. They provide free online storage (mainly for individuals) and they have close to 1 million subscribers. I started a thread for STOR at:
Subject 33705 |
