Just Because You Can….

The blogosphere was alive this weekend with news of new sync/cloud storage service Zumodrive’s beta launch.

For those who didn’t catch it, Zumodrive is cloud storage with a twist, the twist being that your local machine is fooled into thinking that Zumodrive is in fact a local drive, thus obviating the necessity to actually sync data onto the local machine. Instead Zumodrive, streams data when a “pseudo-local” file is opened.

TechCrunch got all a-shiver about it, posting with hyper-positivity (perhaps Arrington has a stake in the fledgling start-up, who knows? – care to comment Michael? )

Mobile Industry Review meanwhile went stratospheric, opining that Zumodrive was going to change everything (world poverty, a cure for cancer and ubiquitous broadband notwithstanding).

Zoli posted with concerns about the transparency, or otherwise, of the Zumodrive launch. To their credit Zumodrive responded rapidly to make amends for their oversight.

So I have two separate issues with Zumodrive;

What’s the (preferably defendable) Unique Selling Proposition?

We all know that start-ups need a unique selling proposition to succeed. Zumodrive’s proposition is the fact that it appears as a mounted drive on a local machine. Other than that it has no more functionality than a myriad of other players out there – SugarSync, Syncplicity, DropBox etc. That seems a pretty fragile point on which to stand. Especially when one considers that Zumodrive is, in essence, just reselling Amazon S3 storage (at a hefty margin it must be said).

Already one can mount S3 as a local drive by using Jungledisk. USD20 gets you a Jungledisk account and then you can pay Amazon for just the data one uses instead of a fixed 30 GB or 60 GB or 200 GB.

It’s a pretty busy space and I’d not bet the house on a business plan which, at first blush, seems a little shaky. Even some superstars of the tech world (Arrington not included, seem to agree);

It’s about bandwidth dummy

Believe it or not (and some readers will have a hard time over this), we don’t all enjoy ubiquitous and near limitless broadband. Sure I can store all of my pictures, music and movies in the clouds, but to be able to stream them in real time and at will is still very much a pipe-dream for the staggering majority of internet consumers.

Despite being a cloud evangelist, there are some things that I believe are still in the “too hard basket”. Full cloud based storage, with no local aspect, is one of these things.

Zoli and I had a discussion this evening and, in what may come as a surprise given that we are editor-in-chief and co-editor respectively of a specialist cloud computing blog, we both concurred on the existing need for local storage. As Zoli pointed out to me when discussing his new 1Tb external hard drive;

1tb external drive 100 bucks – 1GB = 10 cents, not per month

Even Mobile Industry Review – so positive about ZumoDrive  as a product, realises the limitations that bandwidth cause who post that they;

can upload a gig in 8.3 hours

That 200 Gb you want up there is going to take you 1660 hours to upload to the cloud in the first place (or a smidgen over two months) – ouch.

So best of luck to the Zumodrive team, you’re had the misfortune to launch at a bad economic time, your offering joins a bunch of similar ones and your supplier may well become your competitor – but at least you got Michael Arrington’s attention!