We launched Spanning Stats just one week ago but its already been used to scan more than 50,000 Google Drives, and we're just getting started. It only takes a few seconds to scan your drive and generate an interactive visual report that shows you exactly how you're using Google Drive and Docs.
Of course, Google Apps admins can still install Spanning Stats from the Google Apps Marketplace and get an overview report for their whole domain. (Finally, you can see who's taking up all your storage quota with their MP3 collection!)
So please try it out and let us know what you think. We're thrilled with the reception Spanning Stats has gotten so far, and we're eager to hear from you.
Thanks, Charlie
At Spanning, we've been doing sync since 2006. (Damn, that's a long time.) But we hadn't been doing it long before we realized that sync makes backup even more important. Because with sync, when you make a change—including an accidental deletion or modification—that change gets sunc (we made that word up) to all of your copies of that data. So if you sync everything everywhere, your changes, including screwups, affect everything. Everywhere.
In March 2007 we shipped Spanning Sync v1.0, which for the first time let users sync their Google calendars with iCal. Soon tens of thousands of people were using it to do for their calendars what apps like Dropbox now do for files. People could connect multiple Macs to a single Google account with Spanning Sync and have changes made on any of them show up on all of them—and on Google. It was awesome, and there was much rejoicing.
But just a few months later Apple shipped OS X 10.5 "Leopard", and something very bad happened. Inexplicably, Apple made a few changes to Leopard between the final developer release (against which we had been testing) and the bits they shipped to customers. And one of those changes caused Apple Sync Services to tell all sync clients (including Spanning Sync), "Delete everything!" And we did. We had become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Luckily it didn't take us long to figure out what was going on. We shut down our servers so no more bad delete commands would be sunc and worked through the night digging through log files to manually recover lost data for our affected customers. It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't fun. We updated our app to work around the problem and issued a fix within 48 hours. Disaster was averted but the experience stuck with us. And it led us to develop Spanning Backup for Google Apps.
So here we are in 2012 and sync is hotter than ever. Dropbox has some crazy ten-digit valuation, Apple is syncing data among all their own devices willy-nilly with iCloud, and the mighty Google is rumored to soon be launching something that may or may not be called Google Drive. But whatever it's called, I bet it's going to be awesome. And there will be much rejoicing. But.
But like the roads of the Roman Empire that enabled not only commerce but also hordes of marauding barbarians, sync is a two-way street. (See what I did there?) It enables not only easy sharing but also easy accidental data loss. Delete something here and—poof!—it's gone everywhere.
Sync makes backup even more important.
For my part, I'm loving the sync-everything-everywhere lifestyle. Dropbox is awesome. Google Drive will hopefully be awesomer. And along with tens of thousands of other people (thank you all!) I continue to use Spanning Sync (because it's still way better than the alternatives). But I'm more careful than ever to back that stuff up.
In 2007 I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and sat in on a session on the mobile workforce. At the time, Steve Jobs had introduced the original iPhone but it wasn't yet shipping. As I remember it, the panel for the session included several industry analysts as well as representatives from Nokia, Motorola, and maybe one other handset maker. When it came time for Q&A I asked what kind of impact the soon-to-be-released iPhone would have in the enterprise, and how other vendors would need to respond. The panel dismissed the idea out of hand. Apple, after all, is a consumer company.
Two weeks ago I attended an IDC event on mobility and the cloud. At the time, Steve Jobs had introduced iCloud but it wasn't yet shipping. The panel for the session consisted of IDC's most senior research analysts. When it came time for the Q&A session I asked what kind of impact the soon-to-be-released iCloud would have in the enterprise, and how other vendors would need to respond. The panel dismissed the question out of hand. Apple, after all, is a consumer company.
Computing is moving to the cloud in a big way. Mobile is exploding in a big way. And they're two sides of the same coin.
I believe that when the inevitable consolidation happens, the companies left standing will be the ones that own the whole stack—from the dirt on which the data center is built, up through the servers, storage, and networking gear inside the building, to the cloud apps running on that infrastructure, to the mobile apps, operating system, and hardware in the user's hand. Apple, Amazon, and Google all do this now. They allow third parties to augment that stack where it makes sense (which varies with each company's business model) and keep tight control everywhere else.
It's interesting to see companies that don't yet own components at every level of the stack grapple with it. Mobile device makers are rushing to add cloud storage and sync services to their offerings. HTC is bundling Dropbox service with some of its phones. HP planned to bundle Box.Net with its TouchPad before Léo killed that whole thing. Samsung is reportedly building its own cloud services. Similarly, cloud service providers are beginning to move down the stack, eschewing the relative ease and convenience of Amazon Web Services for the economies of scale available to those who build their own data centers. And some companies that might not come to mind when you think of either "cloud" or "mobile" are turning out to be surprisingly well-positioned. Dude, you're getting a data center.
The future is clear, at least in broad strokes. The next 10+ years of computing will be defined by vertically integrated stacks of technology that span mobile and cloud computing. It's going to be fascinating to see how it plays out.
Yesterday Steve Jobs introducediCloud, saying, "We're going to move the digital hub—the center of your digital life—to the cloud," and concluding his presentation with an admonition: "If you don't think we're serious about this, you're wrong."
Apple is the last of what Eric Schmidt recently called the "Gang of Four", which also includes Google, Amazon, and Facebook, to bet big on the cloud. And even though Schmidt left them out of his list, Microsoft is joining the club too. But Apple's cloud strategy is unique in that it essentially embeds the cloud in their desktop and mobile platforms.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are cloud natives—users access their services primarily with a web browser. They offer web API's that enable other companies to write applications of any kind (desktop, mobile, or cloud) to interact with them and share data. But Apple's iCloud APIs, at least those offered so far, are limited to developers of applications for iOS and OS X.
Some will certainly argue this is a closed approach, and unnecessarily restrictive. But to Apple, it's about ensuring quality. Jobs said, "A competitor that doesn't own the apps or doesn't have great developers to integrate with their apps, they can never do this—they can never make it so 'it just works'—and that's what we've done here."
And iCloud does indeed deliver a seamlessly integrated experience. I can create a document on my iPad (or presumably my Mac) and it shows up on my iPhone. I don't have to think about how that happened, or configure anything to make it work. And that happens with apps not only from from Apple but also from third-party developers. Apple is subsuming over-the-air sync into their platform and exposing it to developers at the platform level. And for Apple, iOS and OS X, not the cloud, are the platform. To Apple, the cloud is just plumbing.
It's a radically different approach than we've seen from the cloud-native companies. Microsoft's approach may resemble Apple's most closely, but their cloud integration is being done within Office, not within Windows. It will be interesting to see which model wins.
With 200 million potential iCloud users on day one, Apple is set to go from being an also-ran in the cloud world to one its biggest players. And as always, they're playing by their own rules. Game on.
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of bootstrapping. Instead of putting together a pretty pitch deck and hitting Sand Hill Road (or 300 W. Sixth Street, as the case may be) I've long preferred the model where you open up the IDE, build something valuable, find a few people who'll pay you money for it, and iterate. Growth may be slower, but it's real and you're beholden unto no one.
When we built Spanning Sync, we invested months of nights and weekends writing the code. Before we launched, we worked out a great deal with a key supplier that allowed us to scale up while paying for only what we needed, which allowed us to spend only $2,500 before we started selling our product. I put that amount on my credit card, and before the bill was due we had brought in more than that in revenue. We were cash-flow positive literally from day one, and went on to make millions. Bootstrapping was perfect for that business, and made me a champion of the model.
So why did Spanning Cloud Apps take $2M in venture funding last week? The answer is simple: opportunity cost.
Before we even started building Spanning Backup, we knew it would be valuable to a lot of people. We had been operating Spanning Sync for several years, and despite endless admonitions to users to make backups, had seen one user after another lose data, usually due to a botched sync with some badly-behaved application or device. When OS X 10.5 Leopard was released, the first thing it did after installation was instruct all Sync Services clients to delete everything. Doh!
We also heard from lots of people who had accidentally deleted their calendars, corrupted their contacts, or otherwise goofed up their Google data and were in desperate need of help.
Based on this experience, several years' worth of real-world data, and some educated guesses as to how the backup market would be different than sync, we made some projections. Then we plotted the growth we'd be able to manage by bootstrapping against the projected opportunity and saw a mismatch. In the time it would take us to grow organically to scale, we'd leave a ton of opportunity on the table. In order to capitalize on the opportunity, we'd need to grow faster than that. Which meant outside investment.
I've been down the VC-funded road a few times before. I've seen it work spectacularly well, middlingly, and terribly. I've dealt with bad VC's, mediocre VC's, and awesome VC's. I knew that if I were going to sell a significant part of my young company, I'd want to work only with investors whom I respect, with whom I'd worked before, and who have significant experience and presence in our industry. So I called the guys at Foundry. Happily, they liked what they saw and now we're partners in this business.
I'm still a huge fan of bootstrapping, and I believe that every entrepreneur should build a profitable business from scratch at least once before trying to do it with outside investors. There are lessons there you can only learn by doing. But it's not the best model for every situation, and knowing which funding model is appropriate at what time is, I believe, necessary to maximize success.
Austin, TX – April 6, 2011 — Spanning Cloud Apps, the makers of Spanning Backup for Google Apps, today announced that the company has secured $2 million of funding from Foundry Group, a Boulder-based venture capital firm. Launched in September 2010 and spun out of Spanning Sync, Inc., Spanning Cloud Apps will apply the resources to continue to build on the company's growing portfolio of cloud applications for Google Apps as well accelerate development of complementary solutions for other major cloud service providers.
Spanning Backup is the highest-rated Security & Compliance app in the Google Apps Marketplace, is among the highest-rated paid apps overall, and has already backed up more than 1 billion documents, calendar events, and contacts for Google Apps users.
"When Google Apps customers learn about Spanning Backup, their first question isn't, ‘How much does it cost?' but rather, ‘How soon can we turn it on?'" said Charlie Wood, Spanning Cloud Apps founder and CEO. "We help a lot of Google Apps admins sleep a lot better at night."
The Austin-based company has also added Seth Levine, Managing Director at the Foundry Group, to its board of directors.
"We couldn't be happier to work with Seth and the rest of the Foundry team," said Wood. "With Foundry's support and deep experience in the market we plan to extend our lead in Google Apps backup and use that leadership position to build out a broad portfolio of cloud apps."
"It's very exciting to work with fresh and ambitious companies such as Spanning Cloud Apps," said Seth Levine, Managing Director at Foundry Group. "The caliber of the team and their proven ability to execute made them a very strong fit at Foundry Group. We're very excited to help this team achieve its very ambitious goals."
Spanning Cloud Apps' flasghip product, Spanning Backup, continually backs up Google Apps data to the cloud. While Google's infrastructure includes extremely sophisticated internal disaster recovery capabilities, Spanning Backup provides backup and restore functionality for Google Apps users and administrators. The product provides simple, always-on protection against accidental and malicious data loss and corruption.
Founded in 2010 and spun out of Spanning Sync, Inc., Spanning Cloud Apps is a cloud-based application developer focused on backup solutions for today's most widely adopted cloud-computing suites including Google Apps. Spanning Backup, the company's flagship product, is the top-rated backup solution for Google Apps users and administrators. The company is backed by Foundry Group, and is based in Austin, Texas.
Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage information technology, Internet, and software startups. In addition to providing the necessary venture capital to get a company up and running, Foundry Group is committed to leveraging their experience in starting and growing companies, expertise in the technology industry, and network of relationships to help great entrepreneurs turn great ideas into great companies. Foundry Group is based in Boulder, Colorado, and invests in companies located across the United States.
Often what looks like overnight success is actually the result of years of hard, grinding work.
Look around today and you might think that cloud computing in the enterprise is some new thing that's happened overnight. Giants like SAP have been caught flat-footed and are playing catch-up. Microsoft is struggling to turn the ship. But those guys remind me of the castle guards in the Lancelot skit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
They've seen their attacker coming for a while, they've just misjudged its speed and distance.
"Ha-HA!!"
Cloud computing in the enterprise isn't an overnight success. It's been coming for a long time. And it's moving really fast.
Google's ChromeOS is a very big deal. Well, not yet, but it will be. However, some very clever peopledisagree so I thought it might be useful to go through my rationale for believing what I do.
Let me first make a disclaimer: I'm a big fan of Google. For the last four years I've made a living selling apps like Spanning Sync and Spanning Backup that complement Google's own applications. In fact, Spanning Sync was one of the first apps listed in the Google Apps Marketplace and Spanning Backup was one of the first applications available on the Chrome Web Store. I run my business using an array of Google tools. And I've made a tidy profit off of Google stock, although I don't own any now. So I have a pro-Google bias.
With that out of the way, let's zoom way out and look at the macro picture of what's happening in personal computing these days. I almost wrote, "what's happening on the web these days," but decided that showed a prejudice, so I'll instead talk about "personal computing", a phrase we haven't really used in the past fifteen years or so. And why is that? We all still use personal computers, right? Be they Macs or PCs, they're still the machines we use to do our, uh, computing. Sure, we have our iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and whatnot, but I don't know anyone who uses one of those devices exclusively. Everyone still uses personal computers. So why don't we talk about "personal computing" any more? Because everything interesting happens on the web. So we talk about what's happening on the web, or maybe more generally on the Internet.
Of course not everything we do with our personal computers involves the web. I'm typing this document on a word processor (Pages) running locally on my notebook computer (MacBook Pro). When I recently returned from a vacation to New Zealand, I transferred my digital photos from my camera to an application (iPhoto) running on my Mac. Yesterday I bought a bunch of music for my wife from Amazon and will burn it all to a CD using an application (iTunes) running on the same machine. So no, the web isn't the end-all be-all of computing. But it is where the most interesting stuff is happening.
Let's ignore for a moment the old standards of computing—word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations from the 80's, photos and music from the 90's—and instead look at the applications of the current decade (whatever we're calling it—have we decided yet?).
Google is a web application. Facebook is a web application. Twitter is a web application. So are YouTube, LinkedIn, and, well, I was going to say Gmail but that's three Google properties in a list of six, which doesn't seem quite fair. HotMail? (Is that still around?) Anyway, you get the idea. The things people use—real people who don't work in technology, who don't read TechCrunch, and who don't have an opinion as to whether or not OpenID sucks (it does)—the interesting things normal people use are web applications. And the less-interesting things they've used since the 80's and 90's have web-app substitutes. So the web is where it's at. But you probably knew that before I started rambling, so let's move on.
The copy of Microsoft Windows running on your PC has little to do with the web other than the fact that it runs Internet Explorer or some other browser. Your PC, in fact, has little to do with the web other than the fact that it runs an operating system that runs a web browser. Which is quite shocking, considering the cost and complexity of that PC, particularly given how little of that cost and complexity goes toward running that web browser. How much time, money, and aggravation do you spend applying endless system updates, catching and removing viruses, backing up hard drives, installing and uninstalling software, and trying to figure out why things are running so slowly? It's crazy. Every single PC user I know does all of these things all the time, and every single one of them hates it. I know I do, and I'm a "computer person". I can't imagine how frustrating the entire experience would be if I didn't have a natural affinity for the things in the first place.
So imagine a group of very clever people sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and designing a new kind of machine that didn't require any of those things, and instead was custom-built to do one thing: let you use the web. It might look like a personal computer, with a screen, a keyboard, and a mouse. It might look like a notebook, with a built-in trackpad. Or it might look like something else. But it would be built to get out of the way and let you use email, Facebook, YouTube, Google, and every other web site out there without having to deal with all that other "computer stuff". That's the idea behind ChromeOS. And it's a no-brainer.
"But wait!" you cry, "What about the high-def video editing I do at work?" Well, that's a great example of an application that's suited to a more powerful kind of machine, one we used to call a workstation. Same goes for lots of other specialized applications. My wife, who is an architect, would still need a CAD workstation—likely a PC running AutoCAD. A video post-production professional would still need a specialized machine—likely a PC running AfterEffects. But just as PC's were able to replace many dedicated machines in the last twenty years, web machines will be able to replace many PC's in the near future. Not all, to be sure, but many.
Things fall apart; it's scientific. If you don't believe there's disruptive power in simplicity just ask yesterday's corporate giants. But do it in 140 characters or less.
So the web is a big deal and simple machines that let you use the web without unnecessary complexity will be a big deal. But does that make ChromeOS a big deal? Yep. Because ChromeOS is the thing that makes these simple web machines possible. It's the thing that removes the layers and layers of sedimentary complexity that have built up in personal computing over the last 30 years. It eliminates a vast world of hurt made up of BIOS settings, device drivers, DLL's, startup items, registry settings, and other things too painful to remember clearly. It's the thin layer between the amazingly powerful yet inexpensive hardware available today and the amazingly powerful yet simple applications on the web.
ChromeOS is only a big deal to the degree that the web is a big deal and that today's PC's aren't ideal web machines. Which is to say, it's a very big deal.
There will be a total lunar eclipse tonight, with totality between 1:41a and 2:43a Austin time. This is the first such event to fall on the Winter Solstice since 1683.
The forecast for Austin calls for mostly cloudy skies tonight after midnight with patchy fog. Not the best viewing conditions, but still worth staying (or, like me, getting) up for.
My dad would have called me to tell me about this. I'll make it a point to wake up and witness this celestial event. I know that in his younger days he would have.
My dad died a few days ago after a years-long battle with multiple sclerosis. He had been getting steadily worse for a long time (as is usually the case with MS), had been in bad shape the last eight months or so, and took a turn for the worse last week. It wasn't unexpected, but it still seemed sudden. He and I had a chance to talk a couple of days before his death, and I think we both knew it might be our last chance. I'm really glad we got to say goodbye. Lots of people never get to.
Here's the obituary that ran in the Statesman:
Charles Burnett Wood of Austin, Texas, retired lawyer and municipal judge, passed away on December 14, 2010 at the age of 71 after a lengthy battle with multiple sclerosis. He was born on January 5, 1939 in Austin, attended Austin High School, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Texas School of Law. He served in the U.S. Air Force, and was president of the Bachelors Club of Austin and a member of the Admirals Club. He is survived by his two children Martha and Charlie, and his two grandsons Sam and Hudson.
A memorial service will be held at 11am on Monday, December 20 at Covenant Presbyterian Church.
He had been in pain and discomfort for a long, long time. I'm very glad that he no longer is. When we last spoke, he said, "It's a tough thing facing your own demise. But it's been quite an adventure."
To add extra zest, just pretend everything the Tea Party says is actually true...
We have a religious government run by an unholy covenant between government socialists, the janitor's union, wall-street capitalists, auto companies, abortionists, atheists, and illegal immigrants. This cabal is led by a secret socialist Kenyan muslim svengali. The cabal's agenda is to bankrupt the country by giving away reparations to slaves, health-care to illegal aliens, bailouts to auto companies and wallstreet, and entitlements to minorities. While bankrupting the country they'll also destroy its reputation by apologizing to every country and bowing to their leaders. They'll destroy the military by allowing gays to declare themselves as gay while serving in the military and they'll destroy marriage by allowing gays to marry. They will destroy the Constitution by ignoring the 2nd amendment and taking away everyone's guns and ammunition. They will destroy our souls and our system of law by implementing Sharia law, which is allowed by the Constitution. And, finally, they'll destroy our core Americanism by not always wearing flag pins on their lapels.
This cabal will be battled by a holy covenant of witches, libertarians, game-hunters, anachronists, secessionists, wrestling executives, racists, and talk radio hosts. This alliance will keep the evil cabal from destroying our government by quickly eliminating at-risk government programs like social security, food stamps, and workplace laws, and disbanding at-risk government agencies like the FDA, the IRS, the CIA, and the State Department. They'll prevent a Muslim takeover of the remaining government by bonding the government with an amalgam of fundamentalist Christianity and Mormonism and just a dash of Wiccan. They'll raise revenue by taxing the poor and reducing taxes on the rich in order to spur growth. Poor people will be taxed the most, making them work harder in order to attain wealth, while the rich will be taxed the least in order to maximize the trickle-down effect. The minimum wage and food stamps will be eliminated in order to increase productivity and reduce costs. They'll create jobs by employing people to find and remove the 12 million illegal immigrants hiding within our borders. They'll save the Constitution by interpreting it as if it was 1776 and they'll save the Union by running the country as if it were 1776. They will always wear their flag pins on their lapels ... they would wear two, but that seems a little too Marxist.
Google recently announced the availability of two-factor authentication for Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Editions, and we're proud to announce that Spanning Backup fully supports this important new technology. Here's how it works:
Two-step verification is easy to set up, manage and use. When enabled by an administrator, it requires two means of identification to sign in to a Google Apps account, something you know: a password, and something you have: a mobile phone. It doesn’t require any special tokens or devices. After entering your password, a verification code is sent to your mobile phone via SMS, voice calls, or generated on an application you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device. This makes it much more likely that you’re the only one accessing your data: even if someone has stolen your password, they'll need more than that to access your account
Unlike our competitors, Spanning Backup is integrated with OpenID-based single sign-on for Google Apps users. Now with its support for Google's new two-factor authentication, our users can feel even more confident that their data is secure.
During my pilot training I reached the point where it was time to learn to land. Since landing is more challenging than the other phases of flight, I felt some trepidation. Sensing this, my instructor said matter-of-factly, "You're going to make a hundred bad landings before you make a good one. Let's get started." And we did.
I only made a handful of marginal landings—and none I would call bad—before I solidified my technique.
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they're worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don't have are leaders.
After months of beta testing, Spanning Backup for Google Apps has launched. Since the beta began, we've backed up over 100 million calendar events, contacts, and docs for our users. That's 100 million fewer things they have to worry about.
Now the ability to back up Google Calendar, Contacts, and Docs is commercially available at spanningbackup.com.
Data loss and corruption is a serious problem for Google Apps users. Browse through the Google Apps help forums and you'll find hundreds of posts from users who have lost their data and need help. The usual reply, when one is given, is, "Sorry, your data is gone for good." If those users had been using Spanning Backup, they'd be able to restore their data with just a couple of clicks.
Clay Spinuzzi is an associate professor at the University of Texas and an early user of Spanning Backup. Here's what he has so say:
I've been using Google Docs almost daily since 2006, and I'm totally sold on cloud-based word processing. But how about cloud-based backups? For years, I had to safeguard my thousands of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations by manually downloading them once a week - and I always worried that I would miss something. But with Spanning Backup, I never have to worry about backups. Backup is dependable, browsing files is easy, and restoring a file is transparent. It just works.
Spanning Backup is a pure cloud-based application built on Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS, EBS, CloudFront, and CloudWatch) and is designed to scale to millions of users. It uses a number of Google API's (Calendar, Contacts, DocList, Docs, Spreadsheets, Provisioning, AuthSub, and OpenID Federated Login) and is natively integrated with the Google Apps Marketplace to support domain-wide provisioning and Google Universal Navigation.
After a 30-day free trial period, a subscription costs $3.95/month or $39.95/year per user. Educational, non-profit, and volume discounts are available. Spanning Sync customers get an automatic $10 discount off their first year's subscription.
Spanning Sync, Inc., based in Austin, Texas, was founded in 2006 by Charlie Wood and Larry Hendricks. The company's eponymous product syncs calendars and contacts between Apple and Google applications. The company is profitable and has tens of thousands of customers in 58 countries.
New Polymath is a breathless run-through of the technological forces that are defining the new rules of business and the companies that are successfully harnessing those forces to succeed. (If that sentence hurt your brain, you might want to get a good night's sleep before diving into New Polymath.) While many business authors stretch what should have been an article into a book, Vinnie compresses what could have been a collection of business books into a single volume.
Vinnie's passion for innovation and sweeping knowledge of what's happening right now make New Polymath a fascinating read.
Disclosure: Vinnie is a friend of mine, and mentions my company in his book.
In my last post on this topic I said, "What I want is a way to shoot 720p video on my iPhone and upload it directly to the cloud without any loss of quality." Well, I found it.
Pixelpipe is a free iPhone app and online service whose latest version lets you upload full 720p videos (up to 200MB) from your iPhone 4 to a variety of online services including YouTube. It even features queued uploads that work in the background, so your phone isn't tied up while you're pushing all those bits.
In my testing so far it's worked flawlessly and is exactly what I was looking for. It also performs a bunch of other functions, like uploading photos and routing your videos and photos to various social media channels, but I haven't looked into those yet.
Following up on yesterday's post I just tried uploading a 720p video from my iPhone 4 to Apple's own MobileMe service. Disappointingly, the uploaded video was downsized from its original 1280x720 resolution to 568x320 and compressed from 12.9MB to 983KB. The resulting loss of quality was, needless to say, significant.
What I want is a way to shoot 720p video on my iPhone and upload it directly to the cloud without any loss of quality.
It looks like SmugMug supports HD video with their $149/year Pro plan, but it's not clear whether their iPhone app allows uploading HD video, and given the number of reviews claiming it crashes when trying to upload video I'm not inclined to test it myself, at least not yet.
If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them. Thanks!
Since iPhone 4 can now capture 720p videos, I wondered if uploading them directly from the Camera app to YouTube would result in any loss of quality compared to syncing the iPhone with a Mac and then uploading from there. The short answer is that yes, they do.
I shot a quick test video and uploaded it from my iPhone. Even though the original source was shot at 720p, the resulting YouTube video maxes out at 360p:
I then transferred the same movie from my iPhone to my Mac with iTunes and uploaded it to YouTube via their web interface. The resulting video can be shown at the full 720p resolution:
So if you want your iPhone videos to look best on YouTube, don't upload them directly from the device. Instead, sync them to your Mac or PC and upload them from there.
Anyone know if any video hosting services allow full-fidelity 720p uploads directly from the iPhone?
The cloud is great. Your stuff is stored in only one place. No copies in email attachments, no copies on your laptop, your desktop, and your server. Make a change and there's no need to send out updates, because it's always in one place. Right?
Right. But delete it in one place and it's gone. Gone. You can't just find a copy in email. Or on your laptop. It was stored in only one place, and now it's no longer there.
Loosely connected systems are messy, but they have redundancy built in. Highly connected systems are more fragile. They need explicit redundancy, explicit backup systems.
However important backup is in traditional desktop environments, its much more important in cloud-based environments.
This morning I hopped on a jetBlue flight from Austin to San Francisco to attend Google I/O. I usually avoid industry conferences, but I make it a point to attend this one. I find it has a supernormal signal-to-noise ratio. Here's what I expect to get out of this year's event.
Exposure
We're getting close to the commercial release of Spanning Backup, so it's time to start directing people's attention toward it. (We recently performed our two-millionth backup. Time to light this candle!) Toward that end, here's a quick video showing what it's all about:
Information
We work at the leading edge of Google's API's, so there's often information we need that's not documented anywhere. What's the maximum payload size for an HTTP POST to the Google Docs API? How do you enable compression when talking to the Google Calendar API? Is Google planning on implementing contact sharing, or would it be a good thing for us to do? The answers to these questions are at I/O, not online.
Relationships
It's important to remember that there are real people creating all of these ecosystems, companies, products, and features. And even though better online communications tools exist now than ever before, face-to-face conversation (often in a conference hallway or a hotel bar) is the most powerful way to establish and strengthen relationships with those people.
Zeitgeist
Finally, I want to get a sense of where Google and its ecosystem are going. From where I sit it looks like Google is emphasizing Android over the web, a strategy I would consider dangerous and ill-advised. I want to see if I get the same sense at the show.
Oh Yeah, and a Party!
Be sure to join us and our friends at RedMonk for beers at House of Shields Wednesday night. The first $500 of the bar tab is on Spanning!
But even if you can't make it Wednesday night, please come by the Spanning booth in the Developer Sandbox area and say hello. We have some very exclusive laptop stockers for you. :-)
A couple of years ago I bought a Brenthaven Trek laptop backpack from Amazon. I loved it. But after 18 months of heavy use, one of the zipper tracks broke. Since a similar problem with a $400 Tumi bag wasn't covered by the warranty I assumed this wouldn't be either.
I started shopping for other laptop cases, and mentioned my broken Brenthaven bag on Twitter. Minutes later, someone from Brenthaven contacted me and suggested I send the bag back to get a replacement. As it turns out, they have a lifetime guarantee on their products and this kind of problem is covered. (Take that, Tumi!) I hadn't registered for it when I bought the bag, but that didn't make a difference. I contacted their service department, got a return authorization number, and sent it in.
That was two weeks ago today. This morning FedEx delivered a brand new Trek backpack to my door. It's even a newer model, with better zipper pulls and tracks.
I have to say I'm delighted with both Brenthaven's product and their customer service. The backpack itself is very high-quality, fits my 15" MacBook Pro like a glove, and has just the right number and type of compartments. Also, after carrying an older Targus laptop bag for the last two weeks—and feeling every minute of it in my lower back—I'll never go back to carrying a traditional over-the-shoulder case again.
Aside from that, the fact that they're actively listening for customers who need help is more than just icing on the cake; it's turned me into a customer for life. The next time I need anything Brenthaven makes, like maybe an iPad sleeve, I'll look no further.
My buddy BJ and I had a great time talking with Omar Gallaga at the Statesman earlier this week about our new iPads. Here's Omar's article, plus some video they shot:
I just ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on my iPad and my (2.66GHz Unibody) MacBook Pro. The raw results are here and here, respectively. Here's the comparison:
TEST COMPARISON FROM TO DETAILS
=============================================================================
** TOTAL **: 26.7x as fast 10999.0ms +/- 0.7% 412.0ms +/- 1.0% significant
=============================================================================
3d: 38.7x as fast 1995.2ms +/- 1.7% 51.6ms +/- 1.3% significant
cube: 39.9x as fast 622.2ms +/- 3.5% 15.6ms +/- 4.4% significant
morph: 41.5x as fast 796.8ms +/- 0.9% 19.2ms +/- 5.4% significant
raytrace: 34.3x as fast 576.2ms +/- 1.5% 16.8ms +/- 3.3% significant
access: 41.4x as fast 1621.0ms +/- 2.5% 39.2ms +/- 2.7% significant
binary-trees: 20.4x as fast 114.2ms +/- 2.9% 5.6ms +/- 12.2% significant
fannkuch: 37.5x as fast 562.0ms +/- 3.8% 15.0ms +/- 5.9% significant
nbody: 75.2x as fast 751.8ms +/- 2.9% 10.0ms +/- 8.8% significant
nsieve: 22.4x as fast 193.0ms +/- 1.8% 8.6ms +/- 12.9% significant
bitops: 39.6x as fast 895.8ms +/- 4.4% 22.6ms +/- 9.2% significant
3bit-bits-in-byte: 52.2x as fast 167.0ms +/- 2.2% 3.2ms +/- 17.4% significant
bits-in-byte: 22.1x as fast 159.0ms +/- 3.1% 7.2ms +/- 14.4% significant
bitwise-and: 33.7x as fast 154.8ms +/- 27.5% 4.6ms +/- 14.8% significant
nsieve-bits: 54.6x as fast 415.0ms +/- 0.5% 7.6ms +/- 14.6% significant
controlflow: 33.6x as fast 134.6ms +/- 1.8% 4.0ms +/- 22.0% significant
recursive: 33.6x as fast 134.6ms +/- 1.8% 4.0ms +/- 22.0% significant
crypto: 31.3x as fast 777.4ms +/- 0.5% 24.8ms +/- 4.2% significant
aes: 17.4x as fast 229.6ms +/- 1.2% 13.2ms +/- 10.3% significant
md5: 41.8x as fast 267.8ms +/- 1.7% 6.4ms +/- 10.6% significant
sha1: 53.8x as fast 280.0ms +/- 2.5% 5.2ms +/- 10.7% significant
date: 12.5x as fast 739.8ms +/- 1.4% 59.0ms +/- 4.7% significant
format-tofte: 12.3x as fast 331.0ms +/- 1.1% 27.0ms +/- 6.5% significant
format-xparb: 12.8x as fast 408.8ms +/- 1.8% 32.0ms +/- 9.1% significant
math: 44.1x as fast 1543.4ms +/- 0.2% 35.0ms +/- 5.6% significant
cordic: 55.6x as fast 544.6ms +/- 0.6% 9.8ms +/- 5.7% significant
partial-sums: 32.9x as fast 579.0ms +/- 0.5% 17.6ms +/- 9.5% significant
spectral-norm: 55.2x as fast 419.8ms +/- 0.5% 7.6ms +/- 9.0% significant
regexp: 47.6x as fast 989.8ms +/- 0.7% 20.8ms +/- 7.8% significant
dna: 47.6x as fast 989.8ms +/- 0.7% 20.8ms +/- 7.8% significant
string: 14.9x as fast 2302.0ms +/- 1.4% 155.0ms +/- 1.5% significant
base64: 20.4x as fast 334.8ms +/- 0.9% 16.4ms +/- 6.8% significant
fasta: 15.1x as fast 452.8ms +/- 2.4% 30.0ms +/- 2.9% significant
tagcloud: 11.7x as fast 385.2ms +/- 4.3% 33.0ms +/- 0.0% significant
unpack-code: 13.5x as fast 620.2ms +/- 1.2% 45.8ms +/- 3.5% significant
validate-input: 17.1x as fast 509.0ms +/- 1.1% 29.8ms +/- 3.5% significant
It's one thing not to be able to run Flash apps. But JavaScript performance like this effectively means the iPad can't run complex JavaScript apps either. Interesting.
Update:Tim Anderson reports that even his $325 netbook runs the SunSpider benchmark 4.5x faster than an iPad. This (plus, of course, Flash support) could turn out to be a distinct competitive advantage for Google Chrome OS netbooks, which will surely be JavaScript speed demons.
Update 2:Iñaki Rodríguez ran the benchmark on his Acer 1810T netbook ($612 at Amazon) running Google Chrome. The results were 13.3x as fast as an iPad. This could turn out to be a BFD.
Update 3: According to the benchmark, the iPad runs JavaScript 1.52x as fast as an iPhone 3GS.
Spanning Stats for Google Drive is now live in the Chrome Web Store!
