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SugarSync is one of several companies competing these days to benefit from the disruptions in the market created by the new ways that people organize and share information from the any number of devices they use in their day. That's a fundamental shift that is happening as people move beyond the desktop as a place to keep their documents, their media and their productivity applications. Sponsor Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud. SugarSync's latest hosting numbers are revealing as they demonstrate how much data people are storing online. SugarSync reports that in the past year, the amount of data added to the SugarSync data centers went from an average of 1 terabyte of data to 5 terabytes of information. In total, the company now hosts two petaybtes of information. What's fueling this growth? The customers may provide some clue. About 33 percent of customers are from outside the United States. Mobile devices are far more predominant outside the U.S. It makes sense tht people would need an alternative place to store infromation besides their smart phone or netbook. In light of the booming mobile device market, SugarSync, Dropbox and a host of other services are companies that seem like it would make most sense to develop mobile apps. That appears to be true. In the past 18 months, Sugar Sync has released apps for the Android, BlackBerry and iPad. Services like SugarSync show how the data we create will become part of a personal cloud network. These services lay the grounwork for a new generation of personal and business offerings that work with users to create data as a service opportunities. That's down the road a bit but people do want so share. And they want to share outside the borders of a social network. Personal clouds could be a means to do that. Discuss
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SugarSync: 2 Petabytes and Counting - Welcome to the Personal Cloud
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"My background is in Artificial Intelligence and my last business was building predictive data. Most of our customers were oil companies, and you can hold that against me if you like. But my pitch back then was 'just give me enough data, I'll figure out something.' And often enough I did figure out something." That's how Houston-based 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar describes his background. Tonight his web-crawling-as-a-service company will put up for sale tens of millions of data points extracted from public social networks and other websites. He says it's only a matter of time until everyone's doing it and he wants to be one of the good guys. "You can figure something out from just about anything," he says. That's the kind of geek Shion Deysarkar is. Sponsor Starting at $350 per month, 80Legs customers can now purchase 10 to 20 million monthly user profiles from LinkedIn, MySpace and some other social networks. Facebook and Twitter are not included, but there are a variety of other data sets from places like retail websites available as well. I've bet Deysarkar a beer that LinkedIn isn't going to put up with this, but he says 80Legs has been crawling them extensively for quite a while and would have stopped them if they wanted to. We'll see. 80Legs launched at DEMO last fall and has been on our radar since last Spring. Its core product is crawling the web for a small fee - to index whatever its customers want. As Sarah Perez wrote in September : What 80Legs does is no easy feat. It provides its users a service which offers up 50,000 computers which can crawl up to 2 billion web pages per day. Yes, it's like having your own little search engine that you can rent for a small fee. How small? 80Legs is about 50% less expensive than any other competitive service out there. Tonight it's putting up for sale some pre-configured crawls, in hopes to reach a new market of people for whom the core service is too complicated. Either way, Shion Deysarkar may be a man from the future. We're watching closely the slow opening of aggregate social network user data for bulk analaysis and innovation. It's a hotly contested area. Here's what Deysarkar thinks about four of the biggest questions in this area today. On The Slap-Down of Nice Facebook Data Harvesters Academic and innovation-minded researchers are harvesting large quantities of public Facebook user profile data, only to be threatened by Facebook's legal department. Pete Warden is the best known example and one that Deysarkar called "a shame." The people using that data are not doing anything that's shady or wrong. They are trying to make new value on top of that data. In ways that Facebook or whoever is not doing. Facebook is in the business of bringing people to their site, they aren't leveraging that data for other things, and there is many things they'll never use data for. No harm is being done to Facebook. What would help them would be to become a data standard. As long as people are adding value then it's good. On Users Approving of Data Aggregation Say "aggregate user data analysis" and most people freak out - presuming it's a screaming privacy violation. Might that ever change? Deysarkar thinks so, perhaps too optimistically. "Going forward, the end user will hopefully understand that people are creating services that will benefit them. If I take a couple of actions and I see it benefits me that's hopeful. The challenge is that people have to understand that it came from aggregation. The more people that are making a case and building things around it, the better. "If you look at social networking, quite often connections are made in unintuitive ways. Obviously market researchers can take advantage of that, but it can also help people connect with that we couldn't otherwise. "At the end of the day, it's going to happen. Sites are going to fight it, but that data is going to become available. Wherever there is value to be had, people are going to go for that value." On the Black Market for Social Networking Data One of our arguements has been that Facebook and other networks should open up access to their public user data for aggregate analysis because the bad guys who want to do bad things with it already are, through the black market . Meanwhile, positive uses of data analysis are prohibited. Deysarkar confirms again that the black market is real. "Companies should want to work with us because we're above board. The black market definitely exists. We have heard about it from some of our potential customers, who have asked about things we wouldn't do. They just say, 'we can get it through other ways.' Things like wanting a crawler to log-in and get private data. It's too bad that exists." On the Still Infant Market for Good User Data 80Legs is cool. It's a crawler-as-a-service. Pete Warden, one of our Big Data favorites, uses and endorses it. But it's also a little complicated, especially because it's like selling potential . It sells data that you then have to derive value from, it doesn't deliver value directly in ways people are familiar with. The Economist's Special Report on Big Data last month argued that data was a key new form of economic input, on par with land, labor and capital. Deysarkar says he agrees with that, "it is definitely a unit of value," but also admits that too few people get it yet. "We do have customers who are using 80legs the way we intended, we have a decent set of customers. But we know that there is a whole other set of customers who are intimidated because it is a bit technical now. These pre-configured crawls we're now selling still fit into the big picture, but the whole data market is not well defined. There isn't a rich enough ecosystem of companies using the data, that's the market we'd like to serve, but it's still being formed right now." What do you think? Is 80Legs just a little ahead of its time? A lot? Totally crazy and wrong? We would love for you to share your thoughts on these matters in comments below. Discuss
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Thoughts From the Man Who Would Sell The World, Nicely
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Thanks to voice-controlled systems like Ford's Sync , drivers don't have to take their eyes off the road if they want to place a call or switch to the next track on their playlists. Today, Ford announced the next step in the company's roadmap to connect mobile phones and cars. With Sync AppLink, Ford is introducing a new platform that allows developers to offer voice controls for their mobile apps on Sync-enabled cars. At first, AppLink will only work with Android and BlackBerry devices, but the company plans to offer support for Apple's iPhone OS and other smartphone platforms next year. Sponsor The first Sync-enabled applications, which will be available later this year, are Pandora , Stitcher , and Orangatame's OpenBreak Twitter app. Even though Sync is based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford did not announce that it plans to support the upcoming Windows Phone operating system. Drivers will be able to control AppLink-enabled mobile apps through voice commands that will be routed through the Sync system, as well as from buttons on the steering wheel. The first car to feature this new service will be the 2011 Ford Fiesta . Ford plans to offer AppLink on all Sync-equipped cars next year. Existing Sync users will be able to update their car's software at a later point as well. Same Apps - Just Controlled by SYNC From the user's perspective, installing a Sync-enabled app is no different from installing a regular app on their mobile phones. The only difference is that the car will notice when you start a Sync-enabled app and allow you to control the app's function with your voice. This allows Ford to plug right into the existing developer ecosystems and distribution channels for all of these platforms and developers only have to make relatively minor updates to make their apps compatible with Sync. It's important to stress that these applications are running on the user's phone and not on the car's built-in Sync hardware. Sync only passes the voice commands on to the application but doesn't interact with the app beyond this. In Ford's parlance, these are "brought-in" apps, as opposed to "built-in" apps (like Ford's Vehicle Health Report and 911 Assist) or "beamed-in" cloud-based apps that send traffic information and turn-by-turn directions to the car. Sync AppLink for Developers Ford is currently working with a small group of trusted partners and plans to open up the Sync API and software development kit to a broader selection of developers later this year. Ford also announced the launch of a Sync developer community that will give developers a pathway to partner with Ford on Sync-enabled applications. Image credit: Flickr user Jim Trottier Discuss
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Ford Sync Will Soon Let You Control Your Mobile Apps by Voice
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Last week brought two major announcements from Twitter. On Thursday, the company announced an official application for BlackBerry. On Friday, Twitter announced that it had purchased Atebits, the makers of the iPhone app Tweetie . Over the weekend, there was substantial discussion and a fair amount of hand-wringing by third-party developers, many expressing their frustrations about the company's direction. Attempting to reassure developers in advance of next week's Chirp conference, Twitter API lead Ryan Sarver responded by email to some of these concerns. Sponsor Certainly Twitter isn't the only company at the center of debates about control of a platform (Apple, Google, and Microsoft come to mind), but in light of the flurry of responses to Twitter's moves, it is worth considering some of the (perhaps contradictory) lessons for startups that can be gleaned from the past week's events. Find your niche : Much of the third-party development on Twitter has served to address gaps in the original product: mobile clients, URL shorteners, photo sharing, and search for example. As VC and Twitter investor Fred Wilson argued in a blog post early last week that tipped the hand, perhaps, to where Twitter was headed, there is still room for the development of "killer apps" in social gaming, enterprise, and analytics. Innovate and adapt : Find your niche, but then be prepared to innovate and adapt. Some have suggested that Twitter's acquisition of Tweetie might not bode well for other Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck , unless the two can continue to innovate. By adding new features unavailable via the Twitter website, and by linking streams from Facebook and LinkedIn, they have established themselves as more than just a Twitter client - but the pressure is certainly on for these to continue to distinguish themselves from the official Twitter applications. "Of course we're hole fillers," Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur admits , explaining that while that's a good place to start, it isn't the right place to end. Look beyond the platform : As Mark Suster writes of both Twitter and the iPhone, it is important to think beyond the platform, contending that startups should not think of Twitter "as a business but rather as a channel." In other words, a platform like Twitter should be a used as a way to reach customers but, unless you're Twitter, should not be the vehicle itself. If this is the " inflection point " for Twitter, the tasks for startups will be to learn the lessons from this critical juncture in the platform's history, balancing the sometimes contradictory needs for specificity and flexibility and innovation and stability. Discuss
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What Can Startups Learn from Last Week's Twitter Announcements?
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Mplayit , a Facebook-based mobile app store, just released some interesting new data about people's willingness to pay for mobile apps. According to Mplayit's report, about one-third of users across all the major mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) are interested in paid apps. iPhone users are the most willing to pay for some of their apps (57%), followed by BlackBerry users (33%). Android users are the least likely to be interested in paid apps (16%). Sponsor While only a third of BlackBerry users are willing to pay for apps, it's worth noting that, with a median price of $5.99, they are willing to pay the most for their apps. iPhone users only want to pay around $1.99 and the average Android user is willing to pay up to $2.72. It's important to keep in mind, though, that these are just average prices and people's willingness to pay definitely depends on the quality of the applications. As we noted earlier this month , the average price for iPhone apps continues to fall, but the average price for the most popular iPhone apps is around $2.43 in the U.S. - which - judging from Mplayit's data - indicates that most users would like to pay less than $2 for their apps, but are more than willing to pay extra for the best and most popular apps. Bonus: Percentage of Games in the Top App Stores Discuss
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iPhone Users Are More Than Willing to Pay for Apps - But Don't Want to Pay a Lot
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