The PutPlace Blog

Damien hits another home run for Startups in Ireland with his Tuesday Push idea. What I love about it was the speed of execution. Met Damien last week at the Darklight Festival, he mentioned the idea (which I whole heartedly endorsed), couple of emails over the weekend to confirm with other key figures that it was a runner. tThe very next Tuesday and we are up and running.

Damien is a exemplar of the “lets not overthink this one” model of working.

PutPlace has experienced a dramatic spike in traffic as a result and the link love is sure to stand us in good stead in the future. So in no particular order, a big shout out to,

• Damien Mulley : That PutPlace Feeling
• Conor O’Neill : PutPlace is backup for the rest of us
• James Corbett : When Push Comes to Shove
• David Kelly : PutPlace Beta and The Tuesday Push
• Robin Blandford : Push PutPlace. Push Ireland.
• Keith Bohanna : The Tuesday Push - PutPlace
• Niall Larkin : Get your sh1t together with PutPlace
• Pat Phelan : PutPlace gets the Tuesday Love
• Alexia Golez : Saving Your Digital Life with PutPlace
• Frank Bauer : What Can you Put in PutPlace
• Alan O’Rourke : PutPlace
• Derek Organ : PutPlace, Easy online backup
• Conor O’Neill (on Web 2 Ireland) : The Tuesday Push, Show Real Community Spirit

If I have missed anyone (these are the sites that Google Alerts reported for PutPlace) please drop me a line or post a comment and I’ll add you to the list.

Its official, we are now in public beta. What does this mean? Well right now if you are a Windows user you can register and download our client software. With our software in place you can backup all the content on all the computers your own.

Big job? Not with PutPlace. We do all the heavy lifting and our client is smart about backup so you don’t have to be. Duplicate files are detected by the client so we don’t scarf up all your bandwidth uploading redundant files. On the server all those copies are linked together so you don’t pay out top dollar for storage either.

Once we’ve backed up all your stuff we watch it in real-time and backup all the changes as they happen. What about old versions? We keep ‘em all safe for you online.

Need all your bandwidth or CPU? Turn PutPlace down or turn it off. When we startup again we’ll catch up to where we were in a lickety split.

Upload as much as you want the beta is free. When we move to a paying model in the future we’ll give beta users several months to decide whether to go with PutPlace or somebody else and we’ll move your content there for free (if we can).

So get uploading and send us your feedback.

We’re delighted to host OpenCoffee here at the Digital Depot on James St. Hope to see you all here on Thursday.

As avid users of Firefox, PutPlace is delighted to help sponsor the FireFox 3 Dublin launch party alongside Blacknight, Segala, Wubud and BT.

The venue is CineWorld on Parnell St, Date 19th June 2008, time 7.00pm to 1.00am.

Registration to attend is required. Over 100 people have already registered so make sure you get your name on the list before it’s closed.

Apple announced MobileMe (hosted at me.com which cost them a reputed 11m dollars) at their recent World Wide Developers Conference, aka WWDC for those in the know. The full details are now available on the Apple.com website.

So what is MobileMe? Well its contacts, email and calendar synchronization all wrapped up in a Nice big Apple bow and priced at $99 dollars a year. They also lob in a fancy schmancy Web 2.0 AJAX interface to email, contacts and calendar (take that Google!) and 20GB of virtual storage “in the cloud” as they are fond of saying.

Its clear they are gunning for the Outlook/Exchange users, they even pitch it as Exchange for the rest of us. Do most Outlook users know what Exchange is? I guess this is the WWDC.

So our takeaway is being Apple its sure to be as a slick as a race car, but the price tag makes Google Mail and Google Calendar look pretty attractive. I guess a lot of the CrackBerry addicts will swoon while their companies pick up the price tag.

But this is a new departure for Apple, they don’t have a lot of experience building web scale services and you can be sure that the Mac users will sign up in droves. Google can always throw their hands up and say its free when gmail glitches, but when you are stiffing your users for 99 bucks a year taking out North America’s email plonks you right in the center of class action territory. I do love the fact that they are socialising pay to play services as that is certainly our business model here at PutPlace.

I’ve signed up for the launch and look forward to giving it a spin for real. Time to buy that iPhone I’ve been lusting after.

While PutPlace has a different take on backing up your digital life, there’s no denying that we’re in the online storage space. As such, we’re always keeping an eye on what other players are doing.

In the process of our research, we compiled a big spreadsheet that records, among other things, how much free storage space each service offers. We thought we’d share it with the world, in case you needed to store, like, every episode of The Simpsons online.

A few caveats: we ignored email services like Gmail, and any service that offered less than 250 MB of free storage. We found two services that offer theoretically unlimited storage. However, MediaFire limits file size to 100 MB per upload, and Omemo applies a peer-to-peer storage model that seems pretty complicated for the average Normal Human user.

For the record, here at PutPlace we offer 2 GB for free. Sign up now to join our exclusive beta program.

With no further ado, here’s the big list:

Read the rest of this entry »

Joel Spolsky goes to town on Windows Mesh. We agree synchronisation is not the problem, transit and memory are the problem. Getting stuff from a to b and remembering (for years) that you did so, and not doing the move if its there already.

I met Debbie Landa at the excellent drinks reception organised by Enterprise Ireland (big shout out to John, Hilary and Fergus for organising it).

I was somewhat casually pitching her the PutPlace idea when she totally blew me away by announcing that this would be a good candidate for Under The Radar.

One thing led to another and bingo, there we are presenting at Under The Radar on 3-Jun-08.

Looking forward to it!

Google has made its first foray in wholesale cloud computing with the launch of App Engine. This is a grid compute environment that allows you to drop in Python applications that can be run on a scalable Google Grid.

They only support free applications at the moment and there are a bunch of restrictions, but this is good news for PutPlace. As and when App Engine offers paid accounts we are perfectly placed to take advantage of the App Engine service as all our technology is already built using the Python programming language.

Cloud computing just got a lot more interesting.

HP has launched an uncapped backup service called Upline. Its for Windows PC’s only and priced per PC. It uses the .NET Framework (so expect a bit of a download if your don’t have it installed) and presents a pretty slick interface.

Pricing is,

• Home (1 User), $4.99 a month
• Family (3 users), $6.99 a month
• Professional ( 3-100 users) $8.99 a month (per license)