Recently we have been noticing online media outlets of certain stripes going viral with their semi promotional trend castings. Overwhelming our embedded tubes are glorified mirages of their slanted visions and thunderous sound bites from their decaying wisdom teeth. So, we decided to pull the wool over the crystal ball and tell it like it might be otherwise. For the techies contemplating and crunching mythical accounts of the future, read on and peep.

Recently we came across these screamers in the headlines about how popular cloud based services will simply continue their windfall ad infinitum.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin’s Top Three Tips For Building A Hundred Year Old Company

Dropbox:  (Founder Stories) Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere”

We have heard this story before. It seems like a concerted attempt in spot fixing the future as a linear magnification of the currently obvious.  History has repeatedly cautioned us about the unknown yet lurking presence of potential spoilers.  Far far away from those hogging the limelight today, some may have started revving their engines and will be racing ahead with the last laughs.  Kindly spare your 2 cents for that unforeseen genius who will blow the cloud away with the winds of change and bequeath a radical future.

Perhaps its one laden with information galaxies storing and emitting content waves or hanging them real time in ether waiting to be transmitted to your content receiver. Do we really have to bide for a Hollywood thriller on information management to concoct the subtle ?  Oh wait, there is a breathtaking trailer that is close enough. How about this sophisticated conception of the Future Vision 2019 by Microsoft ?

Now, that’s no small bang for the future Euro & Dollar (if they still exist) ! An absolute game changers delight, wont you say ?

Along these lines, our question to staid outlets extrapolating current trends – is it hard to conceive an entirely plausible alternative future where everybody is whispering vocal notes into the ears of SIRI’s  grandchildren ?  A future that might turn Evernote to Nevernote.  A bright future without silly old fashioned carpal tunnel inducing buttons everywhere!  Future grapevines may welcome Eavesdrop and say bye bye to Dropbox.

Rest assured, there will be clouds that hang over the Dropboxes and Evernotes of today. And regarding whatever is said of the future, Remember Nothing. Zukmo Everything!

Getting mentioned by Techcrunch has been the marketing holy grail for so many startups. There are several articles on the web that talk about the different ways one could grab the attention of Techcrunch. The only way to get that attention these days seems to be to get funded by a silicon valley Venture Capital firm. As one startup founder laments:

“a mediocre competitor launched in LA, raised $12M, got their mandatory TC announcement, and another one, and another… basically a TC article for every little feature they would add. That was absolutely devastating…”

Given all this difficulty to get even an article published on Techcrunch, I was under the impression that the eventual winner of the Techcrunch Disrupt event must have something truly disruptive. After all, Qwiki did promise “An Information Experience”. So, when I finally got the invite, I was very excited to give it a try.

The actual experience though, was a let down. It seems to be nothing but a bunch of images shown in a cool looking UI with a voice over of the first couple of sentences taken out of Wikipedia.

Qwiki, of course, is claiming to be a platform that can be used by all publishers and is hoping it will be used by millions. Maybe it will be. For now, though, it seems like reading the Wikipedia article is more of “An Information Experience” than Qwiki.

Another troubling feature of Qwiki is that all Qwikis are only two minutes long. Yep, when all conversations happen in 140 characters, two minutes is sufficient to have an “Information Experience”.

Go to TechCrunch’s search box, and search for anything – the longer your phrase, the better (you’ll have fewer results to wade through).

Scroll through the results – what do you find? All results from www.TechCrunch.com are correctly dated. All results from external sites are dated Dec 31, 1969. The subliminal messaging: any TechCrunch result is current. Everyone else is ‘living in the past’. How’s that for a conspiracy theory a la Web2.0?

Of course, it’s probably just a harmless bug in their Content Management System but the conspiracy theory on subliminal messaging is obviously more fun! Someone please tell TechCrunch.

As you can see, it’s a a lazy Saturday here. Strangely enough, TechCrunch’s mention of conspiracy theories set this post in motion.

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The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Following a data debacle, the blogging platform ceases to exist and the domain name is now up for sale. All this unfolded over the last 2 weeks when the ‘main database’ that held all key information (including the labor of love of many bloggers) was wiped out after it was unrecoverably written over – ostensibly by a disgruntled IT administrator. Techcrunch has the details.

Oh, and they hadn’t backed up their main (SQL Server) database – and they’ve been around for 6 years!!!

Reading about the Journalspace debacle brought back memories of a similar story I’d read about 2 years ago. I revisited that today and, very interestingly, found out that a data disaster can sometimes be a good thing – as Couchsurfing found out, much to its delight…

From Wikipedia’s entry on them: The CouchSurfing Project is a free, Internet-based, international hospitality service, and it is currently the largest hospitality exchange network. The project was commenced in 2003 and formally launched on Jan 1, 2004.

Their member growth (also from Wikipedia):

End of 2004: 6,000 members
End of 2005: 45,000 members
October 2008: 780,000 members

So what happened between 2005 & 2008, that drove such spectacular growth?

Nothing much! They lost their main database (MySQL Server this time) in June 2006…and no prizes for guessing – they hadn’t appropriately backed it up!

Due to the volume of critical data that had been lost, Couchsurfing’s founder, Casey Fenton was of the opinion that the project could not be resurrected and on June 29, 2006 he issued an email to the membership announcing that “It is with a heavy heart that I face the truth of this situation. CouchSurfing as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore.”

Then something interesting happened…

Fenton’s email was met with vocal opposition to the termination of the project and considerable support for its recreation.

“CouchSurfing 2.0″ was announced early in July 2006, with the intent to be operational within 10 days. The initial implementation of CouchSurfing 2.0 actually launched after only four days.

Since the relaunch the project received a lot of international media coverage, and grew to reach over 780,000 members

Couchsurfing even has a page dedicated to their Phoenix-esque ‘rising up from the ashes’ story.

Though it worked out well for Couchsurfing (primarily since their data could be largely recreated), not backing up your primary data (especially when your whole company is built around it) is foolish, by any yardstick!

Don’t hope for a happy ending like Couchsurfing; backup your data today (all service providers reading this – please do ensure that you don’t forget to back yourselves up)!

Shameless plug: StoreGrid backs up SQL Server, MySQL, and lots lots more!

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.