Digital Storage in olden days

In the good old days, we had floppies, the CDs, then re-writable CDs, then DVDs, not to mention the pen drives for file storage. All was going well, when somebody suddenly woke up and said:

1) Gosh, what if there was a natural or a man-made disaster? Won’t I lose all my data?

2) Can’t somebody steal my data if they are in a moveable storage device?

From Drum Memories to Flash Memory pen drives (see infographic below for complete history of memory devices) these were the only two questions bothering the end consumer.

A few years down the line, thanks to a human being’s ability to stress himself out, came the problem of mobility & abundance. Earlier, people were struggling to buy one desktop for home, now they had a laptop, a tablet and a smartphone as well….which meant one could be using more than one device. This gave raise to one more question:

3) OMG, what if I needed that specific file but I wasn’t carrying it with me?

That’s when the need for the storage to be universally accessible cropped up. Multiple devices meant an extension of universal accessibility – now besides being accessible, they also needed to be synced with each other. And Auto sync between the devices & the cloud in today’s form was born.

Mind you here I am talking about end users and not corporates, which have various other reasons as well for using cloud storage.

When Skydrive was launched in 2007, I remember laughing at it.

My reasons for doubting the business of cloud storage in 2007

1) As an individual, during a natural disaster I am more worried about myself and my family than my data

2) As an individual, loss of all of the data that I have is manageable. It will be a problem, but I won’t lose my life (unlike in the case of a corporate/business).

3) The concept of all-device accessibility hadn’t yet dawned on me or the others because there were no smartphones & tablets yet

4) Besides, cloud storage was a new concept – like insurance and Cord Blood Banking. And new concepts require a lot of convincing & selling before they succeed.

The status of cloud storage in 2011/2012:

- In 2011, $830 million was spent on such file and back-up storage services. And in 2012 its expected to be $1.2 billion

- According to a May 2012 data, Apple’s iCloud garnered 125 Million subscribers within 6 months of launch

- Google Drive launched in February 2012 already has around 20 million users

- Dropbox has more than 50 million members who save one billion files every few days

- There are at least 50 cloud storage apps in iOS App Store and Android Marketplace each.

Now I am being forced to eat my own words – but not before I try and deliver my verdict on who will succeed.

My revised thoughts on cloud storage:

For long large organizations such as Netflix & Zynga etc have been relying on Cloud storage to manage and run their business. End users (or individuals) have also been getting proactive towards cloud storage in the last 2 years.

The cloud storage services these individuals (or mid-sized organizations) use could vary from among a huge list which would include players such as – Amazon S3, Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box.Net, JustCloud etc.

Now if you notice, there are two kinds/types of names in the list above. Lets break them up and see if you can spot a difference:

Type 1: Amazon S3, Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive
Type 2: DropBox, Box.Net, JustCloud

OK, here goes. Type 1 is the type of company that’s into Cloud Storage NOT for making money but to safe guard/further its core business. While for Type2, cloud storage is their core business.

The Type 1 companies can undercut, majorly discount their pricing to win this war whereas DropBox, Box.Net or JustCloud can’t. Type 1 companies already have a ready base of users to tap from – iCloud can be sold to 250 Million iPhone owners or numerous Mac owners while Microsoft’s SkyDrive can be pitched to all Windows PC users.

What also helps Type1 companies to shut out Type2 companies from the competition is the fact that in the case of Type1, the user doesn’t have the need to individually identify the items he wants in cloud storage – he can do a mass selection once and be done with it.

It would also be useless to argue that Type1 companies are restricting themselves to a particular OS/platform while Type2 companies such as Box.net and Dropbox are platform agnostic….because, all Type1 companies have realized that now and making amends. Try searching for SkyDrive in Android Marketplace, iOS App Store – and you shall see the proof.

To sum up, an exciting space to watch. Some heads and companies will tumble – the question is when.

This rule might be undergoing some serious changes, without us giving it any serious thought. Not just the rule, this whole business of content creation is heading for some troubled times.

According to this 90:9:1 rule, in any online community (PC or mobile) the percentage of users creating content would be only 1% while 9% of them would curate the content (that is, help the better content emerge on top by liking or commenting) and the rest (the 90%) will be the silent readers/consumers of the content.

With Social Networking almost saturating the population on the Internet (at last count this was almost half of the 2 billion users who are online), this 90:9:1 rule may be undergoing a change. For two reasons:

1) It is now much easier to be a content creator
2) Most often than not, the content created is only for a sub-set of users on the internet

How is it easier to be a content creator?

Back in those days, to be a content creator one had to write a full-fledged article, author a blog post, construct a review or perhaps provide an answer to a question on Yahoo Answers. This required good communication skills and even better knowledge on the subject being discussed. Not anymore.

A 140 character tweet, a 300 character Facebook status update qualifies me as a content creator now. Not to mention the ability to ‘Retweet’ on Twitter or ‘Share’ on Facebook – such features which enable users to re-purpose content require no communication skills and knowledge on the subject. In fact, this has resulted in the redefinition of the participant called ‘content creator.’

Besides, earlier the format of content creation was text – a difficult ask. Now they can also be photos or videos etc, which are much easier. All you need is a camera phone.

How is the content created for a subset of the Internet?

Soon Facebook will have one billion users – that’s 1 out of every seven person on this Earth and 1 out of every 2 person using the Internet. This growth could stagnate but I don’t see this usage going down (considering so much of lifetime investment already done by FB users, over the years).

It would be fair to assume that around half of all unique content creators that create content on Internet are on Facebook….and considering Facebook’s high user engagement numbers, I would say a lot of content does get created – all of which is restricted to my friends alone (based on my privacy settings).
The problem is…the friends-only or friends-of-friends only restriction doesn’t make the content universally available.

This means, my 300 characters review of a resort called ‘Botanix Resort’ which I posted on FB isn’t searchable by the universe.

The long-term negative impact

Unfortunately, with the direction in which the user generated content is going….I feel soon they might not be useful for the rest of the internet in general and eCom in particular.

Reviews, Answers & Blog Posts are the user-generated content that have the power to convince a user to buy or rent a good or a service. Status updates or photographs are too shallow an endorsement to ensure adoption. And to top it, these status updates and photos uploaded are unsearchable for people outside my sub-set.

The short-term bandage

Good thing that I see happening with User Generated Content (be it within a Social network or outside of it), is that the Product Managers are trying to provide a layer of editorial smartness (for the lack of a better word). By editorial smartness, I mean they are writing algorithms to display the best content, they are moderating it to display the cleanest, etc.

Rajinikanth's Facebook page is open to the public and searchable for the whole universe

In fact, Facebook also tries to do it within its own confines when it says “Friend 1, & Friend 2 also commented on Rajinikanth”….and direct users to Facebook’s Rajinikanth’s page. And Facebook’s Rajinikanth’s page is searchable by the universe.

What are your thoughts? Am I making a big issue of nothing?

Facebook buys Instagram for $ 1 Billion?

What fools, I downloaded it for free!

In case you have been living under a stone for an year now… Instagram is a mobile-only photo-sharing application popular on the iPhone. After a year, they have launched on Android.

Maybe because of the speed at which it works (when compared to other photo apps)….within a short span Instagram reached 30 million users on iPhone itself – and let me assure you thats a good number against your resume. It is believed that there are a total of 350 million iOS users in the world – this means almost every tenth iPhone has Instagram installed in it.

Here is what Mark Zukerberg has to say about this acquisition: “This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users.”

And why not? Facebook is known to host around 150 Billion photos, even as we speak. Compare this with about 10 Billion on Flickr & Picasa individually – Facebook is way ahead. And because Flickr and Picasa aren’t as much of a social network as Facebook is…these pics don’t just rest on Facebook’s servers – they get downloaded to be viewed as well.

With such a strong photos presence, would Facebook have let one more Photos star emerge in the horizon? Especially since Instagram users were uploading 5 million photos per day.

I somehow feel this acquisition by Facebook is meant to kill Instagram and not use it.

Why do I feel that Facebook will kill Instagram? Because history suggests so. Digest this:

- Google acquired Aardvark for $50 million on February 11, 2010 and in September 2011 announced that it would be discontinued.

- Yahoo bought online video distribution and advertising platform provider Maven Networks for 160 million. To shut it down later.

- Picnik was acquired by Google, and is shutting down on 19 April 2012

- Facebook acquired Gowalla and then killed it. Gowalla’s engineers worked on Facebook checkins….but it really wasn’t the same

So do you agree? Have we seen the end of Instagram?