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Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.
Jeff Howe, Jun 2006

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

Looking to harness the power of your crowd? Find out about Chaordix™ - technology that enables enterprises to get the most out of crowdsourcing.

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Umbrella Backup: ubiquitous backup for web 2.0 apps

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Not freeish. Not freesque. It's free!

The Idea

Problem: as SaaS becomes more popular and people start to store more of their irreplaceable data on external services they become more vulnerable to outages, and worse yet, company failures. Solution: Umbrellabackup.com to the rescue- an online personal secure data storage that has hooks into various "web 2.0" (cringe, i hate that term) applications. All your del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, amazon wishlist items, blinksale invoices, salesforce contacts, basecamp data and blogline feeds are backed up daily to give you one central place where you can know that your critical items reside.

I thought of this idea when I was...

We came up with this concept at Grid7 Labs while contemplating all the services that we have come to rely upon as a startup utilizing hosted solutions. My partner built a personal data store product called Syncato that stores things in very cool way in a native-XML database and we thought this would be a very useful app that people would buy to be assured that they had all their data stored centrally rather than strewn around a bunch of different companies that could go away tomorrow.


Comments Posted

Kevin_Cox
Kevin_Cox Posted: October 14, 2006, 5:40 pm

First why would I want some one to know all of my personal info on the internet in one place.

Next, why not just store them on the computer I all ready have or a remote host?

scrollinondubs
scrollinondubs Posted: October 14, 2006, 8:54 pm

Kevin,

because unless you know how to write a script to go out to each service and grab that data on a periodic basis, it's going to require a manual intervention on your part to export the data from each and store it on your personal machine. As far as "why centralize all your data"- because I want to have all my stuff aggregated and stored in one place. Businesses go away. Companies decide to charge for previously free services and hold your data hostage. I hear you on the trust issue and the system would have to be extremely secure as it could become an achilles heel for peoples' accounts on a lot of different services.
Bottomline though- this is something I WANT because I've had Basecamp and Bloglines and Gmail go down before and been unable to access my todo's and contacts and feeds. I keep my reading list on Amazon's wishlist service and that's the only place it exists- i received an error message the other day indicating that my account was innaccessible and I realized that there are 200 books on there that I've accrued over time and I wouldn't know where to begin to rebuild that list. I see this problem worsening over time with the trend towards reliance upon SaaS for many people.

thanks for your feedback and sorry you don't see the value in this type of service.

sean

techguy
techguy Posted: October 14, 2006, 11:10 pm

I'm still on the fence for this. I think the biggest problem is the revenue model. I'm not sure that many people would really want to pay for a service like this. As a business person you would be willing to pay, but I'm not sure the market of business people is enough.

Could you integrate this with tutorials, vidoes, etc that would teach a business why they should use these different products? So, when they started using some of these products they see the need to have it backed up?

 

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