ZumoDrive is going to change EVERYTHING

That Michael Arrington! The man, I’m told, is a machine. A veritable machine. And it’s delivered yet again — in the form of ZumoDrive.

Michael introduced them this afternoon in his TechCrunch post.

Here’s some of what he had to say:

Newcomer Zumodrive, from Y Combinator startup Zecter, enters this space with an interesting twist. Like other syncing services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But instead of syncing those files with all of your other devices, Zumodrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

That’s not such a big deal when in comes to PC-to-PC syncing where hard drive storage isn’t an issue. But I have far more music files than will fit on even my laptop. Zumodrive lets me access them (even via iTunes) in a way that makes them appear local. And when it comes to netbooks and mobile devices with very limited hard drive space, Zumodrive is a Godsend. It just appears to make your hard drive limitless in size.

That’s it then.

We’re done.

There’s a nice clear dividing line between the old world and the new world.

This kind of service, in itself — storage/synchronisation — isn’t new. I’ve been a DropBox subscriber since they launched and a user of all manner of online storage services for years.

The FUNDAMENTAL problem is that I want everything in The Cloud. Everything.

I don’t want to mess around with personal storage. Personal storage on-device is like buying your own power station for your house. Anyone who carries round their data WITH them is living in the wrong century. The future is the cloud. When I need the data, I want it available immediately. I don’t want to sod about managing the memories of my mobile handset, desktop machine, home media server and so on. Stick it up in the cloud, give me lightning fast access to my data — and cache my most used files locally for efficiency.

I’ve been trying to do this for a while. I’m a big user of Amazon’s S3 storage. I have about 50 gig there. Accessing it is a bit of a pain, despite the JungleDisk system I use. The moment I click on a file, I’m punished while the operating system waits as the 73mb sound file has to download before I can do anything with it.

I’ve got another 30gb on DropBox. And recently I discovered how stupid that was when I opened up my Mac Air and found it had 15mb of memory left — because it synced every single file from DropBox overnight.

Last week I bought two iTunes albums. And that took me 100mb over the limit for my iPod. Now I have to choose what data I want to take with me. And that is highly unacceptable. The same way it takes 100 clicks to do anything on a Nokia handset. (Ok, so I am exaggerating that a little, Symbian fans).

But that brings me to Nokia. To the ‘old’ devices. To the ‘old Europe’ of the mobile world. Nokia, Sony, LG and to a large extent, Samsung. There’s your writing. That’s it — right there on the wall.

We’re going to the cloud and ZumoDrive is the first to actually point the way.

For $60 a month, you can store 200gb on ZumoDrive. You can stick your whole iTunes album into it, for example, and access it from whatever machine or device you’re using.

Uh oh — we’ve almost found ourselves into next generation territory! If I can use ZumoDrive to browse, send, look at and play/view any of my files on my iPhone 3G, now you’re kicking. I’m not sure if this will work yet. I’m going to give it a go and see.

There’s issues with the whole cloud thing, certainly. Especially when you live in the United Kingdom provinces and have an 8mb broadband connection that actually delivers about 35k/sec down and a similar rate up. That’s not *quite* going to be that useful with ZumoDrive at the moment. And yes, the reputed 7mbps ‘in the lab’ mobile broadband speeds offered by the operators here in the UK isn’t quite anywhere near the sort of throughput that you’d ideally want — and my measurement is being able to sit on the train and say to yourself, ‘Right, let’s watch a bit of that Batman movie with Heath Ledger in it. Now.’

I won’t be satisfied until I can flick open my device, find the movie in 3 seconds and have it start playing in HD quality (on a, granted, small screen) within 10 seconds. I think 10 seconds is a suitable amount of time to allow. Right now, what are the chances of this being successful? Limited.

But we’re getting there. And services like ZumoDrive are the way ahead. It’s the file spoofing that makes the leap for ZumoDrive. The ability to ‘have’ 200gb of files accessible without actually storing them directly and fully in your device memory.

The implications for the development of the mobile industry are very, very exciting. But game changing. If you think (as I do) that ShoZu, for example, is a good thing — i.e. getting data OFF your phone — how are we going to react when EVERYTHING we create, video, pictures, audio, whatever — is stored and immediately accessible from whatever device we want. Your television, your phone, your laptop, your fridge, your wifi photoframe, your HD digital camera. Screw being limited by physical memory. Screw tapes. Screw the wire.

Right. Having said that, let’s have a butchers, (translation: ‘a butchers’ = ‘a look’) at the install of ZumoDrive.

After install, here’s the first screen.

How big would you like your ZumoDrive to be?

I went straight to the bottom of the list and selected 200gb for $60. Then it asked for my card details right away and I panicked

So I selected 1gb to begin with. Free. Ok account created.

Then, yeah, this is fairly standard stuff – I need to name my computer.

And here’s the explanation of ZumoDrive and the benefits.

And a further illustration.

Nice.

Ok, that’s it all installed. I decided just to ‘finish’. I’ll try it out on the iPhone and other machines soon. Note you can get it on a PC as well as a Mac.

I opened up the ZumoDrive, found a presentation hanging around on my desktop and dragged it over.

Then I opened up the ZumoDrive control panel and had a look. There we go — that’s it loading mobile.ppt up to the cloud.

Brilliant.

I had a click through the various settings. My mouth dropped open at this option though:

RIGHT on. YES please. BRILLIANT.

iTunes ‘synching’. Now, if I can access ANY of my music from my iPhone,… geez that would be really cool.

Right now I’m not entirely sure if this is supported yet. If it is, genius. If not, I’m sure it’ll be coming.

Get yourself over to ZumoDrive if time permits and grab a copy. Let me know what you think. You’ll need Michael’s promo code — ireadtc2 — but you better be quick as I’m sure they’ll be gone in minutes.

More on ZumoDrive soon.

Update: Can’t check out the iPhone application yet as beta invites for that have now closed. But I can tell you they’re also working on an Android app. YES please.

Update 2: The ZumoDrive chaps are sending me a copy of the iPhone app. Plus read Mike’s story now in the Washington Post.

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• Andy

  It even works with MAC OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard Latest Server/Desktop OS. 10A222
  low cpu usage, generally speaking a well behaved client. VERY GOOD.

  A.

• John Smith

  Fuck the cloud. Extremely stupid idea of assuming the entire planet just can not be bothered with their own data (nor the security thereof).
  As always there will be some who think they 'need' this.
  I hope this whole cloud bs just goes away.
  Logistically speaking it will never be anything but a waste of money.

• www.mobileindustryreview.com Ewan @ MIR

  Ahhh brilliant! An unbeliever! Great — let's have some discussion.

  John, the privacy policy that we work here at MIR prohibits me from revealing your identity. I'm not going to do that — in fact I don't know who you are. But what I would like to point out is that you left a gmail address when you posted your comment above.

  And Gmail is the cloud. So I find it strange that — logistically speaking, if you consider it to be a total waste of money, 'bs' and, I presume, a total waste of effort — what are you doing with a Gmail account?

  I *trust* that all the email from your Gmail is downloaded immediately to your desktop computer and stored ONLY there. I further trust that you never, ever login to Gmail online — in the cloud — because that would be 'bs', wouldn't it? It'd be 'stupid'. If you want to access your email, you'll do it on YOUR computer, right? Download it and keep it there.

  Now, if you're using a mobile device for your email, I further trust that you don't ever use a Blackberry with Exchange — as that's dangerously like the cloud. You want to keep your email on YOUR machine. For security. I hope that you manually sync the email from your desktop machine to your mobile handset — and that you never actually use an email client to check your mail online. As that'd be in the cloud too.

  It's not right for every person and for every application — but we're already there John.

• www.mobileindustryreview.com Ewan @ MIR

  Agreed Andy!

• John Smith

  Fuck the cloud. Extremely stupid idea of assuming the entire planet just can not be bothered with their own data (nor the security thereof).
  As always there will be some who think they 'need' this.
  I hope this whole cloud bs just goes away.
  Logistically speaking it will never be anything but a waste of money.

• www.mobileindustryreview.com Ewan @ MIR

  Ahhh brilliant! An unbeliever! Great — let's have some discussion.

  John, the privacy policy that we work here at MIR prohibits me from revealing your identity. I'm not going to do that — in fact I don't know who you are. But what I would like to point out is that you left a gmail address when you posted your comment above.

  And Gmail is the cloud. So I find it strange that — logistically speaking, if you consider it to be a total waste of money, 'bs' and, I presume, a total waste of effort — what are you doing with a Gmail account?

  I *trust* that all the email from your Gmail is downloaded immediately to your desktop computer and stored ONLY there. I further trust that you never, ever login to Gmail online — in the cloud — because that would be 'bs', wouldn't it? It'd be 'stupid'. If you want to access your email, you'll do it on YOUR computer, right? Download it and keep it there.

  Now, if you're using a mobile device for your email, I further trust that you don't ever use a Blackberry with Exchange — as that's dangerously like the cloud. You want to keep your email on YOUR machine. For security. I hope that you manually sync the email from your desktop machine to your mobile handset — and that you never actually use an email client to check your mail online. As that'd be in the cloud too.

  It's not right for every person and for every application — but we're already there John.

• www.mobileindustryreview.com Ewan @ MIR

  Agreed Andy!

• pji

  I've been doing this using a sftp server and sftpdrive/expandrive since the late 90s. Funny how finally catching up to the turn of the century is game changing…

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• Andi

  You don't need all that. You just install your own server and connect it as Volume via SSHFS (MacFusion). It's really easy and my server has 300 Gigs – enough for all my data. “Cloud” is a buzzword

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• www.steves71.com Steves71

  Just managed to get an invite to try it out, only been playing with it for a short while but my early impression is mixed. It is clean and simple to use but the pricing for what is essentially just online backup puts me off a bit especially as it's still beta. I've recently been trying out sugarsync which will keep any selected folders on your computer in sync with ones on the cloud as well as having a section that can just be used as online storage, and its about half the price for a large storage package, plus the iphone app is prety slick.

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• pji

  I've been doing this using a sftp server and sftpdrive/expandrive since the late 90s. Funny how finally catching up to the turn of the century is game changing…

• Andi

  You don't need all that. You just install your own server and connect it as Volume via SSHFS (MacFusion). It's really easy and my server has 300 Gigs – enough for all my data. “Cloud” is a buzzword

• MarkW

  I'd say it's horses for courses. I've got a ZumoDrive account, but I actually prefer Dropbox, precisely because it *does* create copies on each of my three machines without me having to do anything. I don't live in a metropolis where you can guarantee mobile data pretty much anytime. Sometimes I'm with a client with offices in the middle of beautiful countryside, which suits me, but I can't always get HSPDA or even 3G. With this in mind, I don't find ZumoDrive particularly inspiring or a huge advance, though I have nothing against the cloud approach.

• MarkW

  I'd say it's horses for courses. I've got a ZumoDrive account, but I actually prefer Dropbox, precisely because it *does* create copies on each of my three machines without me having to do anything. I don't live in a metropolis where you can guarantee mobile data pretty much anytime. Sometimes I'm with a client with offices in the middle of beautiful countryside, which suits me, but I can't always get HSPDA or even 3G. With this in mind, I don't find ZumoDrive particularly inspiring or a huge advance, though I have nothing against the cloud approach.

• www.steves71.com Steves71

  @Andi and pji I’m not knocking what you say but if you said

  “I’ve been doing this using a sftp server and sftpdrive/expandrive” or “You just install your own server and connect it as Volume via SSHFS (MacFusion). It’s really easy”

  to most people they wouldnt have a clue what you were on about. Online storage solutions like this are for the masses, it makes it quick and simple. Even those with the technical knowledge to do it themselves might prefere a solution like zumodrive, sugarsync box.net etc becasuse it’s hassle free. You go away on a business trip, try to access the server back home and find out it’s gone down, you’re screwed until you get back. With most onlin