My PriceLine Review

Sure PriceLine, I'll click through your review of the Grand Hyatt I stayed at in SF last week.  I'll even spend 5 minutes giving you honest feedback.  But then you got a little snippy with me, didn't you?  You told me to write a review.  Well ok, here are my thoughts:

The Grand Hyatt is a perfectly adequate go-to hotel for business travelers that need easy access to the city.  Outfitted with the latest furniture from the 80's, you'll feel like the lead singer of The Scorpions as you walk the halls of this awesomely dated hotel.  Be sure to say hi to Dee Snyder for me too.

Google App Platform

As a rabid technophile, and systems/information architect I welcome our new Google App overlords and look forward to consuming their new App Platform. But then again, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve been drinking the software-as-a-service Kool-Aid for quite some time. But just because the brain-trust that is Google is providing a platform doesn’t solve every underlying problem.

Stacey Higginbotham on Gigaom postulates:

“It could also cause problems for startups such as online storage company ElephantDrive”

But the truth of the matter is that the exact opposite is true. At ElephantDrive we have created systems and infrastructure to provide global access to a secure, archival-grade version of your data, no matter what device you created it on. That means we encapsulate: encryption; file differentiation; global de-duplication; access logic with credentials; and an entire sharing platform. Google’s platform doesn’t displace us, it just gives us one more potential bucket to use as underlying storage for our product - our infrastructure is still the most relevant and necessary piece of the puzzle. But then again, I’m clearly biased. :)

And we support files larger than 1MB already. Hooray! :D

More:
ElephantDrive Blog
Jose Miguel Cansado at Tech-Talk Biz
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb