The product isn't solar panels, it's energy. With a huge fleet of electric cars needing to be charged in major metros, where is the electricity coming from?
What if you also have a massive deployment of solar panels on top of existing real estate, that you essentially don't have to pay rent for?
When Teslas are autonomous, and owners are using them to make money by giving other people rides. How are these cars getting charged? And that energy doesn't come for free. Tesla will have their hand in every piece of transportation.
We run mobile apps in the cloud (virtualized) so you could use them without first downloading the binaries. Help us change how people create and distribute mobile apps.
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Even though cloud storage is getting cheaper, it's still not as cheap as off of the shelf hard drives (yet). But then again, you can't access your hard drive from anywhere, and it's not stored at geographically different locations.
Then when it comes to your mobile devices, sometimes it's not possible to add additional capacity. You are paying for something different than a hard drive. Cloud storage will get cheaper, just as the harddrives have
Well, a data center using lots of drives can probably use more of the space on them. It wouldn't be unusual for an individual person only to fill up 1/10 of his hard drive. It would be less common for a data center to have 10x overcapacity.
If they wanted to be really clever, they could also analyze the data when it's uploaded and encode it in a less redundant way... for instance, it's quite likely that large numbers of people will have very similar mp3 files... if you could figure out that 99% of a certain file is exactly identical to 99% of another file, why store that data twice?
But, that gets very complicated... you're just shifting the hard drive costs into developer and cpu costs... so it may not be economical.
Clouds must markup. They can't charge the same prices or they are merely covering hardware expenses, which doesn't cover personnel expenses, let alone profit.
Fortunately you can get some premium value out of that markup that is way more expensive to set up yourself. (In particular multiple backup sites.) But the cheapest storage solution absent all other concerns will always be simple local storage.
Other than the usability differences, the underlying technology is significantly different. ZumoDrive uses its own file system layer instead of WebDAV(what most drive services use). What this means for the user is that the drive is a lot faster to access, and it supports things like streaming & random access of files.
David with ZumoDrive here. I hate bandwidth caps as much as you do. But without this provision, we won't have a way to stop the guy that's distributing pirated ISOs via the service. This is really so that we, and indirectly our users, don't have to continue to pay for that. Other than that, we have no intention from you using the service, so feel free to stream away :)
Then you should look at whether you advertise it as "unlimited". It could look like mis-selling and I think the service looks good so you should possibly look at this
EDIT: I'd like to just say that I've downloaded and am using the app and its lovely. Really well done. Regarding the bandwidth usage, I think you should still be able to come up with something that is representative rather than what you are currently using. Hosting companies have done it for many years, so just come up with a bandwidth figure per Gb that you are happy with
If you want to be able to pull accounts that are doing illegal things, why don't you just say "we can pull your account if you're doing illegal things"? You would even get the ISO pirates who keep their bandwidth usage in line with the herd that way. Is this some kind of common-carrier thing?
Yeah - I think there is going to be a natural wariness as people get used to using cloud services. This kind of clause is only going to make people nervous.
I mean, look at it like this. I have a bunch of legitamite but highly used content. I throw it up on this, knowing that amazon's s3 service can serve it far easier than I can.
And it uses one hell of a lot of gigabytes. Hundreds of 'em. A week.
What if you also have a massive deployment of solar panels on top of existing real estate, that you essentially don't have to pay rent for?
When Teslas are autonomous, and owners are using them to make money by giving other people rides. How are these cars getting charged? And that energy doesn't come for free. Tesla will have their hand in every piece of transportation.