
Google Acquires Odysee - enigami
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/08/google-odysee/
======
salberts
When I considered starting my own company in the photo sharing/storage I did
some research of the field. Ignoring the my business related conclusions,
there is one thing I learned as a consumer:

\-- You shouldn't trust your photos with these companies --

People store photos to last for long long time while most of these companies'
lifespan is much shorter. The best outcome would be spending time, money and
nerves on porting data from place to place.

I hate saying this but I'd go with established companies that either have a
sustainable business model around photos/storage (Amazon, Dropbox, Apple) or
have deep enough pockets to make up for it (Microsoft, Google). I probably
forgot some but you get the idea.

~~~
Mahn
Personally I find a couple of hard drives in raid at home the most reliable
photo backup strategy. It doesn't protect them from natural disasters, but
these are much less likely than a cloud service being bought/sunsetted. I can
not even trust Google Photos because since it's not Google's core product I
have to assume they can decide to discontinue it overnight any time.

~~~
salberts
It could be a good solution but for me the overhead is too high and it lacks
many of the benefits of having the data in the cloud. + what happens when
there is a disaster, the insurance doesn't cover lost memories.

Specifically about Google, I agree that Google+ Photos (or however this is
called) is a strange beast. But it shares storage with Google Drive and in
fact Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos. So I use only Google
Drive folders for backup. I also believe that in case Google (or any other
company of that scale) chooses to shut down a major service it will give a
fair notice (don't forget it has business users as well). As for Apple,
Amazon, Dropbox, Box, MS... it seems like a core product.

~~~
tdkl
> But it shares storage with Google Drive

Not really.

> Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos

Only one way, read only. If you want to make changes like autoawesome or using
the editor, you need to copy the album to G+.

------
lnanek2
At this point, no photo storing company is reliable. It might actually be a
competitive advantage to form some sort of photo sharing company that has
legally committed to not letting a big guy buy them and shut down their
service like this. Of course, then you have the other side where they often
die due to lack of hosting funds. So you'd have to charge a lot and legally
require it be put into a fund that only pays for hosting or something. Tough
business problem, but wanting hosting is common and not wanting Google to come
blow the service away is becoming common too...

------
pgrote
Photo sharing is awesome and all, but what about photo organization and
backup? I'd like a service/program that takes my "gold" copy of my photos with
metadata off my external drive and keeps my albums on Picasa/\+ and Flickr in
sync.

Is there such a service/program that does this?

~~~
toomuchtodo
How much would you pay for such a service?

~~~
pgrote
Good question.

I have spent the last week trying to work through this issue.

What I came up with was gold copy on an external drive that I manipulate with
the Windows version of Picasa. I use it to add tags, geo info and clean up
pics. I enable the Sync to Web feature, which keeps Google+/Picasa Web up to
date.

To ensure the copy on Flickr is up to date I registered a program called
PhotoSync for Flickr that watches folders for changes and uploads pics. This
is still a manual process to set up for the most part since it requires a
clean sync; I have to delete all Flickr albums and reupload.

I thought I had the solution with PICBACKMAN, which costs $49 a year. It
didn't handle the meta data for the photos when syncing with Google+/Picasa
Web nor did it dedupe when uploading an album. For instance, I add a new pic
to a folder it would upload all the other pics again.

So, to answer your question. My photos are very important to me and I have
spent a great deal of time scanning pre-digital ones into the archive. I'd pay
$100 a year to ensure my gold copy was synced among services with all meta
data included.

------
rtpg
>Like other many other apps, Odysee was built around a freemium model: free
for the first year, and then $5/year thereafter. The founders had at one point
estimated that they could keep the business sustainable if they reached 3
million users.

How hard would it be to get 3 million people to sign up for something at $5 a
year? I imagine that at that point you might as well charge $5 a month or
something, since the fixed cost of getting a person to pull out their credit
card is so high

~~~
lookahead
Might as well make it 20 or 50 per month. Or, scrap the idea of trying to get
3 million at 5/year (after a year's cliff, which is wishful thinking that your
app will even be relevant in the market of next year). Instead, get 2500 at
500 in a slice of the market that's actually willing to pay for value (like
enterprise). Cut your expenditures to a third by shedding the people who don't
live and breathe this thing and you only need a thousand customers to be
sustainable. That's within the ballpark of sanity. But no. Instead it's
"freemium".

Honestly, these days when I hear "freemium" I mentally translate it to
"aquihire resume with a lottery ticket". Not that there's anything wrong with
that.

------
pearjuice
At this point it's just a matter of time before exposure.co gets acquired. I
thought photo sharing and the like services were out of fashion but they are
still being bought up in bushes. There's really a monopoly battle going on for
the final answer to the question "Where will I store my photos, online?".

~~~
webwanderings
On 1TB external USB drive. I gave up on all online services when I moved to
new computer. Sure it is not convenient, but I dont have to worry about my
relationship to any online service anymore. It is all local, all near.

~~~
andyidsinga
you might consider storing in amazon s3 ..its highly durable and cheap and
wont suffer from local hdd failure. it probably wont be sold in the near
future.

~~~
hrktb
For the sake of completion, do both. A NAS box with a S3 or Glacier backup
routine will do it.

Now, I'm on the cheap side, but I find AWS expensive compared to other backup
services like backblaze. Perhaps it's the backup services that are overly
cheap, I don't know, but I'd love to have a cheaper service available for
backing up from a NAS (backblaze seems to be pain to setup on a NAS). I'd be
OK with major inconvenience on retreaval, as long as it's cheap to backup.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Now, I'm on the cheap side, but I find AWS expensive compared to other
> backup services like backblaze. Perhaps it's the backup services that are
> overly cheap, I don't know, but I'd love to have a cheaper service available
> for backing up from a NAS (backblaze seems to be pain to setup on a NAS).
> I'd be OK with major inconvenience on retreaval, as long as it's cheap to
> backup.

Glacier is $10/month for 1TB. For highly durable long-term storage, that is
stupid cheap.

~~~
hrktb
For reference, Backblaze is half that price for unlimited data.

------
amirmc
I'm happy for the team but somewhat sad for the users. I wonder why they sold
so quick? Google is the antithesis of using edge devices to their maximal
advantage, and this was clearly not a product acquisition.

------
inglor
It is very annoying when a startup gets bought like this and shuts down its
service in a matter of weeks. If all my photos were there and they'd just down
I'd be very annoyed.

I get that they don't care about public opinion now - but it's still very
frustrating when this sort of thing happens. It wouldn't kill them to stay
open and close registration and then offer automatic migration to the service
once it's integrated into Google - the user base gets preserved this way which
is another win.

------
rasz_pl
>Private Photo/Video Backup

I always backup my private anal wards photos to the cloud ... Damn Im old, I
just cant understand new generation :(

