Talk about a non-starter.
Back in April of last year HP decided to reinvent the online storage wheel by introducing their own backup service, named HP Upline. It came. It never quite got off the ground. And now, it’s officially joining the deadpool.
Just in case there is anyone out there who actually put data on Upline and didn’t get the email from HP announcing its departure, it says in part:
HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.
HP will no longer be backing up your files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for you to download any files you have backed up to Upline.
If you have a paid subscription to HP Upline, you will be refunded the full amount of the fees you paid for the service. That refund will be credited to the credit card account or PayPal account that you used to subscribe to the Upline service. If you do not receive the refund prior to March 31, 2009, please contact our customer service team at https://www.upline.com/support/email.aspx.
HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future.
We’ve been worried about GrandCentral for a while now. The free service that promised “one number for life” started with such promise. And then Google bought the company and the technology way back in July 2007…and they left it to rot. No new invites. Existing users have seen the service languish in maintenance mode since the acquisition. No updates. No new features or improvements. No word from the developers. Shame.
This morning, those of us still using a GrandCentral number are logging in to our accounts to see this:
An expired SSL certificate is not a big deal. Just accept the expired certificate because you trust the site and move on. But that’s not the point. It’s yet more evidence that if the GrandCentral folks are still at Google, they’re working on something else. The GrandCentral support forum is filled with questions and problems, and there has been no official answer to anything.
The challenge for those of us left behind is number portability, or lack thereof. I like my GrandCentral number. It’s easy to remember. It’s in the area code I want it to be. I would gladly use another reasonably-priced service if I could take the number with me (I do use PhoneFusion for my local contacts). Yes, GrandCentral has always been “beta” and was never meant to be used for mission-critical contacts. But it’s a little difficult to “test” a service like GrandCentral without giving the number out to contacts, isn’t it?
It’s about time for Google to do the right thing. Shut GrandCentral down once and for all, and give us a way to port our numbers elsewhere.
As we covered last week, free services I Want Sandy and Stikkit are closing shortly, joining a growing list of Web 2.0 free-to-consumer startups that have shuttered their sites. It’s not just the little guys that are going out of business, either: Google Lively is set to become the latest failed experiment from the search behemoth later this year.
While just a few data points don’t make up a trend, it does seem likely that we haven’t seen the last closures. Services start up in a burst of optimism, then hit the cold hard wall of needing to pay for servers and bandwidth. The tightening of venture capital and the decline of online advertising have been covered elsewhere: other factors that will make it tough for free eternal-beta Web 2.0 startups to stay in business. But how is the savvy web worker to cope?
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This is the risk of falling in love with free services. We’ve written positively about I Want Sandy and Stikkit in the past, two simple but effective productivity web apps. The company behind the apps, Values of n, has announced that both services will go offline for good on December 8.
This isn’t your typical “startup ran out of money” story. Rael Dornfest, the brains behind Values of n, accepted a fulltime job with Twitter. Rather than pass the web apps on to someone else or keep them going under Twitter’s roof, the services will just go away, leaving their user base high and dry.
While I’m happy for Mr. Dornfest and I’m looking forward to seeing how Twitter improves with the infusion of his technology and expertise, this should serve as another wake-up call to all who rely on free services by small companies. Often labors of love built during off hours, there’s nothing to stop developers from moving in other directions on short notice.
Did you use I Want Sandy or Stikkit? How will you replace these services in your life? Read further analysis on GigaOm.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
