transparency

Last week, in the midst of the hellish torrential downpours that were gracing the east coast, I experienced a severe form of umbrella envy. My umbrella = red, cost me two dollars, purchased hastily in a metro station in DC a few minutes before a job interview. Four other people’s umbrellas = large, dome-shaped, clear plastic bubbles that enabled them to stay dry and see what was coming towards them down the sidewalk.

Transparency is key, I think, in feeling secure about most endeavors, be it data storage, or, navigating a flooded storm drain on a crowded city street. Several of the comments posted about this article that’s hanging out over at Techcrunch highlight the need or desire for transparency where business and data are concerned. People seem to be voicing concerns about being able to understand precisely how their data is going to be stored, and where–information that I’ve always found readily available at ElephantDrive.

It’s great to have tools that “just work”, that are swift, reliable, and affordable. But it’s also fantastic to understand how they really work, and to not have to place blind faith in a system whose inner workings are somewhat of a mystery.

Little. Yellow. Different.

Okay, so, ElephantDrive isn’t yellow, and it’s definitely not Nuprin, but, this article over at Techcrunch today manages to highlight its strengths, even as it sings the prasies of Amazon. The BusinessWeek article that is quoted in this post talks about Amazon’s “binge” on new technologies from the perspective of company profits, but, the binge is also key in terms of thinking about the ways in which a startup can benefit you, the consumer.

ElephantDrive has been able to leverage the brand and the infrastructure of a large, trusted company, without losing focus on their original desire: to provide the best, most user-friendly, secure, online data storage possible. Amazon’s recent glut of spending on diversified technologies, even as it leads to innovations, also necessarily means that not every single feature provided by the corporation can be its top priority–whereas a startup, like ElephantDrive, can afford to be single-mindedly obsessed with you, your data, and how they can best protect it. Sure, they can’t find me a rare Interpol album at two a.m., or ship me a four-pack of Teff grains from Ethiopia, but, they can be the company I trust to be just as concerned with my data as I am.

Fish in the Press

Michael Fisher was recently quoted in this article in Processor Magazine!