A tipster informed us today that online storage solution Omnidrive has been having technical difficulties; and that the CTO has just left the company. Omnidrive's forums, both the official one and the Tangler one, are filled with messages complaining that the service is up and down - messages which the company doesn't appear to be responding to. The last post on the company's blog is dated August 31st and is entitled 'All technical difficulties have been resolved!'. There's also no recent postings on CEO Nik Cubrilovic's blog.
As we wrote in August, the online storage space is very crowded - and there are a few monster players in the form of Microsoft, Google and Amazon. But Omnidrive was doing some great work in the space, driving for open standards and partnering with other Web Office companies like Zoho.
We've put in an email to Nik to clarify. I know him personally and it would be very sad if Omnidrive fell into the deadpool, particularly given the recent 'deaths' of Blognation and edgeio - two other web 2.0 startup collapses. As of now we're not ready to call Omnidrive in the deadpool, but there seem to be major issues with the site judging by the forums.
UPDATE: Nik Cubrilovic has replied in the comments and via email. He says:
"Omnidrive is profitable at the moment, and we actually knocked back a round of financing recently (we will likely raise a round in the new year)
Our new 1.0 release, which we have been working on for a while now, will be out by the end of the year.
So while some might view not responding to forum posts and/or posting on our blog as a sign of being dead, it is just because we are so overloaded at the moment and have a lot to work on."
UPDATE 2: Ex-CTO Phil Morle responds in the comments:
"...as far as I know there is no one working at Omnidrive today. No one is supporting the customers. No one is developing version 1.0. The Wollongong and Sydney offices have been vacated."
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