Dear Peter Forret,
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I just read the announcement today of a very strong data backup offer: backify.com lets you use 512GB of backup space for free. If you compare that to the competition: Dropbox and Mozy give you 2GB for free, OpenDrive, SugarSync and Box.net have a 5GB free account, although the latter has upped this to 50GB recently, when Apple also announced its 5GB free iCloud offering. Microsoft Live SkyDrive used to be the biggest free offer: 25GB (but no way to upgrade). So how can one company offer more than 20 times that space, and still not charge?

There are a couple of things that made me doubtful.

• Too good to be true: a previously unknown company (Google will try to correct a search on their name to Backupify, because the first mentioning of the company was yesterday) comes and offers you something HUGE for FREE. Hmmm. Where’s the catch?
• Business model doesn’t make sense: if you offer any John Doe 512 GB, you can count on a lot of data coming in. There will always be some guys that will try to use all of it. You need thousands of terabytes, and those don’t come for free. You could use Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure, but they will charge you $0.10 to $0.15 per month/GB. There is a freemium model for storage, but the sweet spot seems to be: anything above 5 – 25 GB should be paid for.
• No believable team: maybe this company has developed a new, revolutionary technology to make storage 10 times cheaper, but then they would show off their exceptional team. There would be a CTO or Chief Scientist with 30+ experience in data storage and some exotic patents in ‘redundant sub-particle holographic storage‘ or so. Here: nothing.
• Look and feel: their page looks like it was made with a standard template and cheap stock photography. Like they couldn’t afford a decent web agency.
• Empty company blog: that was a big red flag: they point to an empty blogspot as their ‘company blog’. This definitely smells like a scam.

So I started to dig deeper: what company is mentioned in the Terms & Conditions and the Privacy Statement? They talk about ‘Backify Internet Ltd’, but who knows if that company really exists. The address is interesting: it’s a Canadian one “Surrey, BC, Canada V3T 5L2″, that is shared with 2 other companies: AptiQuant and atCheap. AptiQuant has come in the news some months ago with the article “Is Internet Explorer For The Dumb?“. It was a hoax study (which was admitted afterwards), and the official explanation was that it was an effort “to create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE versions 6.0 to 8.0“. My thoughts: it was meant to drive traffic to the atCheap site, a comparison shopping site. Who is behind both companies? One person, Tarandeep Gill. And what was just added to that AptiQuant site? A link to Backify, free online backup. I checked the registration of the Backify domain: it’s the same guy. He registered the site in Feb 2009

So what does the Backify site actually offer? I downloaded the client, and here is the thing: it is not a ‘Backify’ client, it is a LiveDrive client (for Windows). LifeDrive is a UK company, started by ex-FastHosts people, notably founder Andrew Michael, who cashed £46mio or 72 mio $ when he sold his company. Also in the team (although non-executive) : Nicholas Cowell, brother of Simon ‘Idol’ Cowell, and a very rich UK real-estate entrepreneur. So these people do have cash, and, so it seems, a working product at pretty much the same prices as Backify is offering, except: they don’t have a 512GB for free offering, they only have a backup trial for 2 weeks! The Windows client works, you can upload files with it, and the files are actually stored at LiveDrive (I checked). The web interface doesn’t mention that I’m on a temporary plan. So LiveDrive seems to deliver.

So what is my hunch: Backify (or Tarandeep) is just a reseller for LiveDrive, he pays 60$/month to get a Backify rebranded white-label online backup service, and LiveDrive runs the actual service. Noteworthy: neither the Terms of Use or the Privacy Statement mention the Livedrive company or product. Is the ’512GB for free’ Backify offer actually the LiveDrive ‘Unlimited backup trial, free for 14 days‘, and so will it stop after 2 weeks? It’s either that, or Tarandeep has cut a better deal (“let me offer a crazy amount of storage for free forever“), which would be quite an accomplishment. Is it another stunt to drive traffic to atCheap (there are no links on the Backify site yet)? Is he branching out to a new niche? Time will tell. One thing is for sure: his press release has gotten huge coverage. And everyone seems to think Backify is a legit company.

TL;DR: Is “512GB for free forever” also for real? My gut feeling says: no. Don’t put all your eggs in that basket.

 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMnRatLfkCc[/youtube]

Rather suspicious, right? So I started checking some of them out:

Most of them were similar: very few updates (1-2), a lot of ‘Following’ and hardly any ‘Followers’. And, most importantly, a link to the same website in their profile: ‘the6figureteam.com’. This has all the looks of a spammer at work. The ’6 figure’ website is a promotion for a DIY kit to convert your car so it runs on water.

(in the small print you can read it’s actually water AND gas, not just water.)

The owner of the domain cannot be traced (Domains-by-proxy). But the site points to a redirection service, which is run by Clickbank:

Now we’re getting somewhere: Clickbank is a company from Boise, Idaho.

It also operates as Keynetics or Click Sales Inc. What they do is described in a lawsuit they got for ‘regular’ email spamming:

Apparently the company is quite big, they allow low-tech customers get money for referrals, which means a lot of people without scrupules will use it to let other suckers click on their links. Colleagues of theirs: Tradedoubler, CommissionJunction, Affili.net.

Who is to blame for the spam Twitter accounts? Clickbank just runs the technical redirection platform, Centemax (11K hits in Google all of them spam/landing pages) just set up a commision scheme for a ‘Run your car on water’ product, and the affiliates just used that scheme to try to make money. Capitalism at work, right?

SOLUTION: better detection

The best thing Twitter could do is enhance their detection:

• if a large number of new twitter accounts are created with the same URL in their profile: SPAM
• if they have almost no own updates, no followers, but they’re following 5000 other accounts: SPAM
• if the URL they refer to is a page full of ClickBank redirects: SPAM
• …

I’m getting old, I guess. This ad campaign annoys me. For those who don’t understand Dutch: if you take a Dodge Journey for a test-drive on the Father’s Day weekend, and make a baby on the back seat, then you have a chance of winning a car.

First off: it’s borderline immoral. There can be several reasons to have children, but winning a car shouldn’t be a motivation. Having children is quite a big thing. To make it into a gamble with a prize, feels wrong.

Secondly: the logistics. I can imagine they won’t require the couples to stay in the showroom with the car to perform the act, but where do you park? Side of the road? Public parking? In the garage at home? You’d need to live close enough to a garage. And what about the activities that happened in the car before you entered? What’s that smell? Is that a … on the backseat? OMG! Never mind, baby, we only have an hour, hurry! Close your eyes and think of off-road adventures.

And then the criterium for winning: the baby that’s closest to 8 March 2009 wins. I can imagine some future parents instructing their gynaecologist to have the birth on exactly that date. There’s a possibility for a 20K euro car, so if the baby has to come prematurely, then that’s just how it’s gotta be. And if you have 3 babies born on 8 March, that’s all equally ‘close’, right? Who will be chosen? The one that was born the closest to 12AM? (“Nurse, can, you change that hour of birth? Like one hour later, say 11.53AM?“)

For me this is a campaign thought out on the back of a napkin after a bit too much of alcohol. It should have stayed on that napkin.

Exhibit #1, May 2006:

Exhibit #2, August 2007:

Exhibit #3, May 2008:

A psychoanalyst would have hours of analysis pleasure on these beauties. The mammary image in the first picture clearly links forklift trucks (which is what they sell, by the way) to a homely feeling. There is also an element of surprise: forklifts can’t lift boobs?? Who would have thought? The second demonstrates your basic castration fear (Freud turns in his grave and shouts: “I thought of that one”) and the last one assures you that asian efficiency will be used to service … whatever (insert misogynist joke with ‘screw’ and ‘shaft’).

A look at TVH’s who’s-who indicates that the responsible person for the campaigns would be sales & marketing director L. Maertens. Keep excercising that innuendo muscle, Mr Maertens!

Test your dudeness, too. I’m an Estro Dude.

Here are all the commercials. I specifically like the Vegas one.

‘Look who’s talking’ meets ‘The Matrix’ meets ‘Chucky’: a funny spot for Wilkinson Quattro.

Responsables annonceur : Eric Oriot, Catherine Brandenberger et Stéphane Rosen
Responsables agence : Florent Sallard, Chloé Larmurier et Cyrine Boussena
Responsable innovation : Olivier Sebag
Directeur artistique : Xavier Beauregard
Concepteur rédacteur : Vincent Pedrocchi
TV Producer : Elisabeth Boitte
Réalisateur : Akama
Maison de production : Wanda
Production son: THE
Musique: midnight run / Xavier Berthelot

• Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
• Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
• Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.
• Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
• A good wife always knows her place.

Actually, this is probably a fake ad. One guy claims he found the actual Housekeeping Monthly article and posted a ‘scanned’ picture on Flickr too, but since it is an image copy (with identical underlining) of the images that circulate everywhere, it’s not really credible. Both Snopes and Wikipedia suspect that it’s a fake. I think it’s too much over the top too: “his topics of conversation are more important than yours”, “A good wife always knows her place”, that’s clearly written by a man to disturb women. Maybe someone at an advertising agency with too much free time on his hands?

Best soundtrack to this article: Daan’s Housewife

Equal Pay Day

This obviously is a trial to make a viral video. They’ve made some mistakes though:

• You can only personalize the movie for yourself, you cannot forward a copy personalized for a friend. That would have really made it viral.
• I fail to see why “Your wife is cheating on you” would make the subject want to buy a product/service, expect if it concerns lethal weapons or a private detective.
• The contrast between a movie that is trying to be cheeky and a company that is anything but cheeky – an institution that tries to sell you security services – makes it untrustworthy

Flash is to websites what airconditioning is to a car: you might call it luxury, you might call it indispensable, but you cannot call it a car. It’s just airco.

For some reason, people that have experience with creating Flash applications also think they can make websites. “Just throw some Javascript on the homepage and it plays beautifully”, right? Wrong! If you have never heard of proper markup, SEO, the limitations of Javascript and Flash, you should leave making websites to professionals. If you insist that your branding cannot be properly expressed with just HTML/CSS/Ajax, you can add a Flash object to your site. But on its own, it’s a sorry excuse for a website.

Case: Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles

Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles is a new brand of singlets (‘wifebeaters‘ in English, or ‘marcellekes’ in Bruxellois). The idea is good, the branding is beautiful, the advertising is top-notch (not surprisingly, since the founder is also one of the founders of the ad agency LG&F).

But then you take a look at the brand’s URL: it’s not a website, it’s a Flash blob. The first page is just a Flash detector with no useful information what-so-ever. For search engines, it might as well be empty:

• the only information that’s not style or Javascript is the following line: <title>Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles</title>. No hint of what the page is about, what the product is about. No description, no keywords, not a word of text. Not one.
• the homepage only checks Flash compatibility and if your browser can do Flash, shows a clickable image to the actual Flash blob. This link,however, is not in HTML, only in Javascript. So it is not recognized as a link by search engines. For non-human readers, the whole site consists of only 1 page, and a useless one at that.
• Since Google does show the “One more click and you will be on Marcel, le site officiel (…)” text, which is not in readable HTML on the page, it must be that Google spiders get a different page than regular browsers. That would be cloaking, and Google doesn’t like it.
• if the search engines would get to the Flash movie page, it would not help. It is totally devoid of anything resembling meta-data. The movie itself is a auto-running slideshow(!) with pretty pictures.
• In the movie there are moments where you can click on words to get the high resolution photos. Those are beautiful, huge (3MB!) and offered in TIFF(!!) format.

We can only conclude that “Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles” is determined to stay as obscure as possible. God forbid some interested person would find them in Google.