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Right now, the whole world is singing the praises of Steve Jobs, and rightfully so. In his brief 56 years on the Earth, Jobs had a profound and sweeping influence on perhaps the most transformative industry in the history of human civilization. A huge portion of our modern world looks and works the way it does because Steve Jobs wanted it that way, and he refused to accept anything otherwise.

And for most of his life, Steve Jobs was a failure.

You won’t see that headline much today, but it’s an important one. It’s perhaps the single greatest lesson of Jobs’s legacy — and the one Backupify takes most to heart. The lesson is this:

We persist in our efforts because we believe, regardless of the timing.

Our CEO and co-founder, Rob May, invoked that philosophy in reference to Jobs just a few short days ago:

Designers in particular love to point out that Apple is the second most valuable company in the world and attribute that to their design culture and the pursuit of perfection. But it misses the point that Microsoft ate their lunch for the first 25 years of Apple’s existence, and it took Apple 34 years to pass Microsoft in market cap. What really happened is not that Microsoft or Apple had the right philosophy, but that they had the right philosophy to match the market at the right time. Apple beat Microsoft not because Apple or Microsoft changed, but because the PC market changed. Those of you over 30 probably remember a time when you did only buy a PC on specs because they all looked the same, and you remember that you wouldn’t have paid more for a sexy looking PC because they were already too expensive. It wasn’t until the price fell, and average performance far outstripped what the average user needed before people decided they wanted an iMac.

Jobs had to wait until the world caught up to his vision, and thankfully he lived to see that vision realized.

At Backupify, we have our own vision of how the cloud, personal information, privacy and consumer control intersect. Perhaps the industry and the market aren’t quite there yet — but we have conviction they soon will be, and that we’ll have laid the groundwork for that better world to come.

Someday soon the idea of storing all your data in a single online service will seem foolish, even reckless. Very soon now, data lock-in, not data unavailability, will be your greatest concern. The Model Ts of cloud solutions are on the information superhighway today, and Backupify is selling SaaS car insurance. By the time the cloud Corvettes show up, we’re convinced you’ll be glad we’re around.

And so we persist, despite obstacles and misfortunes that make or work seem less interesting and, perhaps momentarily, less relevant. The world moves forward, and we move with it. So vision demands, and faith abides.

We’d like to think Steve Jobs would approve.

Mac users generally regard themselves as tech consumers who just ‘get it’ in terms of simplicity, innovation and a clean user interface. They view PC users as laggards in the tech scene that strangely enjoy clunky software and second-rate hardware.

Does this comparison seem familiar? This is the exact debate going on between Microsoft Office and Google Apps. Those that use Office are seen as being inefficient, laggards, and hesitant towards innovation.

Google Apps users are innovators, lovers of new technology, and they ‘get it’ in terms of a simple user interface that can increase productivity.

Thus, Google Apps users are the new Mac loyalists, a point ZDNet blogger Sam Diaz made just this week. This is not to spark a debate between Mac vs. PC or Google vs. Microsoft, but to simply demonstrate a correlation between the public perception of innovation vs. legacy products.

We’ve talked to many PC users who switched to a Mac for what they would describe as a superior computing experience. Once they switch, they admit to themselves that for them the Mac just makes sense.

Google is not (yet) trying to push mainstream consumers and large corporations to get Apps, just as Apple does not pursue mass adoption of the Mac. They have the understanding that these people just don’t ‘get it’ and that chasing that market share is likely more trouble (and less profitable) than it’s worth. For now, it seems Google and Apple understand that the loyalists and early adopters will appreciate the UI and productivity capabilities and others will follow afterwards.

Will Google Apps ever become mainstream? Probably not. The same goes for Macs. But that doesn’t mean that Google and Apple can’t succeed.

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The challenge for large social networks is to undo permissions that they’ve already given. Meanwhile, a startup is at an advantage as they can build something from scratch that allows the user to predefine the data terms for sharing.

Wilson was gushing about Foursquare — a company in which Wilson’s VC firm has invested, so take his observations with the appropriate desert of salt — but the point is no less cogent. Large companies with entrenched business models cannot easily pivot their operations. (Marketing they can change quickly, whence comes spin.) This is especially true of changes that run counter to foundational company culture.

Google, Facebook, Apple and every billion-dollar player out there have an entrenched approach to many aspects of online business, including security and privacy. It has been loudly and snarkily argued that Google’s utilitarian engineer-first culture can’t build successful social apps. Apple has a beautiful design obsession, which means they might build death-grip phones. Facebook was (at least anecdotally) founded by someone who doesn’t give a damn about privacy.

If these were still scrappy upstarts with a dozen or so employees, it might be possible for company culture to shift to address these shortcomings. But each of these firms has thousands of employees in multiple countries, and the corporate culture is the only thing that such a dispersed and diverse group has in common. It’s their corporate DNA. And when a technical gaffe or market shift makes those traits a liability, they’ll be unable to adapt quickly.

If your privacy and security needs run counter to the predispositions of these companies’ cultures, odds are they’ll be unable to fundamentally address the problem in anything resembling a timely fashion, and that they’ll unleash spin well before they unleash apologies. Google Buzz. Facebook Beacon. The iPad iLeak. Every company has blindspots, and your private data might be caught in them — even absent malicious intent.

Hope you’ve got a backup plan.

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The blogosphere (or, at least, TechCrunch) is all a-twitter (pun!) that Google is going to war with Apple on several fronts, based on announcements from the Google I/O event last week. Google TV is going to take on Apple TV and, more generally, Apple’s iTunes video downloads. The Android Music Market will take on iTunes directly in the music download space. Google has a rumored Chrome/Android tablet aimed to topple the iPad. The new Google Editions online bookstore will battle with iBooks for the right to topple Amazon and the Kindle. This after Apple moved into the digital ad space with iAds, clearly trying to beat Google at their own game. And, of course, there is the raging war of Android itself versus the iPhone OS, and the Chrome OS and browser versus Apple OS X, Safari and every other browser and operating system out there.

Setting aside the prediction of who is likely to win, or if we’re in for another protracted conflict, the upshot for your data is rather clear: Get ready for data anti-portability.

Google has ostensibly staked itself to the open model, promising to make your Google web-app data easily portable — but it will be more easily ported between Google products. Yes, you can get Google Calendar data onto your iPhone, but it will be so much easier to get it on an Android device. Yes, you can bring Flickr photos into your Google Apps, but Picasa photos are so much simpler to import.

Apple, meanwhile, makes no bones about wanting to own your entire data ecosystem. Steve Jobs simply believes his data formats and their parent devices are better, and if you can’t appreciate his design aesthetic, you aren’t worthy anyway. If Apple deigns to make your data platform-portable, it’s only because Steve doesn’t think any great number of users will ever choose to abandon the Appleverse for their obviously inferior competitors.

The onlookers in this Google/Apple war may also look to data lock-in to spare them from collateral damage. Yes, you can read Kindle books on Google and Apple devices, but you can’t read iBooks or (so far as we know) Google editions on a Kindle or a Nook. The implication there is that Amazon wants Kindle to be the standard e-book format, and is willing to shun competing formats on their device simply as a means to ensure their e-reader survives the war.

Microsoft is meeting Google on their own cloud-turf with Office 2010 and Skydrive, but still reserves the office file-format’s best functionality for its own applications. Documents stored in Skydrive can be opened directly in Office desktop applications, bypassing the web-based editor entirely. Outlook Web Access has always had more bells and whistles in Internet Explorer than in any non-Microsoft browser. Expect this format lock-in philosophy to get more explicit, not less so.

Moreover, if the Google-Apple conflict becomes a drawn-out affair, don’t be surprised if one or both sides gets even more zealous in its desire to control data. Adobe has been a longtime ally of Apple, but Jobs and Company kicked their signature Flash web format to the curb simply to preserve absolute control over the iPhone OS application ecosystem. Google, meanwhile, keeps expanding its horizontal integration into product offerings, giving more and more applications and features away in an effort to aggregate user loyalty and thus (ad-enhancing) user data. These apps will continue to play better with each other than non-Google products, keeping users loyal with the carrot rather than the stick.

The new name of the game is enforcing loyalty. Switching from an iPhone to and Android phone is going to get harder, not easier. Maintaining a library of iBooks, Kindle titles, and Google Editions is going to be an increasingly tricky proposition. MP3 may be the prevailing music format, but good luck moving your personal playlists and song rating from iTunes to any other music management application, let alone from your iPod to your Nexus One.

Bottom line: Keep a reserve copy of your data whenever possible. If you switch loyalties during the format war, it may be up to a neutral third party to get your data from one side of the Google/Apple battle line to the other.

Hope you’ve got a backup plan.

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What services will Backupify offer two years from now? Hard to say. We’ve got lots of cool ideas, some crazier than others. Here’s a listing of some of the wackier concepts that may or may not have come up during brainstorming sessions. Please feel free to weigh in on your favorites, and don’t forget to relate your requests to Backupify’s core business.

Navel-Gazer Self-Search: A meta-search of all the Backupify services you back up. Find keywords or links regardless of where you posted them. So if you went on a Facebook-Twitter-and-Google-Buzz tirade about the latest Apple product rumor (the iPad 4.0 has a 3D videochat cam, and for only $1699!) you can sort through all your posts to find out exactly where you put that link to the leaked prototype pics.

“The Party’s Over Here Now” Profile Migrator: The Facebook Killer has finally arrived (Orkut? Really?) and you don’t want to drag all the photos and videos and friend lists and birthdays over to the new hotness? No worries; Backupify has a wizard that will let you pick and choose which bio — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google Profile — you like best, and which friends from each service you want to to slide over, along with an easy way to import all the multimedia files you’ve got jammed all over the place. And in 18 months, when the next new social network fad pops up, you can do it all over again, only easier.

The “Eternal Sunshine” Machine: Got a relationship (or a weekend) you’d like to erase from your online memory? A few keyword and profile selections, and we’ll delete every connection to your ex that’s out in public, while retaining the unpurged records in our archives (just in case he apologizes and you decide to patch it up).

Twitter Court Reporter: Give us a list of Twitter usernames and a general time window, and we’ll narrow down your tweetstream to just the conversations you had with these individuals, then output the whole confab as a searchable PDF.

E-Marketer Goggles: We’ll run a general keyword analysis over your collective social profiles and determine what products and services that marketers — who buy data from Twitter, Facebook and Google for exactly these purposes — think you’re apt to buy. This may explain some of those bizarre AdSense ads and spam messages you keep getting. Think of it as a next-generation tag cloud of your online footprint, only more useful (and creepy).

If any of these sound cool to you, or if you’ve got an even better idea, feel free to flame away about it in the comments section of this post.

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Henry Ford once famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In some circles this is taken as an admonition not to listen to customer requests.  In what I would term smarter circles, this is a reminder to remember what your company is about.

Henry Ford wasn’t selling a replacement for the horse, he was selling personal transportation. It just so happened that his answer for the best possible personal transportation was a horse-replacement, the automobile.

Apple, which is perhaps best associated with the “ignore the customers, we know better than them” interpretation of Ford’s philosophy is nonetheless a great example of remembering what business you’re in. Apple wanted to sell a better portable music experience, which resulted in the iPod. But Apple isn’t in the MP3 player business. It’s in the portable music experience — or, rather, portable media experience — business, which is why the iPod has become somewhat ignored in favor of the iPhone, iTouch (which is so far removed from the original iPod people rarely call them iPod Touchs anymore) and iPad.

Which brings us to Backupify. Yes, we backup your cloud-based data, but we’re not really selling cloud data backups. That’s the mechanism, not the business.

Backupify is selling control of your cloud-based data.

Your Gmail messages are just messages you happen to store in Gmail; the service doesn’t own the data. Backupify exists to detach the data from the service, the profile data from the profile page, the medium from the message. If Gmail fails, the data is safe. If you want to analyze the data, you can download it from us and parse it however you like. If you want to migrate away from Gmail to another e-mail solution, we’ll do our best to facilitate the changeover.

The same applies to your Facebook profile or Flickr albums. Those are your videos and pictures and birthday wishes and commiserations with friends. They belong to you, not to the cloud, and not to any specific brand or application. Backupify is here to make sure of it. That’s our business. That’s what we’re selling (or, in most cases, giving away).

Backupify is in the data control business. It just so happens that backing up cloud-based data is where we’ve started. But if a better solution comes along, we’ll be ready for it.

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At Digital Book World, Google announced Google Editions, a platform-agnostic e-book system that would let users read a single version of a digital book on any Web-connected device, and that would let users buy a physical book from within the e-book. Meanwhile, everyone expects Apple’s tablet to mainstream e-book consumption. Thus Google, Apple, Amazon, and even Acer are all moving into the e-book market, suggesting that — believe it or not — there is going to be a serious, mainstream e-book market.

So who keeps all your online books safe? For those files kept on your hard drive, there are plenty of conventional backup services. For those files kept almost exclusively on a dedicated e-reader, as is the case with the Kindle, you’re at Amazon’s mercy (and they can erase at their whim, even without a file failure). If nothing else, that may be what sees tablets overtake dedicated e-readers; the ability to save and transfer files to your satisfaction, not Amazon’s.

But what of those files kept in the cloud, like Google Editions wants to see happen? Yes, Backupify would very much like to backstop your Google bookshelf as soon as it exists and there’s an API for it. That said, the difference between us backing up your Gmail and your Google Books is rather significant; there’s likely to be a significant dollar value attached to e-books that most people don’t associate with e-mail.

My Gmail archive may ultimately be more critical and valuable than my Google Bookshelf, but on a visceral level, if I’ve got $500 worth of bestsellers stocked in my Google Editions account when it goes down, I’m going to feel that loss more acutely.

DVD software heavyweight Sonic Solutions has quietly rolled out a Google Editions-like movie-management system called Roxio CinemaNow, which manages paid virtual licenses for rented and bought video downloads. The value proposition is simple: Buy a movie once, stream or download that licensed content to any Roxio-compliant device — forever. While the service looks impressive, and it has the backing of partners like Best Buy and Blockbuster, what happens if Roxio loses your license “locker” file?

Content creators are very much pushing cloud-based media consumption as a means of battling back against privacy, but if all your media content migrates from the bookshelf to the cloud, who fireproofs your virtual library? Something to think about as we transition to anytime/anywhere media.

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Rumors are swirling that Facebook is looking to integrate Facebook Credits — those micropayments that let you send monetary gifts to other users — with games from Zynga, the makers of such timesuck singularities as Mafia Wars and Farmville. Basically, Facebook wants to start charging you for all those game applets that are killing office productivity around the world. Think of it as Facebook’s version of the Apple App Store, only without the  Silicon Valley hipsterism.

At the same time, Payvment is a new third-party app that aims to make setting up storefronts on Facebook pages extremely easy. EventBrite and TicketLeap already did something similar for Facebook events, but given exactly how much time everyone spends on Facebook, it makes sense that vendors are tired of pointing you offsite to make transactions.

All of which is to say, Facebook as a commerce portal is coming, and it’s going to be huge. Whether you’re buying or selling there, Facebook is going to be a transactional nexus for the next 2-3 years. And all those transactional records will be in some measure dependent on Facebook’s own data integrity and security.

I’d have a backup, if I were you.

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