It apparently had a section dedicated to service members, which was used as a photo request-and-exchange forum since at least last May. Sources pointed Business Insiderto the site, called AnonIB. US Naval authorities immediately began investigating hundreds of Marines, but more details have emerged in the days since - including the discovery of another image posting board where users traded photos of women from all service branches, even requesting some by name. Read the full article here.Last Saturday, the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that a Facebook group, Marines United, had been distributing nude photos of servicewomen for some time. It and similar services, he seems to say, are in a position to outcompete the older-model data backup systems such as Carbonite.
It also saves by running on Amazon S3 rather than its own hardware as does Carbonite.Ĭahill’s conclusion is that in the long run Dropbox has the stronger business model and is more likely to attain high profitability. Rather than spending on advertising, it offers a referral bonus, that costs the company little in actual expenses, to existing customers. As a result, he argues, the company may never achieve profitable status.ĭropbox, in contrast, relies on a “freemium” model to attract new customers in which it offers 2GB of free data storage. The problem, says Cahill, is that Carbonite “never gets off the acquisition cost treadmill” as competition increases. On the other hand, it shows a 97% retention rate for its customers.
And that cost seems to be increasing year-to-year according to the data supplied in the IPO. In 2010 it added 361,000 new customers, for an average acquisition cost of $91.68 per new customer. Carbonite relies heavily on on-air endorsements from 49 national radio talk show personalities and has a sales and marketing spend of $33.1 million per year. One area he concentrates on is the relative cost of customer acquisition for each of the companies. The article is triggered by and in part based on information from, Carbonite’s recent IPO. Therefore, it uses an older and more expensive business model than does Dropbox, a cloud data backup service pioneer created in June 2007. The somewhat controversial piece, “The Economics of Carbonite, or Lack Thereof”, finds that Carbonite to an extent may be a victim of the period in which it was created, in 2005, just before the Internet 2.0 cloud computing explosion. Consultant David Cahill, principal of Diligence Technology Advisors, has published an interesting comparative analysis of the contrasting business models of Carbonite and Dropbox on Wikibon.
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