Friday, September 7, 2007

Mediamax demands right to reply

Mediamax has apparently bullied an author on Newsvine to allowing comments on an article there about the problems with the company and its associated companies. It wants to be able to set the record straight.

As the author notes, it is ironic that Mediamax succeeds in bullying Newsvine into forcing the author to allow comments (with the threat of deleting the article), but disables comments on its own blog which is full of misleading posts about problems being solved when they patently have not.

I became aware of this through a comment left on this blog.

So watch out for the Mediamax response on Newsvine - as comments are enabled there you will have the chance to comments on its accuracy. Click here.

28 comments:

Anonymous said...

Talk about perfect timing.Just tried to log on to my account....I get this...

Service Unavailable


Mediamax is a a JOKE

Anonymous said...

John Hood how bout turning on Mediamax's comments on it's on blog? You crooks are going to jail and hell

Anonymous said...

Mediamax and Steve Iverson are nothing but THIEVES.

There ya go Mediamax - reply to that!

I can't wait for the day someone takes you to court.

Anonymous said...

Found this about nirvanix

http://www.socaltech.com/fullstory/0011039.html

Anonymous said...

more interesting discussions
http://mashable.com/2007/09/02/nirvanix/

Anonymous said...

Great post, please keep up the good work.

David said...

What a joke having to change your files so you have to re upload!

I have gone to Carbonite now. Paid my money and am very happy.

Had a 30 day trial, now a paid member.

Luckily I had a back up of my files on MediaMax.

So MM you can drop dead and go into receivership now for all I care. No company can survive after what you have done to your client base. You don't deserve to.

Anonymous said...

Hey, Luzo, I have a subject for your next article, if you're interested.

Did you ever notice how the pro-MM commenters on the various blogs follow a set template for their comments? It usually follows this pattern:

1) State that MediaMax and Nirvanix are separate companies with separate teams (though this is untrue)

2) State that anyone complaining about MediaMax or expressing doubts about Nirvanix is either a disgruntled ex-employee, or employed by the competition (as though no one could ever REALLY have an issue with MediaMax's GREAT service!)

3) State that they know Harr/Iverson/both personally and they have a lot of respect for them, they really care about customers, etc.


That's basically how they assassinate the reputations of anyone who would dare express contrary opinions. I can't stand people like that. Thanks for making this blog and bringing them to justice.

I'd also like to analyze that common statement "separate companies with separate teams". Anyone know the teams, apart from the top 3 employees from each company? I don't and don't know how to find out. Someone said on one of these pages that they share a great deal of staff - who said this, and how do they know - can it be proven?

Thanks a lot.

Anonymous said...

It has been almost a day since the first poster fot "service unavailable", now I am getting the same thing almost a day later.
Are they fixing something, or is this the beginning of the end?

Anonymous said...

I did a search on linkedin.com 2 weeks ago, found just about 4 people
2 technicians, one ceo/cto , one commercial
About this out of service thing. It was there friday and I noticed that with couple of refresh tries in your browser you eventually get in.
About communication again it is very quiet again. MM still didn't react to
the bassedvines article, I got a cc on a response to a mail from backupreview to which i replied to
John Hood in person on Thursday, still no response. John Hood in person promised to take some actions here on this blog about 2 weeks ago. Am still waiting for this.
I still have a strong feeling there is indeed more to this Nirvanix relationship. Nirvanix went public last wednesday and maybe mm keeps quiet because they don't want any more bad publicity.
Maybe we should all try to make as much publicity as possible, vote this bassedvines article up, participate in the discussion about nirvanix on mashable! It is almost 3 months now that mm had their infamous operator error and it should have been fixed by now. Maybe more attention to cleaning up their mess will put some more pressure on this.

Anonymous said...

Found another interesting story on the net
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1058042/startup_nirvanix_to_offer_digital_file_storage/index.html?source=r_technology
They seem to have raised new capital.

Anonymous said...

saw the link is a bit messed up
this should work also

http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1058042/startup_nirvanix_to_offer_digital_file_storage/index.html

Anonymous said...

sorry it goes wrong again
now with tags another try
article

Anonymous said...

Newsvine dropped off the planet ... as has the processing system of MediaMax. 12 Files uploaded, none show up in the file manager. Another fun day in MM-land.

Anonymous said...

"This article has been removed by the Newsvine community."

Curious to hear the reason for this, but it, and I can hardly believe I'm saying this, smells like a cover up operation. And I was just about to post again stating that signing up for MM atm is an excercise in futility, because if the stuff you want to store at them never shows up in your account, what good are they?

Anonymous said...

Google is caching documents so
the article can be found at
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:VEnddZvHE6IJ:bassett.newsvine.com/_news/2007/09/06/944429-nirvanix-amazon-s3-killer-or-crap-in-sheeps-clothing+mediamax+nirvanix+basset&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2

I tried to get through newsvine and the author to get a reaction why it was removed. Still waiting for a response.

I got a reply from John Hood himself at some email I sent where amongst others I reminded him of this blog and the promises he made. I asked him to pay a visit again and participate. Unfortunately he didn't reply to that part.
The only reaction I got
Thanks for your comments, Jeroen. I'll follow up with our Engineering team. Your account has been changed to Freeloader.
I find it disturbingly quiet at the moment, no progress seems to be made and I wonder what this article meant I found at the san diego tribune where it was stated that extra money comes in.
If the same people are running the show I wonder if a new startup will not draw all attention. Nirvanix is public so why not make a decent and full explanation about mediamax?

Anonymous said...

Thanks JD. Can you explain how you can search for Google cache? Might be usefull for me to learn as well. Noticed that the cache you found is from before comments were allowed unfortunately.

I also wrote to Newsvine demanding an explanation.

Atm, there is no visible progress ... and taking into account the processing problems that are currently rampant again I can only conclude that we have gone backwards yet again. I have a feeling that they are so busy with their data recovery and their new FTP/MM XL (and hopefully some real bugfixes) that they fail to keep track of current affairs. Hopefully this setback is temporarily and means that they're busy fixing some stuff .... one can allways hope I guess -_-

Anonymous said...

Will, When you search in google often you see under the results a small link labeled cache. When you click on this you get a cache version of the page, unfortunately google doesn't visit every page each day again so it is old version here without the comments made. They keep these caches for quiet long and I am not sure whether they are able and willingly to clean those as well
I did save the page this morning. Is it an idea to publish it somewhere else, is it possible here ? (ofcourse with reference to the author and the story behind it)

Luzo what do you think?

It seems that newsvine is open for censorship. I find this quite disturbing in the western world. Tom Basset opened the article up for comments so why didn't mediamax and/or nirvanix respond? My guess is they try to avoid any publicity at all at the moment such that Nirvanix can have a fair chance.
If it is indeed all separated why don't they explain this decently. The San Diego tribune article was also not really clear about this.
My guess there is still more to tell and maybe Nirvanix inherited problems from Mediamnax?

Anonymous said...

It's true, the files ARE coming back!

Let me state at the outset that I am no apologist for MediaMax. I am a long term subscriber with a collection of some 30,000 audio files stored on MediaMax and like everyone else was horrified to find that almost all of these files became inaccessible on 15 June. Dismissal was very light retribution for the former employee who was responsible for this debacle!

The 30,000 files have been uploaded regularly since July 2003 and should provide a representative sample over time of the restoration of files by MediaMax.

I have performed a 100% audit of the availability of all these files on August 18 and again around August 31 and there was a marked improvement at the second sampling with the overall inacessible rate down to (only!) 45% from more than 80% a fortnight ago.

The availability improvement varies greatly with the date that the files were uploaded and this graph shows how well the file restoration is proceding for the files uploaded during the past four years.

http://tinyurl.com/2ea3f2

There is still a long way to go before all files are restored and my own estimates of how long this will take are are 6-8 weeks and are consistent with those quoted by John Hood of MediaMax (no relation).

I am encouraged by the results of this research but will reserve judgement about the effectiveness of MediaMax's file recovery until the end when I see what the residual loss rate is. Even a modest 2% final loss rate will be totally unacceptable for me as this will be 600 files that need to be reloaded and 15Gb of bandwidth. With the current frustratingly unreliable uploading options, that is a huge amount of work

Unknown said...

Hi Martin,

How did you manage to check the availability of your mediamax files ?

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I am the author of the articles in question. Fortunately, I backed them both up (comments included) and I will repost them elsewhere.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what my next step should be? I mean, if MediaMax/Streamload/Nirvanix can get websites to just delete my articles, what can I do?

Anonymous said...

Since Newsvine censored my articles, I took it upon myself to set up a blog.

I have put those articles on that blog, as well as a few more I've written on this topic.

Feel free to stop by, read, and visit.

MediaMax/Nirvanix/Streamload Watch

Anonymous said...

1. We did have issues with one of our web servers on the morning of the seventh. That has been resolved.
2. I've already explained, repeatedly, why the comments are not on on the blog.
3. You only have to change your files if it was one that became inaccessible on 6/15.
4. Again, Nirvanix and MediaMax are entirely separate companies. We share no employees.
5. I'm here, Jeroen! I've kept all the promises I've made here. Files ARE coming back. The project is almost 90% done. We are very close to releasing the latest beta version of MMXL. FTP is further off. I will update here when I have an ETA on the MMXL release.
6. We knew about the Newsvine article. I didn't see anything new there that needed to be commented on. With all due respect, Tom Bassett, a lot of the new stuff is patently untrue.
7. Thanks for reserving judgement, Martin. I agree that the effectiveness of the data recovery can't possibly be judged until it's completed.

Anonymous said...

4. Again, Nirvanix and MediaMax are entirely separate companies. We share no employees.

However, at least 4 of the senior staff from MediaMax are NOW senior staff at Nirvanix:

* Patrick Harr is CEO of Nirvanix. He was formerly CEO of MediaMax.

* Greg Bohdan is the CFO of Nirvanix. He was formerly CFO of MediaMax. He was also formerly CFO and is currently on the Board of Directors of the "San Diego Venture Group", which FUNDED MediaMax.

* Geoff Tudor was Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering at Streamload. He is now COO & VP of Engineering at Nirvanix.

* Adrian Herrera was the Director of Business Development at Streamload. He is now the Director of Business Development at Nirvanix.


So, they just went from one of the sister companies to the other. It is a ruse really - "Hey, we're different companies!" when you just spun off from the same company and retain a significant portion of the senior staff.

6. We knew about the Newsvine article. I didn't see anything new there that needed to be commented on. With all due respect, Tom Bassett, a lot of the new stuff is patently untrue.

Really? I got an email today from Steve Iverson that most of what I wrote WAS true, because it was taken directly from Nirvanix & MediaMax websites. Which of you is correct?

Your games aren't working. So why bother?

Anonymous said...

Guys, this conspiracy theory has been blown WAY out of proportion. Tom, in my email to you this morning I also offered to clear up details via email or phone if you'd like, so please contact me.

> re: employees

I honestly don't see what you are getting at. Yes, there used to be one company, Streamload. Now there are two - MediaMax and Nirvanix. Many employees stayed with Nirvanix (some of which you listed) and John and I now work for MediaMax exclusively. That's what happens when a company splits... ?


> re: the NewsVine article

Note: MediaMax did not request that article or comments to be taken down - that is patently wrong. I can only assume someone from Nirvanix requested that but I have not confirmed with them yet. I know for certain that John Hood and I did not contact NewsVine in regards to that article.

I have no problems with you writing about MediaMax, but I just want you to get your facts straight. I hope you also continue to cover MediaMax when we have more positive news to report!

-Steve


p.s. Yes, we moved across the street. I didn't know it was 203 feet, but thanks for that factoid. I also live downtown and like having the office nearby - there is no conspiracy.

Anonymous said...

Woah ... falls of chair seeing the chairman of MediaMax in person on this board.

To get back on track with the MediaMax discussion (I regard whether or not Nirvanix is related to MediaMax a non-issue).

I hope for Martin Hood that the remainder of his missing files are in the remaining 10% John Hood mentioned (I trust there is no family relation here ;-) ) as with only 10% to go I would be a little worried as MM recovered 35% restoring 90% of what they lost. I'm still curious John how you validated your link ... I sure could use it to sniff out unavailable stuff out of mine account.

I'm eagerly awaiting the new MM XL version as atm I'm using another paid service to gain access of my home PC just to be able to continues upload stuff using the webuploader. Seems that the processing performance has risen again as today all but one of my uploads of today showed up. The ones that were uploaded earlier though are still nowhere to be seen ... guess I'll be re-uploading more stuff.

I sure hope though that your FTP isn't to far behind ... or you at least allow FTP clients back as a lot of people have a preference for FTP over MM XL (mainly because MM XL sofar had it's fair share of stability and compatability problems).

One of my other main problems is still that I can't use the file manager as I'm supposed as my account is apperently to big. I really could use a fix for that one ... it's been nearly a year since I could organise stuff and you do NOT want to know what has been piling up ready to be archived.

Anonymous said...

Gah, where is the edit button when you need one -_-

"I'm still curious John ... ", John should be read Martin.

Anonymous said...

Streamload...ah that word reminds me of the good ol days.Mediamax..the word brings to mind its like changing a baby diaper after eating oatmeal and carrots