David Friend, Carbonite, and the Case of the Employee Reviews

The folks at EMC were kind enough to point out this blog post by David Pogue, which exposes the embarrassing issue of some Amazon.com reviews that were posted by employees of Carbonite. In 2006, two Carbonite employees posted glowing reviews of their company's back-up service. They used their real names, but didn't disclose that they worked for the company. Carbonite competes with Mozy, an online backup service owned by EMC.

I called Carbonite CEO David Friend this morning to find out what was up. He acknowledged that not disclosing that the Amazon reviewers were connected to the company was a mistake. "We had eight employees at the time but no sales," he said. "Frankly, every little company does that kind of stuff." But since 2007, he said, the company has explicitly prohibited posting-sans-disclosure as part of its policies.

Friend added that Pogue didn't contact him before he published yesterday's blog post -- which was based on info from an ex-Carbonite user using a pseudonym; Friend has since posted a comment on Pogue's blog.

Consumer-Oriented Online Storage: Mozy vs. Carbonite

Sunday's Globe column looked at how Carbonite and Mozy are building the market for consumer-oriented online backup services. Carbonite is a Boston-startup funded first by CommonAngels; Mozy is a Utah start-up acquired by EMC in 2007.

From the piece:

Mozy and Carbonite are two of the leaders of the online backup business, a rare bright spot in a gloomy tech economy. Rather than buying their own hard drives to save a copy of their data, consumers and small businesses pay a fee (Mozy's is $59 a year, Carbonite's is $50) to send their information securely over the Net, and have Mozy or Carbonite keep a copy that can be retrieved any time. IDC, a Framingham research firm, predicts that online backup services will generate about $715 million in annual revenue by 2011.

The big question is whether a start-up like Carbonite, with 125 employees and $47 million in venture capital, can capture a bigger piece of that market, or whether a division of a big company like EMC will have the edge.

To accompany the piece, there's an audio interview with Carbonite CEO David Friend, who talks about how hard it was to raise VC money for a consumer-oriented company in Boston.

Tom Kennedy, who does some communications consulting for Iron Mountain, pointed out to me that that Boston company also offers online PC backup. I should have included them, even though none of the reviews I could find of consumer back-up services mention their Connected Backup for PC offering. (Perhaps because its pricing is much higher than Carbonite's or Mozy's?)

Fireside Chat with Gail Goodman and David Friend, from Future Forward

I had a chance to conduct a "fireside chat" with two of Boston's most successful start-up CEOs this past Wednesday, at Future Forward 08.

David Friend is CEO of Carbonite; Gail Goodman runs Constant Contact.

Founded in 2005, Carbonite is an online back-up service that has raised $50 million in venture capital, and has users in 120 countries. David Friend had earlier started companies like eYak/Sonexis and FaxNet. Constant Contact went public last October, and I wrote about them recently in my Boston Globe column. Goodman had previously run the e-commerce group at Open Market Inc.

The audio file is an MP3, about 35 minutes long. Quality is good -- except for a few beeps at the end indicating that my digital recorder was about to run out of juice. We talk about what each CEO learned from prior ventures... raising money... going public... marketing and advertising... and surviving near-death experiences.