The Dangers of Machine Learning

Analytical approaches to mining big datasets are just tools in the hands of the people implementing them.  Sometimes they can make things easy, other times they can be misused and lead to poor results.  And other times approaches can take on a life of their own and appear as panaceas for any big data challenge.  Machine learning is one of those mystified tools that often falls into this last category, and without a fundamental understanding of the underlying structural relationships can be costly and ineffective.

The issue is tied to the same principle behind causality versus correlation.  It is a basic idiom that correlation does not imply causality; just because the crime rate in NYC has dropped in the last 10 years and the price of a candy bar has increased, does not mean that increased candy prices cause less crime.  We know that because we know that the likelihood of some underlying fundamental and structural reason for those two things to be related is tenuous at best.  

Yet, many people think they can just naively apply machine learning to data sets to mine for interesting results.  When left unconstrained, machine learning techniques will often find far stronger signals with nonsensical relationships than with truly causally connected events.  And even with refinement of the input to your models, i.e. your feature space, the results are still based on correlations.

Take it from an industry where analytics and quantitative analysis play a huge role – finance.  In 2008, when the industry was permeated with systematic investment players executing their economic models based on machine learning techniques, something unexpected hit – a massive deleveraging in the market.  By and large the winners in that situation where those who understood this structural dynamic and what is implied, not the players naively applying their statistical models to the past few years.

 What can we learn from this?  It is not that machine learning is bad, but just that it is a tool and that in order to not be caught with an empty bank account you have to apply it in conjunction with also developing a fundamental understanding.  And if you are going to start somewhere, spending the time to carefully and logically construct a basic set of fundamental assumptions will often yield you less risky performance at first.

 Ultimately understanding a signal from a noisy dataset takes a variety of approaches.  It takes inductive approaches like machine learning and deductive approaches like hypothesis testing.  Heralding the ability to do one piece only means you have part of the solution, and if you rely on that alone you are likely setting yourself up for failure.

Congratulations to Colorado AdTech company SpotXchange

Looks like Colorado's own SpotXchange has been recognized as part of the Earnst & Young entrepreneur of the year awards. 

http://www.ey.com/US/en/Newsroom/News-releases/News_2013-Award-winners-in-the-Mountain-Desert-region
Technology Services MikeShehan,CEO & Co-Founder, and Steve Swoboda,COO, CFO & Co-Founder, SpotXchange, Inc. (Westminster, CO)

Congratulations to Mike and Steve and to the entire SpotXchange team. It takes a great leader to run a successful company, but it also takes an amazing, hard working team backing the leadership. I have a few friends and former co-workers there that I have great respect for and know that the team there is top-notch and hard working

Their online video ad exchange is excellent and they have been one of the easiest partners to work with while building out our video product at The Trade Desk. As we expand our video rollout to Australia and other Asian markets we find SpotXchange has a strong presence there and look forward to growing together worldwide.. 

I, of course, have a special interest in Colorado AdTech companies having opened the Boulder office for The Trade Desk and hired a team of engineers here. I've been amazed at the quality of AdTech in the Boulder-Denver area. We have everything from top tier agencies, exchanges, data and analytics companies, DSP's, search marketing companies, and even representation from the likes of Google and Microsoft advertising teams. While it's not New York, this area's concentration of quality AdTech companies is impressive and growing. 

Micro Data is more important than Big Data

The term "Big Data" seems to be all the rage these days. Everyone uses it in someway to describe what their software company does. I often goad friends that work at startups claiming to be Big Data companies because they are handling the twitter stream or they are running X thousand transactions per second. I tell them to give me a call when their company gets up to scale a bit more.

In the online advertising world, especially with programmatic buying of ads, we have to handle nearly a million requests per second (and that is just the start of our scaling), make decisions in 5ms, track everything that happens across the globe and be able to report it to our clients within 5 minutes of it happening. With that kind of scale our budgeting systems have to be accurate within seconds or you could over spend by thousands of dollars. When you start to find that Amazon and Rackspace cloud environments can't handle your systems due to network speeds you may have achieved a decent level of scale (not kidding, we actually took down an entire Rackspace data center at one point).

So with the large number of transactions that we handle and the massive amount of data that we store and process every second, what is it that's important to us and what do we care about with our "Big Data"? There's not really much you can do with the mass of data as a whole, except maybe donate it to some research university to use in their studies, or keep it all somewhere and pay massive storage costs every month. No, it's not the Big Data that matters, what really matters is the "Micro Data" within that large data set that is interesting and with out the large amount of data it's not really possible to find micro data trends.

In online advertising the more micro the trend is the more valuable it is. If we know that every left handed race car driver in eastern Iowa is guaranteed to buy your product, then you are going to be willing to pay a lot of money to show that one person an ad (we of course care about a bit large audience than that one guy). If we can find millions of micro trends that are valuable to advertisers then we can really help guide their advertising budgets and make really good decisions on how much to spend on showing an ad to any given request to buy an ad among those million requests we see each second.

I don't claim to have coined the term micro data. I first heard about it from a friend over beers one evening. He is a researcher at the University of Colorado and is in a research lab with Big Data in the name. One of the bodies of data that they use in their research is the US Census data which collects massive amounts of data points on every household in the United States. He told me that there is nothing interesting about saying that the average annual salary of each household in the US is $X, or that the average family in the country has 1.8 children and 2.3 dogs. Those statistics are meaningless to all but politicians who want to use meaningless data for whatever purpose then need. Instead, these researchers look at the micro trends in the data to understand things better. It's much more meaningful to know the average or median income of a specific block in downtown Boulder or the average number of people living in each household in a single block in South Boulder.

That type of micro data helps in the advertising world as well since that is how advertisers want to be able to control their spending on ad buys. We spend a huge amount of our time looking for and processing "Big Data" to discover the "Micro Data" within that is so much more interesting and valuable.

AlterEgo 2-Factor Authentication

File this under the "Why didn't I think of that" category. MailChimp just released a super cool new product called AlterEgo that enables 2-factor authentication for web apps using an IPhone application.

Check out:

• http://blog.mailchimp.com/tag/2-factor-authentication/
• https://alteregoapp.com

If you've done anything with production systems, then you've probably used 2-factor auth and have always found it to be a pain, especially if you've had to add it to some software you're building. This product looks to bring a simplified version of 2-factor auth to webapps that can provide a really nice additional layer of security to webapps that need it. I'd love to hear from anyone who has used this product, either as a user or as an integration.

Centripetal Product Review of Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager

This is a continuation of a series of product reviews of the products that make our cloud infrastructure work and make it workable. The product we’d like to show off today is one of those products that has just made the pain of managing a large server farm a whole lot easier.

Our deployment consists of numerous dedicated and cloud based servers in Rackspace datacenters in Texas, Chicago and London as well as Amazon cloud datacenters in California, Virginia, Ireland and Singapore. We run Microsoft Windows based servers as well as Redhat and Gentoo based Linux systems. Managing this type of an infrastructure has always been left up to Ops teams in my past jobs who had large teams and suites of pricey tools at their disposal. But as a small startup we needed a way for a couple of key members of our team to be able to access all our servers from one place in an easy fashion. Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager has been a life saver for us. Remote Desktop is a simple tool that organizes all of our remote servers in once place with built in configuration to work across all of them in unison with ease.

Among all of it’s features the ones that have come to be the most useful to me have been the ability to manage all of our systems, regardless of OS or location, from one console; the ability to have a central password store integrated into the tool; and the embedded, tabbed view of multiple remote sessions at once.

Manage Everything


One of the beautiful things about running a startup in this day in age is the vast resources available through cloud based deployments. A small startup company like ours has the ability to deploy hundreds of servers across all geographic locations in the world with the click of a mouse. Managing these can all be done from the comfort of our offices overlooking the beach in Southern California. However, managing this many servers can get to be quite a burden so any tool that can ease that burden is a blessing. With a disparate set of systems in our deployment we needed a tool that would allow us to view everything together in one place. Remote Desktop Manager has the ability. The Dashboard view within the tool allows me to look at all of my servers. I organize them by data center and region and then stick all of the Windows servers and Linux Servers in there together. Opening up a remote session is as easy as double clicking on a machine. The configuration of each machine is where I can setup what that session is, Windows RDP or Linux SSH console or whatever else. This ability is more rare than one might think in this type of a tool.




Central Credential Store

With this many servers, managing passwords is a serious pain. In addition, as a small company with just a couple of people who know how to access most things we needed a way for the knowledge to be accessible in the case of something happening to key people. Remote Desktop Manager has the ability to store credentials for all types of remote sessions. This can be managed centrally by our one full time operation person while still allowing access to the others that need the occasional access. There seem to be a lot of different options for storing this that include higher levels of security as well as things as simple as a centrally accessed Access database, SQL Server, XML or even Dropbox storage.



Tabbed View

One of my favorite features of Remote Desktop Manager is the ability to have multiple sessions open at once and view them all within the RDM program within a tabbed view. This makes opening up a bunch of servers and going back and forth between them a breeze. The name of the server appears in the tab at the top, as opposed to just opening up multiple RDP sessions where I have no idea what is what. This is a God-send when I am needing to compare config files across servers, monitor event logs, or need to install a new release across multiple servers at once. I can still open the sessions up in full screen if I need to, but I don’t find myself doing that a whole lot lately.


Summary

All in all Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager has been a great tool. The only thing I have found myself wanting is an automated way to reach out to my Amazon or Rackspace account to suck in new servers as opposed to manually entering remote connection information, but that is a minor issue compared to the pain that this tool has removed from my day to day life of jumping around our remote, distributed cloud infrastructure. Thanks to the guys over at Devolutions for an awesome product.

• http://remotedesktopmanager.com/
• http://devolutions.net/

Centripetal Product Review of CloudBerry S3 Explorer Pro

Part of building, running and maintaining a Software as a Service application like ours means having great tools at your disposal to make things easier. I wanted to highlight one of those tools that I've become particularly dependent on in my day to day work for keeping things running smoothly. The tool is CloudBerry S3 Explorer Pro by CloudBerry Labs.

We manage our complete backend logging, monitoring and reporting systems based on Amazon S3 at the core. There are lots of tools we run on top of that from custom built applications to Hadoop and everything in between. We currently have 10's of millions of individual files ranging in size from 100 bytes to over 1 GB. In Amazon's S3 environment we we manage over 100 buckets, spanning all Amazon worldwide regions with each containing complex directory structures that define content and date partitioning of the data in the files. We also run a lot of different portions of our applications through the Amazon CDN which is seemlessly integrated into S3. With all the applications and code we have dedicated to S3 specific functionality you'd think that we would never have a need to actually just look at the raw S3 structure and browse around for files or other things like that, but it has become a daily need to go in for one reason or another. When I have a need to go directly to S3 for something Cloudberry S3 Explorer Pro has been my tool of choice. It is indispensable when looking for individual files when debugging, doing copy or move jobs, or scripting more complex file jobs.

Debugging

A typical day finds me debugging an issue for one of our business team members. Many times I find that I need to go directly to the transaction logs of some server to determine exactly what happens. We store all of these in S3 in order to run transaction reports across them with Hadoop and other tools. Cloudberry Explorer has made the job so much easier because I can look at my different buckets through the lens of a typical filesytem that I am used to and can browse around, download and open files with a click of the mouse and can even make quick updates when I need to. Cloudberry gives me a beautiful user interface for working with some of the more advanced features of S3 like ACL's, Bucket Policies, Cloudfront distributions, External Buckets and more and it makes these features much more accessible than the straight Amazon S3 API for quick tasks I need to do. If I ad to work within the confines of the Amazon API or even the Amazon Web interface for doing this debugging I would be entirely hamstrung and my life would be in shambles from the craziness of things.....

Copy or Move Jobs

Another thing that I find myself doing a lot is moving files around within S3. We use specific naming conventions for S3 files to denote the working state of a file. We also use different buckets in each Amazon region to reduce cross datacenter chatter. But there are often times that I find I just need to copy or move a whole slew of files from one place to another. Recently I actually had the need to move over 1 million files between buckets. For this I use Cloudberry. Moving and Copying is a drag and drop task within Cloudberry. And for some of those bigger jobs (like the million files) I can use up to 100 threads to get the job done more quickly. The ease of sing Cloudberry for these types of tasks has gotten me to be a little too dependent on the tool, I've actually spun up Amazon Ec2 instances just to put Cloudberry on to do large copy/move jobs and then tore them down. That allowed me to have more CPU power going as well as even more threads working on my job.

Scripting 

One thing that we've recently discovered is that everything that is available in the CloudBerry S3 Explorer Pro version is also available in Windows Powershell snapins. We've utilized these
extensively to script out tasks that we find ourselves doing over and over again. While we have our own tools that use the Amazon S3 API to interact with S3 from within our applications, I've found that the Cloudberry Powershell snapins are more reliable and much easier to use due to the scripting capabilities of Powershell. Now each time I find myself doing something in Cloudberry I ask if it is something that I should script out for future use. Often times I find that a few minutes adding new capabilities to my script toolbox using these snapins ends up saving countless hours down the road. 

Summary

If you're using Amazon S3 for anything you're doing in your business you need to go out and get a license for CloudBerry S3 Explorer Pro. This tool is one of the most useful tools that I have found, not only do I use it daily but I bought licenses for everyone on our engineering team and they all use it pretty much daily as well. Cloudberry also makes tools for many of the other cloud based storage solutions. Pretty cool. Thanks a lot to the guys over at Cloudberry Labs for such a great tool!

http://cloudberrylab.com/

Mike Davis

Review All Your Invoices

The blog has been getting a little neglected lately, but we're still working on the products. We just released a new feature that allows customers to access their past invoices. We always email you your invoice as soon as your credit card is charged, but now you are able to go into the system and view all of your past invoices. Simply login to app.centripetalsoftware.com and click on the Account tab at the top. This will show you a summary list of all of your invoices.

From there you can click on any one of the invoices to access a detailed invoice that you can print out.

This is all done by accessing payment information that is stored in our Level 1 PCI DSS Compliant payment processor's system. So all of your credit card information is secure and no information will be available that could compromise your security.

Payment Information Updating

We’ve been working on a ton of new features and have released some of them, but the blog has been getting neglected. So I thought I’d throw up a tidbit of what we’re working on. We’ve been building out the admin section of the application to allow users to better manage the information about them and their account. The most recent bit we’re about to push out is a mechanism to update payment information. One of the downfalls of a recurring service that is automatically billed is that payment information gets out of date. It’s difficult to get people to update it, especially if there is no way to update it, so we’re working on making that a little bit easier.

 

Carbonite Review

Carbonite (found at carbonite.com) is a back up program for your computer’s files, music, videos, and more. It boasts of unlimited backup capacity, completely automatic retrieval, secure and encrypted file storage, and easy file recovery. The cost is $54.95/year with a free, no credit card required, trial.

According to their website, “The current version of Carbonite is designed for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Carbonite supports both the standard 32-bit and 64-bit versions of each. Carbonite will not support older versions of Windows (Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows ME) or Linux operating systems. Carbonite is also available for all Intel-based Macs running OS 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard), and 10.6 (Snow Leopard).”


Carbonite works by installing a small application on your computer that works in the background. There are no limits on the backup storage capacity, but Carbonite does warn that because of DSL speeds, a larger file file back up will take considerably longer to upload to their server.

I signed up for the free trial and have started the process as I write this review. I am running it on an Intel-based MacBook version 10.6.4. The installation process was simple and straightforward, however I was not pleased to read, after I started the program, that the initial back up could take several days.

Because I’m running this on a laptop, my computer will not stay on continuously for that amount of time. I’m not sure how this will affect the usefulness of this program. It may be better suited for a desktop computer that can stay connected to the Internet continuously in awake or sleep mode.

Once you install Carbonite, you can just let it run its course. It works in the background when your computer is idle, backing up new and changed files. All files are encrypted twice, using the same security measures banks do, and the information stays secure, only accessible for you to retrieve it if need be.

The retrieval process seems simple as well. A few clicks and your important files are brought back to your computer. You have the option of selecting which files to backup, and it’s important to check the preferences of the program to customize the default files Carbonite updates.

As a backup system, I believe Carbonite is worth looking into and considering. However, it is subject to being connected continuously to the Internet and DSL speeds. I think it would be a great option for desktop computers and their Carbonite Pro packages for multiple computers, is worth looking into for small businesses.

*It’s been one hour since I installed Carbonite on my Macbook and my initial backup is still initializing, no files have been uploaded to the Carbonite system yet... time will tell if I will continue with Carbonite as my backup solution. I will post an update to this post when (or if) my backup completes.

Kjaere Friestad
- guest blogger :: San Francisco, CA :: for Centripetal Software

1% for the Planet

We recently became a member company of 1% for the Planet. We did this because we care deeply about our planet and for all that God created, and want to ensure that our business does everything possible to help to better the place that we live. 1% for the Planet exists to build and support an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet. What Centripetal Software is committing to is giving 1% of sales to one of the environmental organizations listed on the 1% for the Planet web site. We will donate directly to a nonprofits—not through 1% FTP. We do everything we can to ensure that the way we run our business causes a minimal impact on our planet and we are committed to helping organizations that are working to make this a better place to live.

A moment of panic....

We recently had a Basecamp user call us with a hint of panic in their voice. They had been working with a consulting company that used Basecamp as the means for most of the communication with this person's company and as the mechanism to exchange all files that were deliverables as part of the consulting engagement. Well, as sometimes happens, the relationship wasn't quite working out and the man on the other end of the phone was desperate to get all of the data and files out of the Basecamp account before the consulting company was able to remove his access to the data. With Basecamp a company can grant access to a project to another company in order to collaborate on a project, this is typical for consulting companies to do with their clients. This man was looking to get a copy of all of his data and files for the work he had paid for over the past 2 years in order to have a copy of it all, as well as to have a record of communications in case the worst case should find the parties in court.

He was able to use Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp to export all of the todo's, messages, comments, files, & writeboards from Basecamp and have a local copy delivered to his desktop via Dropbox syncing. He was so excited to have this done so quickly and seemed relieved to know that he had a copy of everything that had become so important to his business. They had been using Basecamp so extensively with this consulting company that they didn't even realize how important the data had become to them and he didn't want to risk not being able to access it should the relationship further sour.

Customer Feature Request Product Release

We recently released a number of features and bug fixes to our core engine which were primarily based on customer feedback for both feature requests and bug reports. We’re pretty excited to be hearing so much from our customers and we’re always excited to be able to release software that is directly driven by what our customers want. This latest release includes the following:

• A fix to the way that we name files and directories and syncing that up with the way that we link them in the html exports. The issue was that we had some casing problems where we linked to a lower case directory name when the directory was actually camel cased. This only caused problems for our customers who are on Unix based systems where directory linking is case sensitive. Having come from Sun Microsystems and working exclusively on Unix systems for years, I feel bad that this one was missed, but working on Windows these days made this one slip by us unnoticed.
• We had a number of customers request that we add author information to the html exports for messages. We had limited what we put into the html exports with an aim of getting them released earlier. We’re open to any other enhancements that customers want to see there.
• We discovered a bug on exporting Basecamp messages from projects that are in an archived state. This was causing us to not receive the message body and so we printed out an empty message body in the html exports. We poked around and figured out how to extract this information from Basecamp.
• A recent (unannounced & undocumented) change by the Basecamp team was causing us to hit a rate limiting threshold on the API access we make to backup user data. We put in some workarounds and fixes so that we won’t hit that any more. This was simply causing our service to continually have to wait for a 20 second timeout period until we could make additional requests. With these new fixes we are now able to complete backup jobs much more quickly.

Please let us know if you have any additional feature requests. We love hearing from our customers.

 

We’re working on some new account management features now as well as an integration with Highrise for backing up all of that data.

Automated Invoice Emailing

We've been working on lots of new features and have completed a piece of our billing system updates. This latest feature enables automated emailing of monthly receipts to the email on file for the billing contact. We've opted all of our existing customers in to this new feature which will begin on the next billing cycle for each customer.

Centripetal deploys update for unannounced Basecamp API changes

Today 37Signals made modifications to their Basecamp API which modified the way in which they limit the number if calls that can be made to their APIs. Our application has always been in compliance with their requirements and it was because of our strong logging and monitoring that we noticed the issue right away. Basecamp doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to announcing changes to their applications that impact other people that are dependent on it, so we put some extra effort into some mechanisms that would alert us of those changes. When they made these changes today we saw the issues in our logs and began investigating as quickly as possible. Once understood the change we implemented a work around that works with new rules, tested it and deployed it to our servers. Our system is back up and running and all Basecamp backup jobs that hit this error will be picked back up by our scheduler and rerun within 24 hours. We also alerted other Basecamp API users of the issue so that they could know about it as well.

When we originally were settling on an architecture for Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp, these changes were one of the considerations that we took into account. We chose a hosted application model so that we could control the push of fixes as quickly as possible. Had we chosen a desktop application model that our users download and install on their system, our ability to fix issues would be drastically limited and impossible in most cases. The cloud based application model is one that has a lot of benefits for software vendors as well as customers alike.

Box.net Review

I recently signed up for the free "Lite" version of Box. I was given 1 GB of web-storage and a 25 MB file upload size limit. You can check out Box at Box.net. Box offers tools for securely uploading files to private and public folders that are then accessible for other contributors or embedded into your website for public access. You can also send to social media networks among a variety of other options.

The paid accounts at Box start at $9.95/month for individual users with 10 GB of storage and 1 GB file size limit, $15/user/month for business users (3+ users) with 15 GB of storage and 2 GB file size, and a variable pricing plan for larger companies, referred to as their Enterprise plan, with Unlimited storage and a 2 GB file size limit. Each paid plans offers a 14 day free trial. 

Wanting to just test the system out, I settled for the "Lite" version to dive into what Box has to offer me. After confirming my email address, Box directed me right away to starting the process of their product by creating a folder to be used to store my documents. 

I had the option of creating a private folder or inviting others to upload information to the folder I create. This would be very helpful if I needed people to submit documents to one central location that was easily accessible world wide. For now, I have decided to keep my folder private, but if I change my mind, it is fairly simple to invite collaborators to securely share files inside this folder. 

I created a folder called: Newsletters. When I'm not working for Centripetal Software, I work at a Preschool in the Bay Area. Part of my job is to create our monthly Newsletter. A program like Box would be very helpful for me even at the basic free version. Now I can upload my Newsletters here, invite the school director, board members, or other teachers to view my document, and/or send in contributions to be considered for publication.

As you can see from the screen shot below, I have different and easily understood options to explore after uploading my April Newsletter:

If I don't want to invite collaborators to directly view this folder, Box offers a great option of creating a specific email address for every folder I create. I can then share that email address with anyone, and all they have to do is send an email to contribute information to my folder. Box also creates both an embeddable link to the folder for your website, or a direct link, depending on how you want to share your information.

If I were to upgrade to a different level of Box, I'd have more options on file storage size, file controls, faster uploads, security options, etc. 

Box works with a variety of operating systems, including a Box app for the iPad. I viewed and tested Box in Safari on a Mac OS X operating system. It works on FireFox as well, however, I was unable to find other information on the site about what other Web browsers and systems it works in.

You can link your Box account with a variety of resources. For example, link your account to FedEx office, and send your documents directly from Box to be printed and shipped, or link your account to Twitter, and have updates to your Twitter account when you create a folder for the public eye. The list of applications to integrate to your Box account is impressive and provides tools for many different social and business networking options. 

I was very impressed with Box and think it's a great tool for individuals and business to look into to manage their important documents and files. It's easy to set up and use and I think a worthwhile tool for companies and individuals to look into.

Written by: Kjaere Friestad

Centripetal Software

Community Manager

Fun Product Overview Video

We've been working with Splainers for awhile now on the completion of an animated product overview video for our Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp product. It's finally done and up on our website, but I thought I'd throw it on the blog as well.

Protecting my critical business data in Basecamp

Centripetal Software specializes in building products to backup business data from online applications. One thing that we have been finding is that many of our customers are moving to online, cloud based, business tools like Basecamp and Highrise partially to get away from managing the infrastructure and all of the IT type of services that go along with running a data center. These customers picked Basecamp and Highrise because they were great tools that also had a stellar track record with availability, reliability and data protection. Many of them came to Centripetal Software to backup their files, Writeboards and data from Basecamp as an added layer of security because they are trusting Basecamp with some of their most critical business data. It's just makes sense for them to keep redundant copies of that data on their own computers.

One Centripetal customer recently said something that is typical of what a lot of customers have been saying:

"I’m looking to back up our Basecamp data because, even though I think 37signals and Amazon/S3 are two extremely solid companies and I fully trust them, I still need to protect our critical business data that exists solely on Basecamp.  I need redundant copies duplicated to our local servers somehow.  The other angle is Basecamp project archiving, we need to remove large projects from Basecamp to clear room for new ones. We mostly use the Files tab, in fact. Having everything automatically pushed to our Dropbox account is a huge help."

Centripetal customers are saying that they fully trust Basecamp, 37Signals, and Amazon S3 with their data, they are not backing up their data because they are afraid of 37Signals or Amazon screwing up. Instead this is an extra layer of security for people who want to stay in complete control of their data.

We recently completed a customer testimonial video with one of their customers that talks about this added layer of backup that people are looking for.

An extra layer of security for people who want to stay in complete control of their data

Here is a quote I got from a customer that is really typical of what I've heard a lot of customers tell me:

"I’m looking to back up our Basecamp data because, even though I think 37signals and Amazon/S3 are two extremely solid companies, I still need to protect our critical business data that exists solely on Basecamp.  I need redundant copies duplicated to our local servers somehow.  The other angle is Basecamp project archiving – it’s a real pain to pull a large project OFF of Basecamp (to clear room for new ones) since they don’t (yet) offer any sort of mass Files export.  We mostly use the Files tab, in fact.  Having everything automatically pushed to our Dropbox account is a huge help."

Our customers are telling us that they fully trust Basecamp, 37Signals, and Amazon S3, they are not backing up their data because they are afraid of them screwing up. Instead this is an extra layer of security for people who want to stay in complete control of their data.

Announcing New, Lower Pricing for Recurring Basecamp Backups

We heard it loud and clear from many of our customers that we hadn’t gotten our pricing quite right yet. We talked in detail to some industry experts, a number of current customers as well as lots of people who tried out our products but didn’t sign up for a paid plan and we think we have a set of prices for our monthly recurring plans that are in line with the service that is being offered. All new customers will be given these new prices, and all of our existing customers will also get the new pricing on all upcoming bills. Check it out and let us know what you think:

Automate Basecamp XML and HTML Exports for Free

We have recently been testing our new HTML export functionality for Basecamp data with our higher level plans. It was met with a lot of enthusiasm from our customers that were on those plans. We’ve now completed rolling that out to all of the plans including our free trial and our always free plan. What this means is that anyone can automate the export of all Basecamp data from your account and get it in both XML and HTML formats and have it delivered directly to you. Are you sick of going in to your Basecamp account when you think about doing a backup of your data? Are you afraid you might forget to do a backup that you might need? Do you wish you could request a data export in both html and xml and not have to choose one or the other? Would you rather just have your data delivered to your computer and not have to go and download something after it has run? Well our automated data export functionality does all of that for you. We even have plans that will get all of your Files and Writeboards at the same time.