Important question saurik! Our primary store is mongo. All data is replicated in different availability zones and at least one additional replica which is kept in a different ec2 region. A running snapshot backup is also taken at least every 30 minutes. Simperium isn't a messaging service. Every change is persisted and versioned. So for the Simplesmash demo, you could have a slider that would allow you to go back in time and replay movements. A note on versions: they are stored in an RRD like fashion. At first every version is kept, and as they accumulate; older versions are compacted and become less granular. We plan on making what level of granularity is kept an adjustable option in the future.

For sure EECS, all the ideas we are trying to validate are focus on growing plants. The way you didn't fill out the form was just right.

There are a lot of people in this space. By specializing your sign up is slightly more streamlined than groupme .. but only slightly -- http://groupme.com/ -- how do you see yourself comparing with them?

Clickable link: http://textmyfamily.com/

In a way I'm going for a worse-is-better tactic. It doesn't do everything GroupMe does, but -- as you say -- that means it can be simpler: there's less to configure, you don't have to download an app, you don't need a smart phone, and you don't need to know anything other than how to text (which, after all, not all mobile phone users even know how to do).

Nice, coralrift is slick. It does look super similar to http://staticloud.com

I wonder how much inspiration they have taken from there. It looks like they have uploaded their demo site to: http://dane2.staticloud.com/

Who would be the target market for this sort of service. It is potentially quite niche. Is it targeted towards users technical enough to be able to write html, css, and javascript. But not technical enough to use say Amazon's new static web site options on S3 http://bit.ly/h1rcJ8 or github's static hosting option?

We found out about Staticloud after we started but decided to keep going because we wanted to create something that people could use for their serious websites (like portfolios). Thus the need to have ownership of your subdomain and be able to add and remove files etc...

We were inspired partially by the struggles of our less technically minded classmates [we go to design school] who can piece together a simple portfolio but end up paying $5 a month to tear their hair out trying to figure out how to host their site on Godaddy.