Bill Erickson
New Media Entrepreneur

I drove up to Lake Travis last night and within 30 minutes of getting here my powerbook was broken. I was updating my blackberry with iCal and it crashed, now it won’t boot up. But, it’s shown me how unnecessary bringing a laptop really is. All the data I care about is in the clouds, and accessible from almost any device.

I’m subscribed to all my blogs I follow through Bloglines, which can be accessed anywhere; it even has a great mobile interface so I can access it from my blackberry. My email is on gmail and also comes to my blackberry. All my documents and files for projects I’m working on (Coursevote, and a few others) are on my Backpack account, web-based software offered by 37signals. Most of my photos are up on flickr. All my bookmarks are up on del.icio.us. The only thing I don’t have access to are the movies I put on my laptop to watch while I was here, and some applications (Photoshop, Fireworks…all my web dev apps).

Luckily I have a daily backup of my laptop back in College Station, just in case the Apple store can’t fix this. People have told me “you only need to back up your important files, documents…no need to waste space backing up applications.” All my important files, documents…everything except a few of my applications are already backed up through all the web services I use. And you could say all my music and movies are “backed up” on sites like The Pirate Bay .

5 years ago, if my computer broke I wouldn’t be able to get any work done. Nowadays, my powerbook just provides a pretty interface for me to interact with my data and applications in the clouds.