Here at Mozy we have a lot of exceptional employees and today we are excited to congratulate one in particular for his hard work. He is a great example of what makes Mozy awesome!

This week Mozy won the Best use of Twitter award at this year’s Utah Social Media Awards from among 225 nominees. We credit Nate Karchtner from the Mozy marketing team for his continued creativity and innovative approaches to working behind the @Mozy Twitter handle. He helps Mozy engage with its customers and the tech community at large.

Nate started @Mozy in 2008, as an additional channel of communication and masterminded contests such as Free Account Friday and Guess the Prize. His work helping customers via Twitter has also been recognized in InfoWorld.

Nate has some great new ideas and plenty more excitement coming soon, so we encourage you to join the 6,000+ users following us on Twitter here. Additionally, check out Nate’s work on the Mozy Facebook fan page here.

UPDATE: Due to some circumstances beyond our control, we’ve had to discontinue the contest, but look for it to make a reappearance at a future time.

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Yeah, that’s a scary face. And just like the picture above, data loss is scary too! Just how scary? You show us!

Turns out we’re giving three $50 cash prizes to the owners of the scariest data loss faces. And if you’d rather spin us a nightmarish tale of your own data loss, we’ve got three $50 prizes for that too! Here’s how to enter:

1. Snap a picture of your scariest “I just lost all my data” face (original photos only) and/or write up your non-fiction data loss story in 200 words or less.
2. Send your submission to stories@mozy.com by October 25, 2009. Please include your name, age (we won’t post it), and city/state.
3. Six winners (3 photos, 3 stories) will be announced the week of Halloween and will each receive $50 cash.

You can get more info and check out submissions here!

Good luck, and be safe!

We here at Mozy are excited to announce a new partnership with Vodafone! Vodafone is the world’s largest international mobile telecom company, with mobile networks in over 70 countries (including a 45% stake in US telecom giant Verizon Wireless), more than 300 million customers, and over $60 billion in annual revenues. They will be introducing a range of business and consumer personal cloud services that are built on Decho’s Mozy online backup service. They’ll initially launch with a PC backup and data management service that will allow customers to protect, access, organize, and share their data. This service will be launched across a number of Vodafone’s European markets throughout the rest of the year.

This partnership, along with our partnerships with China Telecom and McAfee, highlight the emergence of “the personal cloud,” a phrase coined by Frank Gillett of Forrester (subscription required) to mean the movement of individuals’ personal data into the cloud, where they’ll be able to monitor, safeguard, and use their data anytime, anywhere. It’s an exciting revolution in the way we interact with our information, and we’re thrilled to be at the forefront.

McAfee has made a name for itself combating the biggest security threats on the Internet. Millions of McAfee customers around the globe have come to rely on McAfee to protect themselves against identity theft, phishing scams, spyware and malicious web sites. It isn’t a big leap to protecting customers from hard disk crashes, theft and accidental deletion.

McAfee is introducing a new online backup service, and guess what, McAfee Online Backup is powered by Mozy. The new service is available to customers in the US today, with availability in other countries later this year.

We’re delighted to be working with McAfee to bring online backup to their millions of customers. Protecting over 15 petabytes of customer information for more than a million customers, Mozy is the world’s most trusted online backup service.

In the past several years, Internet usage in China has absolutely exploded, and now there are more than 330 million Chinese Internet users who, like everyone else, have data that needs to be protected and secured.

That’s why we here at Decho/Mozy are excited to announce our partnership with China Telecom, the largest telecommunications and broadband provider in China! With China Telecom’s 214 million fixed lines, 47 million broadband subscribers, and 35 million mobile users, we’ll be able to help millions of Chinese Internet users protect and manage their data in the cloud!

We’re calling the new service eYun (which is Chinese for eCloud). It’s powered by Mozy and already has 15,000 pilot users,. We’ll initially be providing safe, secure online backup services, but in the future, eYun will let users do even more with their data with additional cloud services.

You can find out more about the Mozy/China Telecom partnership in our press release.

In response to several questions regarding Mozy’s compatibility with Snow Leopard, we’re happy to announce that our QA team has approved Mozy for Apple’s latest and greatest software. In fact, we’ve made Snow Leopard the preferred Mozy operating system for Mac.

Our reasons for doing so are twofold:

1. Running the latest Mozy client on Snow Leopard provides gains in the client’s stability and speed.
2. The sooner we get the majority of our Mac users on Snow Leopard, the sooner our engineers can take advantage of Snow Leopard’s 64-bit architecture. What does this mean for you? An even faster, more stable, and more feature-rich Mac Mozy client.

We’ll keep you updated as more releases and updates become available. In the meantime, be safe!

For the past few months, we’ve been giving away free MozyHome accounts on Twitter via a simple contest – we call it Mozy Free Account Friday.

It’s been pretty popular (after all, it’s hard to beat free), so we’ve decided to expand the contest to Facebook. After all, Facebook users need love (and backup) too!

So starting tomorrow, we’ll be giving away a FREE 1-year MozyHome subscription ($54.45 value!) to a randomly chosen entrant each Friday. Sounds great, right? Well it is! So here’s how it will work – in order to be considered you must:

1. Be a fan of Mozy at the time of the giveaway.
2. At some point between 12:00 AM MST and 11:59 PM MST Friday, you must post the following message (or words to this effect):
   

   I just entered Mozy Free Account Friday to win a free year of unlimited online backup! You can win too! Just become a fan of Mozy, post this message in your status, and let Mozy know you’re entered on their fan page! (for more info, check out http://bit.ly/dM9qs)

3. I’ll have a status message posted at 12:00 AM MST Friday on the Mozy fan page. Simply comment on that status to let me know you’re entered!

You can enter the Facebook and Twitter contests once per week. We’ll announce the winner the following Monday. Good luck, and be safe!

UPDATE: In order to verify your compliance with all the requirements should you win, I’ll be briefly friending you. Just so you know.

Hey moms,

From your first family photo as a mother to last year’s tax return, your computers are full of irreplaceable photos, videos, and documents. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything you do and manage your own backup system. Mozy wants to let you know that we have your backup.

During the month of June, you will be able to choose a free T-shirt or onesie for signing up for an unlimited MozyHome account. If Mozy is already automatically backing up your files, you can still get a shirt or onesie by posting a message about Mozy to your blog.

For more details, go to mozy.com/moms.

Yesterday CNET named Mozy the 2009 CNET Webware 100 winner in the Infrastructure & Storage category. The Webware 100 Award honors the people’s choice in the best sites and services available today.

We thank each Mozy customer who voted for Mozy and helped us win the award. After more than 6,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, the CNET editors narrowed the nominations to 300 in each category. From this list, web users voted more than 600,000 times to select the top 10 products from each category.

The award points to Mozy’s popularity and leadership in the online backup market. We won the award because of the support of our great customers, and we thank our customers for their enthusiasm.

Recently Webware, part of the CNET community, posted finalists for the Webware 100 awards and Mozy was chosen as a finalist! We’d be honored if you took a minute to show your love and give your props for Mozy before voting closes on April 30. It’s easy to vote and no registration is required. Just go here to vote.