Peer to web gains momentum; BoxCloud launches workspaces

By Vivek | February 27th, 2007 at 12:45 am ET         

While the regular p2p companies move to newer business models(read Bittorent selling movies), the upcoming breed of media and file sharing startups that enable file publishing from PC are appearing on the horizon. Last year I had written about PurpleNova that was one of the first few companies operating in this space. While PurpleNova has struggled a bit on expanding its feature set, world didn’t stop at that. BoxCloud from WiredReach is another smartly designed per-web publishing platform. WiredReach based out of Austin, TX is a 5 member team led by Ash Maurya. WiredReach’s technology is based on 2+ years of development effort of the team of what what was supposed to be a white label media sharing platform. Realizing the potential of their product they had built and realities of the ever changing market, WiredReach launched BoxCloud around 6 months back.

BoxCloud is gives the feel of an instant messenger that enables file/folder sharing, which makes it easier to understand for ordinary users. Since this is a peer-web sharing application, any files you share through BoxCloud, can be accessed over a standard browser. So no need to ask the other party to download and install a new client. You just make sure that your PC is up or you cache the files at BoxCloud server so that the files are accessible any time.

Over the past weekend BoxCloud launched support for workspaces that adds much need advanced collaboration feature to the platform. Instead of throwing out all the files to be shared at one place, now you can create workspaces for your individual projects, invite people to those workspaces, and share files specific with each of them. BoxCloud has also thrown in goodies like workspace dashboard, RSS feeds for workspaces, easy sorting of files by file type, and more.

From the pricing perspective, BoxCloud is one the best deals around that gives 1 GB space/bandwidth free for a month, while also having a top plan that gives 50 GB of space for $99/month for unlimited workspaces and number of people you can share with. Till date over 4500 companies/teams have signed up for BoxCloud service with number of them going in for the paid plans.

Personally I always like to stay in control of the files I share, while staying away from the pains of waiting around when larger files need to uploaded onto 3rd party servers. BoxCloud is the perfect solution for this scenario.

Links:
BoxCloud