Izimi p2web; Obopay with Citibank; adManager bait

By Vivek | February 28th, 2007 at 05:17 pm ET     4 Comments »    

Izimi: is another peer-to-web application in making. Right now in private beta and launching early next month, Izimi will enable users to serve files, photos, videos right from their PC. The UK based startup is supposed to have raised a small amount of funding totaling £150k from Star Capital just under $3million. Earlier I had written about Boxcloud and PurpleNova operating in the same space.

Citibank+Obopay: The mobile payment startup has finally hit gold. Obopay is running a pilot program with Citibank to enable its credit and debit card customers to instantly send and receive money via any mobile phone. Besides this customers will be able to remotely track and manage their mobile payment accounts by checking balances, viewing payment histories, and adding funds directly from their mobile phone. Last time I had written about Obopay, the startup had raised $10 million in funding. Since than Obopay has acquired BillMonk and undergone major management additions.

Microsoft adManager: The software giant is throwing out a bait for existing and new Microsoft Office Live subscribers to get them hitched onto the Microsoft adManager. As part of a new offer all those users who activate Microsoft Office Live adManager beta between February 20, 2007 and July 31, 2007 will get a $50 Microsoft adCenter credit. As I have said before, I am completely lost in this Microsoft+Office+Live mumbo jumbo. I mean what has a word like “Office” got to do with a word like “adManager”? Does anyone ever listen over there? Anyway these offers fall far short of what Google has been doing to promote Adwords and Checkout.

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

PurpleNova - makes every PC a Web-Server

By Vivek | December 21st, 2006 at 03:47 pm ET         

Infinishare Technologies has officially launched its file sharing and hosting product, PurpleNova, that lets any PC act as an Web-Server and host files. PurpleNova users can host any files and content from right from their PC, which can than be accessed through a URL over standard HTTP protocol.

Infinishare based out of Pune, India, is co-founded and partly self-funded by Anand Soman and Yogesh Chitnis, and has received strategic financing from one of India’s largest ISP Netmagic. Anand a serial entrepreneur, who has done his MS and PhD from Caltech, previously co-founded Intigma, a provider of spend data management technology, which was bought by Emptoris last year.

Purplenova claims that they have developed a superior technology as compared to Apache or IIS (or any other traditional web-server) because they cannot work from behind NAT Routers / Firewalls / Proxies. PurpleNova lets you easily share files using a desktop client and the files are made available over a standard browser of any type. As compared to traditional file sharing where you need to host content onto third-party hosting companies like x-drive or Yousendit that have privacy issues involved, all the data stays on your PC when you share files using PurpleNova.

To start sharing files, you need to download and install the PurpleNova client(2.2 mb). After that just browse and select the files you want to share, and PurpleNova gives you a unique URL for the shared file that you can share with other people. Files can be hosted in public or private mode by limiting the number of times the file is accessed. You also have an option to encrypt your files using a password. Any files you upload, PurpleNova automatically categorizes by according to the type like image or video files. By default files are not stored on PurpleNova servers, but in case you are going to boot down your machine you can set the files to be cached at the PurpleNova servers for certain number of hours before the cache gets purged.

Real advantage of hosting files using PurpleNova is that you can access the shared files using any browser including your mobile. You don’t get this feature with regular p2p clients where you required to install their client on either end. Among other uses, if you looking to stream your music playlists, you can share them using PurpleNova and later access it using the URL in winamp or Windows Media Player.

From the technology side I am not sure how things work, but it might be possible that the PurpleNova PC client establishes a persistent connection with the PurpleNova server to maintain a continuous communication. On the other end when someone needs to access the shared file, PurpleNova resolves your username to the IP address of your machine and serves the file. This is just an idea from my side, and I surely hope there is more to the backend technology at work.

Overall I like the idea of sharing files without uploading to an external server or making people understand how and why they need to install software to access shared files.

Links:
PurpleNova