Webware100

Yahoo's Briefcase service is a far cry from the arms race of free and low-cost storage providers on the Web, but it's wonderfully simple. Yahoo gives you 30MB of file storage you can keep and store at no cost. Users can create as many folders as they'd like and dump their files in one at a time, or en masse via a Web uploader.

What makes the service particularly useful is that you set the access of each file and folder with different levels of privacy, meaning if it's time to send that 25MB folder of photos to mom and dad, you can make sure they're the only ones you're giving access to.

Winner: Yahoo Briefcase (Birefcase.Yahoo.com)
Category: Utility

ShareFile is a service for business customers or anyone who wants to transfer small to large files instead of using e-mail and without having to resort to a more difficult solution like FTP or P2P software. While it's aimed mostly at business users, there's also a consumer version that lets people swap files up to 5GB in size. The business memberships throw in additional employee accounts as well as file encryption and larger file sizes all the way up to 150GB.

What makes ShareFile neat is that it's not simply a place to dump your files and get a URL. There's a powerful interface that makes it easy to sort through your files and set up complex rules on sharing, privacy protection, and distribution to your employees.

Winner: ShareFile (ShareFile.com)
Category: Utility

Pando is a peer-to-peer file-sharing technology. Pando users must be running the Pando client software, which lets them share files that are too large to share via e-mail or instant-messaging conversations. People can select any file on their hard drive and make it sharable using a link that can be sent through e-mail. It's also got a built-in Web video viewer that lets a user download or subscribe to video podcasts.

Pando is free, but it comes with a limit of 1GB on file sizes and download links that expire after a week. For power users, Pando offers three other premium services that let users transfer much larger files and do it at faster speeds.

Winner: Pando (Pando.com)
Category: Utility

OpenID was created to solve one of the Web's biggest annoyances: log-ins. You've already got a verified identity on one site, so why do you need one for every place you visit? With OpenID, site owners can simply built it into their Web apps and services, letting you use your verified credentials from one site in place of having to sign up for yet another log-in.

The hope of OpenID is that it becomes a standard and universal system across every site, letting new sites spring up and have users more comfortable with signing up with less hassle. As of right now, there are nearly 10,000 sites that support OpenID, and many large and popular companies are adding OpenID as an option for new user registration.

Winner: OpenID (OpenID.net)
Category: Utility

OpenDNS provides domain names systems (DNS) support to turn your site's URLs into Web pages that people can navigate to. The process of converting a domain into a machine-readable address requires services like OpenDNS, which happens to do all of this for free. In many ways, it's the middleman of taking a domain you buy off of a domain service and hooking it up to where the data is actually hosted.

OpenDNS also lets IT admins get a very high level of control over sites and services its users are trying to access including domain blocking, whitelisting, and content filtering. It's used in colleges, high schools, and businesses for these reasons.

Winner: OpenDNS (OpenDNS.com)
Category: Utility

LogMeIn is a remote desktop application that works on both Macs and PCs, letting you control and access files and data from one computer on another. It has several versions, including a free one that lets you control your computer remotely using a different mouse and keyboard. Advanced versions add in remote printing, drag-and-drop file transfer, and support for several people controlling the same PC simultaneously.

We like the service because its free flavor is so incredibly useful in times when you need to access something from your remote PC and don't want to mess with the lackluster solutions that come built-in to most computers.

Winner: LogMeIn (LogMeIn.com)
Category: Utility

Box.net is an online Web storage provider. Users can store 1GB of whatever they want, or pay a little extra for more space with the service's premium plans. What really makes the service stand out is its slick-looking file-sharing widgets. Users get instant previews of images, music, and text documents. The files reside in your Box.net storage area, and as the widget owner you can even upload files through the widget.

In 2007, Box.net launched a development platform for third-party sites and services to tap into Box.net's file systems to run applications right within the file browser. Users can add these services to their Box.net accounts free of charge, and tap into them by right-clicking on files. So far, there are more than 20 application tie-ins, with more on the way in 2008.

Winner: Box.net (Box.net)
Category: Utility

Amazon S3 is Amazon Web Services' online storage service. Anyone can buy a nearly limitless amount of Web storage for pennies per GB. Many start-ups and Web services take advantage of S3's low prices and fairly stable uptime to take the place of having to host and store data themselves. While there have been a couple of hosting hiccups, it's remained up and running since its public launch in early 2006.

One of the things that makes S3 more attractive to start-ups and power users is that it ties in with other Amazon Web Services like the elastic computing cloud and its SimpleDB service. Using all three, start-ups can offload some of the tasks that usually required spending a large amount of money up front to do this work--saving them, and potentially their customers time and money.

Winner: Amazon S3 (Aws.Amazon.com)
Category: Utility

BitTorrent is an advanced peer-to-peer sharing technology that runs using a client system. To share and transfer files, users must be running a BitTorrent software client on their computer. Some Web browsers such as Opera have built-in BitTorrent clients as part of its technology. BitTorrent works by splitting up files into tiny bits of data that can be shared in any order. Users work together to make the file available on demand. Even if just one person has an entire file initially, eventually after sharing it with others, the speed for downloading increases.

To share and download files using BitTorrent, users must first open a torrent file that contains tracking information to get things started. BitTorrent has become quite controversial as a result of sites and services that have sprung up to track and host these tracking files. While the technology remains a really great way to take the burden off servers and put it on to the users, it's a hotbed for piracy of music, movies, software, and other intellectual property.

Winner: BitTorrent (BitTorrent.com)
Category: Utility