LaCie merges with online-storage start-up Wuala

LaCie, known in the United States for its external-storage products such as the LaCie Biggest, announced on Thursday its merger with Caleido, the Swiss creator of an online storage service called Wuala.

The move is a sign that LaCie intends to enter the cloud storage service market.

Unlike the established LaCie, which was founded in France in 1989, Wuala is still a relatively new start-up. Before the merger, the company's personnel included just 11 people, including two part-timers. Nonetheless, Wuala has gained substantial traction with tens of thousands of users, mostly Europeans.

Wuala's service include innovative online storage that allows its users to store, back up, access, and share files with one another from anywhere in the world. Users start with 1GB of storage but can get as much as they want, either by trading idle disk space or by buying additional storage.

According to Philippe Spruch, founder and CEO of LaCie, the merger would allow LaCie to use Wuala's innovative online-storage solution to transform the company from a hardware manufacturer to a comprehensive digital-storage provider.

Cloud storage has become a big trend with the involvement of many storage and networking vendors, such as Netgear, with its new ReadyNAS Vault, or Marvell, with the Sheeava computer.

[websterphreaky]

LaCie stuff was ALWAYS over-priced, guess they caught that bug from the Greedy at Apple, and not as good as some other major brands for innovation and features. Maxtor long had One Touch built-in backups, while LaCie had NADA!

I see Wuala and LaCie going down the tubes in this Obummer black economy.

[Markus2008]

Wow, so many things you said make me want to throw up...

I'm thinkin a lot of computer "geeks" are gonna be learnin how to use a shovel and broom in the new socialist state of obummer. Thank you websterphreaky

[andreas-wuala]

Dong, thank you for announcing the Deal. We're glad about it and we're looking forward into a great future. However, may I add a fact to your arguments: What really sets Wuala apart from all the other so called "cloud storage" providers, is that we are actually building a cloud. That is we're using idle resources in a distributed P2P storage system to build a storage cloud with millions of devices. To my understanding this is unique because all the others rely on Amazon S3 You can find more information about Wuala's truly unique technology in the technology section of our website: http://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology or you may watch a record of the founder Dominik talking at Google Tech Talks back in 2007: http://www.wuala.com/en/learn/techtalk

[sandor_f]

Glad to hear from someone involved... the article/report seems to vaguely infer that there is a bit-torrent/shared environment of some type with regard to Wuala's cloud, so i am happy to hear it confirmed.

The only downside i see right now is dependence on a single software for access to any data you have on the proprietary cloud... but it is intriguing nonetheless.

[caxqueiroz]

Wuala concepts are great, P2P users sharing storage all over the world. However, the technology they have used to implement it are a bit cumbersome. Lack of access through proxy, relying on java applets for "web" access, a mandatory GUI (Mac and Windows) when some users just want to use "virtual" drives are some of the issues with wuala technology. Not using FUSE to support virtual drives was a big mistake IMHO. I was one of the first Wuala users, since I started spend more time at Uni (through a proxy) I stopped using Wuala. Had to migrate to some solution that supports proxy such as Amazon S3.

[bethinoklahoma]

This just seems like another of a very long line of free online storage services (be it with a twist). The problem is that there is simply no an endless supply of money to support this stuff anymore. Once you run out of what you have you better be able to support your business model or you are going to have to end the service.

When is the tech world going to learn that you giving away services with no way to get your money back never works in the long run.

How many of you have free online storage accounts someplace, uploaded a few files and never went back....

Ten Million Customers X $0 = Ten Million Zeros!

Just my thoughts