Transferring a large file isn't always easy. When e-mail won't work (which it often doesn't for files of any heft), you can burn to a disc or send a file piecemeal, but neither option provides much value to the person who just needs your file now, and simply.
Online file-sharing services can transfer large files for you. To use these services, you upload your file to them, and then your recipient gets a link to the download. The file itself doesn't go through e-mail, just the link to it. Let's look at a few different products that perform this service.
Box.net
Box.net may be billed as a service designed for companies, but it's equally useful for consumers.
Overall, Box is extremely easy to use and its interface is second to none. After signing up for an account, you can upload a file of up to 1GB in size, add comments to it to provide some context for other users, and save it to a single folder or multiple folders on the site. Once the file is uploaded, you can e-mail or IM a Box link to others, who can then download that file to their local machine. You can even create a shared workspace and work together online. Whether it was uploading the file or using that shared workspace, Box provided me with an outstanding experience.
One of Box's best features is its customizable widget. After heading to its widgets page, you can upload files, customize the look and feel of your widget, and share it with others by embedding it in your Web site or blog. You can keep adding files until you hit the 1GB limit. It's a really neat feature and a great way to share files that you don't mind keeping unsecured. I created my widget (right) in under a minute.
Unfortunately, Box only provides 1GB of storage a 25MB upload limit for free. If you need more than that, the company charges $7.95 for 5GB of storage and 1GB uploads or $15 per user per month for businesses that want 15GB of storage and 1GB uploads.
Dropbox
Dropbox is similar to Box because it allows you to upload files and share those with others. But in order for them to see the files, the service requires you to add them as authorized users.
Once you sign up for Dropbox, you can immediately start uploading files and creating separate folders to control access to documents. Once a folder is created, you can share it with others by inputting their e-mail addresses into the sharing box on Dropbox. The service then sends those users a link to sign up and start sharing access to the folder.
Dropbox makes it easy to upload files.
(Credit: Dropbox)Uploading files in Dropbox is simple and generally zippy. If you want to create a photo gallery that can be viewed by anyone, the site boasts a Photos section where you can upload pictures. And although it works as advertised, it doesn't compare to nicer galleries like those you'll find on Flickr.
One of the most compelling reasons to use Dropbox is its offline functionality. When you sign up, you can download the company's desktop client, which allows you to drag-and-drop files into it. Once complete, it syncs with your online account in the background while you work. It's an outstanding feature.
Dropbox also offers an attractive pricing model. Although it doesn't provide as many collaboration features as Box, it offers more capacity for free. In fact, you can upload up to 5GB for free. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year to have 53GB of storage.
... Read moreLast night I attended the Crunchies award ceremony, where Facebook took top honors as the best overall start-up (See the full list of Crunchies award winners). The awards are based on a popularity contest via votes cast through the Crunchies Web site and with input from the Crunchies Committee, consisting of co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and advisors.
The most surprising winner for the evening was in the Microsoft's Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement. The competition included Facebook Connect (the runner-up), Google Friend Connect, Google Chrome, Swype and Yahoo BOSS.
Given that Microsoft is often vilified by the Web 2.0, start-up community, and the stellar competition in the category, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won without a little help from the Crunchies Committee. On the other hand, the Microsoft community is large and mighty and perceptions are slowing shifting to be more positive about the openness of the giant software company. In any case, it's a deserved award, which was accepted by Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, and David Treadwell, who runs the Live Services Platform.
David Treadwell and Ray Ozzie discuss the mesh with GigaOm's Om Malik.
(Credit: Andrew Mager)Live Mesh is essential glue for synchronizing files with all the devices a user might touch, and as a kind of information bus for identity, notifications, and other Web services. Microsoft, with its huge footprint, is uniquely positioned to provide a universal, operating system- and device-agnostic syncing foundation.
Ozzie and his team are working on a complete transformation of the back end and the front end, moving from PC-centric to multi-screen, he told me during a brief conversation at the Crunchies. Microsoft's Azure cloud service is another key part of the transformation, but is lagging behind Live Mesh. "2009 is still a learning year for Azure, just as 2008 was the Mesh," Ozzie said.
The challenge for Azure is moving the massive scale Microsoft platforms like XBox Live, to the Azure cloud-services architecture. "In 2009 Azure will be more mature, you'll see some large-scale usage," Ozzie said. But it won't be until 2010 that Azure is ready for prime time.
Ozzie is mindful of the profound changes culturally and technologically among its developers that Microsoft must undergo to realize the Live Platform and Azure cloud services vision. "When we are in an environment with technological and environmental change, you have to focus on these new huge constraints, but also new opportunities for destruction or rebirth," he said during a Crunchies interview with Om Malik.
For a photo replay of the Crunchies, check out Andrew Mager's post.
Late last week Microsoft quietly released an update to its Live Mesh product to support mobile access. From your phone's Web browser you can access the service via m.mesh.com. If you're on a Windows Mobile device, or any other phone that supports file system access you can upload files over the Web to your Live Mesh storage--something that's helpful for things like photos taken from your phone's digital camera.
In addition to the file browser, the mobile version of Mesh includes the same news feed functionality that lets you track all the changes to stored files. Missing is an installable client, which is on the horizon and will provide real-time file changes and deeper system integration on supported handsets.
Mesh opened up to everyone late last week. Microsoft's vision of creating a syncing tool for anyone echos Apple's latest online subscription service, MobileMe. The key difference is in price and device support with Apple's solution costing $99 a year and offering deep integration with the iPhone. Incidentally, earlier on Monday, blog LiveSide also got their hands on a pre-beta version of the upcoming Mac client of Live Mesh which has Finder integration but no remote desktop support unlike its Windows cousin.
Microsoft's solution may not be as developed as Apple's (yet), but it will be far more open with eventual support for a multitude of devices with no cost for the end user. Microsoft is expected to unveil a development platform later this year that should let application creators tie in their services for file access and notifications.
Grab files from Mesh on any mobile device, including the iPhone. But sending them to your cloud storage requires a Windows Mobile or Symbian handset.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)
There is no business model behind it, but mesh Wi-Fi company Meraki is offering free Wi-Fi access to San Francisco, one neighborhood at a time, as I discovered when I passed by the company's folksy demo table at my local farmers' market last month (see report from local newspaper). But Meraki is not in the business of just blasting money out the door, which it appears to be doing in San Francisco, and there is a method to this program.
Meraki's business is actually quite straightforward: it sells wide-area Wi-Fi network hardware, and provides the management consoles to go with it. If you want to give a building, a street, a town, or a city access to Wi-Fi, you buy some Meraki Wi-Fi boxes, plug a few of them in to broadband connections, and they configure themselves to wirelessly share the connection among each other and among users.
Stick this free gizmo in your window in San Francisco to boost the Meraki signal, for yourself and others.
(Credit: Meraki)Unlike other creative Wi-Fi mesh companies Fon and Whisher, Meraki is not aiming to build a global free Wi-Fi network. Rather, it's simply a Wi-Fi hardware company. If you run a mall and want to provide Wi-Fi access to everyone in it, get Meraki equipment (or spend more for competing products from Cisco, Tropos, Skypilot, or Nortel). If you want to change the world by connecting existing broadband connections together into a giant mesh that anyone can use for free (and break ISP terms of service in the process), sign up for Fon.
That's not to say that Meraki isn't out to change the world. Its technology of relatively inexpensive Wi-Fi access points coupled with its hosted management console can make it cost-effective for a community to light up wireless access for everyone. It's like the OLPC of Wifi (and to be clear, OLPC devices have their own mesh Wi-Fi routers built in).
User access to Meraki services can be free or paid. Meraki has the software for both, and doesn't really care how its devices are configured, since it's basically a hardware company. The hardware costs $150 for an indoor repeater and $250 for an outdoor-hardened router. You can also set up an ad-supported Meraki network, and get a discount on hardware.
Meraki co-founder Sanjit Biswas told me that one hardwire connection can be distributed to about 10 repeaters, and that each repeater can handle about 10 users at a time. And, of course, Meraki networks can multiplex multiple broadband connections together and share all their bandwidth with all their users. Most users will get about 2 megabytes a second of throughput.
Free Meraki nodes in San Francisco.
Which brings us back to San Francisco and the loss-leader network it's building here. San Francisco is Meraki's test kitchen. If you're in one of the covered neighborhoods, you can just hop on the network for free. If you can see the signal but want a stronger connection in your house, the company will send you a repeater you can set up in a window (thereby expanding the network's footprint). If you're in an expansion area for the San Francisco project but have no signal, you might be able to get Meraki to bolt an outdoor repeater on to your house; the company may connect it to a DSL connection that it installs and pays for (you'll only have access to the Meraki signal, though, not the raw DSL link). Coming soon will be solar-powered repeaters, which will make Meraki's build-out even easier.
Another thing Meraki is testing in San Francisco is how to work with municipalities. Meraki may just provide San Francisco the city-wide free Wi-Fi access that the mayor, Google, and EarthLink together couldn't maneuver into being. But this project is a one-off. Biswas says Meraki does not want to be the primary driver of a muni Wi-Fi project. Rather, the company will sell its technology to whatever agency or company wants to sponsor the installation. Arguing the politics of public versus private wide-area Wi-Fi is not what a hardware provider needs to do. It wins no matter which way the wind blows.
After getting into the limited beta for Microsoft's Live Mesh, blogger Long Zheng wanted to find a way to share the opportunity.
It turns out that each person who gets added to the beta gets to invite a few others, by sharing files with them.
"As soon as I got my own invite, I started thinking of the original 'Gmail invite sharing' Web site and began to build one for Live Mesh," Zheng said on his Istartedsomething blog. "Thus, www.sharemesh.com was born. If you would like a Live Mesh invite or have one to share, I encourage you to check it out."
So far, more than 190 invitations have been shared via the site. Some 1,400 people have registered seeking invitations.
Microsoft announced a beta of Live Mesh at last week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, but said the test would be limited initially to about 10,000 testers. The company said it expects to continue adding testers, with plans for a broad beta this fall.
As with most core strategies at Microsoft, Live Mesh has a strong platform angle.
At the Web 2.0 Expo on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled Live Mesh, a cloud service for synchronizing files, folders, and Web-delivered content, such as news feeds, across multiple devices.
Along with giving people access to a test version, the company offered a tech preview that will allow developers to access the Mesh APIs to write Web applications with the data-syncing features.
People have long said Microsoft doesn't "get" the Web or is too tied to its desktop heritage. Well, part of the PC legacy is the hard drive, as in "your information."
With Ray Ozzie as chief software architect, Microsoft is tackling one of the trickiest computing problems of the day: data.
(Credit:
CNET News.com)
• Services Are the Core of the Platform--the Live Mesh platform exposes a number of core services including some Live Services that can all be accessed using the Live Mesh API; these include Storage (online and offline), Membership, Sync, Peer-to-Peer Communication and Newsfeed.
• Same API on Clients and in the Cloud--the programming model is the same for the cloud and all connected devices, which means a Live Mesh application works exactly the same regardless of whether it's running in the cloud, in a browser, on a desktop, or on a mobile device.
• Open, Extendable Data Model--a basic data model is provided for the most common tasks needed for a Live Mesh application; developers can also customize and extend the data model in any fashion that is needed for a specific application.
• Flexible Application Model--developers can choose what application developer model best fits their needs.
Reaction among developers and tech bloggers has been generally positive, likely because Live Mesh seems to serve a real need for people with multiple devices. Developers also shed light on how the platform helps Microsoft competitively.
Josh Catone at ReadWrite Web said that Live Mesh brings offline access to Web applications, much like Adobe AIR and Google Gears (which is still in development). Catone writes:
"Web apps using the Mesh platform will be able to lean on the client software to take their Web applications offline, including all user data, and sync it up when the user gets back online at a later time.
Microsoft is taking an offline approach that is more akin to Google Gears or Mozilla Prism than Adobe AIR--the Web-to-desktop functionality of Mesh is essentially a wrapper for the actual Web app.
Ryan Stewart, a rich Internet application (RIA) evangelist at Adobe Systems, pointed out how important Live Mesh is to getting Silverlight, Microsoft's alternative to Adobe Flash, onto more devices. Live Mesh only works on Windows machines now, but Silverlight runs on the Mac OS, Linux through Moonlight, and mobile devices. Stewart writes:
"As an RIA fan boy, I'm excited to see what people build on top of Live Mesh because I think it tries to solve the right problem. We should just have access to our data. It shouldn't matter if we're in the browser, on the desktop, or on a device. That's a goal I think both Adobe and Microsoft share and I think the next couple of years are going to be great in unifying the Web and getting rid of 'Web application' versus 'browser applications.' They're just going to be applications when all is said and done."
Meanwhile, all that talk of Web OSes or Webtops seems to be coming from Microsoft, the company with presumably the most to lose as computing moves from the PC to the Web.
"Is this like a WebOS (Webdesktop, Webtop?)--yes, although everyone seems to be avoiding the term, this is a lot like all those WebOS apps you've seen. You get a virtual desktop with 5GB of storage and you can access it from anywhere. It's integrated with Windows' Remote Desktop, so it's really simple to set up," writes Stan Schroeder at Mashable.
What developers actually do with the Live Mesh platform remains to be seen. But third-party applications are key to delivering on its promise.
Microsoft is announcing Live Mesh today in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Expo. It's an ambitious technology platform for sharing data among people, apps, and devices. Consumers will first be exposed to the technology in a personal data synchronization and device-sharing product of the same name, competing directly with products like LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, SugarSync (review), Syncplicity (review), and Microsoft's own FolderShare, and SyncToy.
We tried the technology preview version of the app. As a sync tool for PCs, it's got good potential. It is easy to perform the basic operations of adding PCs to your sync pool and to define which folders you want to keep replicated. Synced data is automatically copied from PC to PC when both devices are online. It's more difficult to set up the system so directories with different structures sync to each other, but once you find the option to do so, there's a lot of flexibility.
Live Mesh shows you your synced devices in a cute animated "ring." (Click image for gallery.)
Live Mesh is free. It also gives each user a free but limited (5GB) Web-based storage pool, the Live Desktop, that acts like another sync point: You tell it which of your PCs' folders you want to see on the site, and the data is copied over. Some media types, like MP3s, can be streamed directly from the Live Desktop using a Silverlight media player.
Live Mesh grafts a sidebar window onto Windows Explorer for directories that are synced. (Click image for gallery.)
Live Mesh allows users to share their directories with other people, but this feature isn't fully built out. It's currently possible to give another person full access to a synced folder on your PC, but I couldn't find a way to share just a single file, nor share a file or folder from the Web-based Live Desktop (which would have been better, since sharing from a PC means you have to leave your PC on for the other person to see the files). I also couldn't find a way to give other people read-only access to my directories.
One big plus: Live Mesh integrates Windows' built-in Remote Desktop function. It's easier to set up remote access using Live Mesh than any other app I've used.
The Web-based Live Desktop lets you stream your synced media files. (Click image for gallery.)
And there's a handy notifier widget with Live Mesh that shows you what's happening with all your shares and syncs: Who's accessing them, changing files, and so on. Once you start building out a large mesh of files and folders among various devices and people, this will become an important tool for keeping up with what's happening to your data.
Ready for prime time? No.
Our recommendation: If you're currently using another file or folder synchronization product, stand pat. Live Mesh is too rough around the edges. In addition to the user interface issues, I found that during initial sync it dragged my systems' performance down a lot. I would hope performance improves as Microsoft inches toward a public release of Mesh. But we are talking Microsoft here, so that's not a given.
As I said at the beginning of this review, Live Mesh has a ton of potential. Fix the performance, the user interface, and add Mac and mobile clients (in the works), and it could help people really get a handle on their far-flung data. Add an option for unlimited online storage (like HP Upline; review) and it becomes a killer backup app. We'll keep an eye on this one, and we recommend you do, too, but I wouldn't rush to install it today.
CNET News.com reporter Ina Fried got briefed by Microsoft's Noah Edelstein and recorded this video demo:
See also:
Live Mesh: a glimpse of Ozzie's plan
Peering through the Ozzie Mesh
FAQ: Making sense of Live Mesh
While Microsoft eventually hopes its Live Mesh effort will be a way for people to share data across all of their devices, the service that launches next week will be limited in several ways, CNET News.com has learned.
Next week, Microsoft will launch a pre-beta "technology preview" open to about 10,000 testers in the U.S., according to a source familiar with the company's plans.
File synchronization is an important component of Mesh, but not its only feature, the source said. Developers will be able to write their own applications for Live Mesh, with the idea that applications written for Mesh can then be accessed by a number of different devices.
Another key aspiration for Live Mesh is that it work with more than just Microsoft products. Out of the gate it will work with "multiple browsers," the source said. Initially it will be limited to XP and Vista PCs as well as Windows Mobile phones, however Microsoft wants to add Mac support as well more types of phones and even other devices, such as MP3 players.
Live Mesh is also not just a space for linking one's own devices and information. Users will be able to invite friends to share parts of their Mesh.
Ray Ozzie first talked about Mesh in a speech at last month's Mix '08 event in Las Vegas.
"Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications," he said. "Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub."
The company will have more to say at Web 2.0 Expo next week, as well as at an April 24 event, both taking place in San Francisco. A Microsoft representative said the company did not have any comment ahead of its events next week.
Meshly is a new nanoblogging platform that's built around publishing via instant messages. Users can create and publish posts in AIM, Google Talk, or Windows Live Messenger using IM bots. Creating posts is like having a conversation with someone. Type "post" to the IM robot and it will ask you to fill out the post title, body, links, and tags, before it publishes the content to Meshly's post queue.
Once post are there, other Meshly users can vote to decide which ones are interesting. Stories that have piqued enough user interest will be promoted to the front page, which is a system closely matching Digg's.
Users can vote on small posts, comment on them, and see a short description.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I'm not sold on the usefulness of a system that enables posting only via instant messenger (instead of a browser and/or a mobile platform). Nor am I sold on the system's ability to scale to something the size Twitter has become. Just a casual glance at the front page of Twitter shows that all of the public posts have happened within the last minute--hardly something that can be kept track of easily. Digg has gotten around the problem of dealing with the huge amount of submissions by adding a cloud feature that groups together tons of headlines.
Adding a rating system on tiny blog posts to corral them is an interesting idea. I'd like to see something similar done to Twitter's limited favorites system, which becomes cluttered quickly for heavy Twitter users. For publishing, though, one of the things that makes services like Digg, Twitter, and Tumblr so great is their easy-to-use publishing tools.
[via StartupSquad]
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