Ladies and gents, Swiss start-up Wuala has launched. This is a free social online storage service. What’s up with the “social” part, you might ask. Well, it refers to the easy share features and the possibility to see what your friends are uploading. In addition to centralized servers, Wuala is a mesh/cloud/P2P storage which can harness idle resources of participating users and thus provide a better solution – there are no file size limits, no bandwidth limits, etcetera. That makes them different from famous competitors like Box.net.
The technology has been developed at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Files on Wuala are encrypted, so that might reassure people who are still a bit afraid of online storing. Even the founders won’t get to see what people are saving on their online hard disk.
Wuala was in alpha mode for three long years, founder Dominik Grolimund told us during an interview in June. They allegedly had “tens of thousands of alpha users and thousands of communities around the world are actively sharing millions of files.” So they’re used to a rather large crowd using their service. Let’s see how they cope with it now.
it’s worth noting that in order to get 1GB of free online storage in wuala one has to devote 5GB on his hard drive – they use this cache to speed up the transfer to make the users happy, but they do not tell them what is the hidden price of it.
gonzo, you’re mistaken here. the 5 GB which you see in the preferences dialog are your local cache only – it’s the most recent data that you’ve downloaded in wuala, comparable to a browser’s cache. note that all the files in the cache are completely encrypted.
trading storage is completely optional – by default, nothing is shared.
best,
dominik (co-founder of wuala)
What sounds amazing to me in the announcement is the fact that during the 10 months of alpha testing they had real people actually using the service as I doubt that anyone could upload this huge number of files only for the sake of testing. So hopefully they will get those millions of users they are dreaming of now.
Hi. Full disclosure here: I work for http://www.nomadesk.com, which offers small business users (or nomadic professionals, as we like to call ourselves) an innovative way to share documents and work together on a “virtual fileserver.” I read this post on Wuala with great interest, and just wanted to add NomaDesk to the discussion.
Because most mobile pro’s appreciate off-line capabilities while travelling, we have added local encryption to the mix and TheftGuard. Actually, NomaDesk comes with a feature set specifically geared toward the digital nomad. I would appreciate your review.
Thanks!