There’s definitely no shortage of cloud storage and file sharing services, with major corporations like Google, Apple and Microsoft duking it out with well-financed startup companies like Dropbox, Box and Bitcasa, and nimbler upstarts such as Crate, Ge.tt and Drops also fighting for a piece of the cake.
It’s amazing that there are still people willing to attack this massively saturated market, but that’s exactly what Pakistani entrepreneur Ghaus Iftikhar is doing with the launch of Jumpshare.
Billed as a “new, faster way to share files”, Jumpshare lets you upload photos, videos, documents, presentations, code and more (the service boasts support for more than 150 different file formats and counting) and share them on the Web, via social networks and by email.
Jumpshare is free and users can upload an unlimited amount of files, although the total size of all uploaded files shouldn’t exceed 2GB. The maximum size you can upload is 100MB per file.
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Currently, all files are kept for only 14 days, after which they are automatically deleted.
The service doesn’t (yet) have user accounts, but once they go live people will be able to easily increase the available storage space – Jumpshare relies on Amazon AWS hosting and uses Amazon S3 for data storage – and permanently store files.
On its own, the offering isn’t really that impressive, but the UI is very nice and this is only the beginning.
Iftikhar started a photo sharing website when he was in college but shut it down after a year due to lack of funds and time. He dropped out of college and founded tech blog AddictiveTips, leaving his position as Editor-in-Chief of the site in late 2011 to set out and build Jumpshare.
In a blog post, he explains why he thinks the many existing file sharing services still haven’t gotten it right in his opinion:
Some wondered why I chose to go into the file sharing space. It is a risky market, where one has to remain competitive and also pay huge hosting costs; think about huge operation costs; web servers, conversion servers, storage servers, bandwidth, and finally scaling it all. Out of all the promising ideas, I chose the riskiest one because I strongly believe that the services that exist today are not enough to truly make the pain of file sharing go away.
It’s 2012, and file sharing has not evolved past the point of having fancy UIs and an option to download the files. In the world where everything is about consumption, file sharing has lagged behind. With Jumpshare, we plan on changing that.
He adds that Jumpshare is currently 1% of what he envisions it to be, so there’s a lot more work to be done. Give it a whirl and tell us what you think.
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