Kim Dotcom made a very interesting announcement on Twitter this morning: Mega will be offering white label versions of its service. Furthermore, he told TNW that his company “will provide this service for free” to universities.
Dotcom told us he couldn’t offer too much detail, but he did say that he hasn’t partnered with any schools just yet. Mega has been approached “by one famous US university” recently, however, and the company concluded it “should offer them a tailored solution,” according to Dotcom.
Why is Mega suddently interested in supporting education? Mega is reportedly “popular with students” and the company has received feedback that they “love our collaboration feature and can’t wait for our messaging to go live.”
Yet this appears to strictly be a business decision. “We want to cooperate with universities all over the world,” Dotcom told TNW. “Their students are our potential future customers.”
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In other words, the strategy is similar to what Microsoft and Google do via their various education programs. The idea is that once students (or startups) get hooked on a service, they will pay for it once they are able.
#Mega will provide white label cloud storage to Universities incl. high-speed local servers. Tell your Professors how much you like #Mega =)
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) February 21, 2013
Whether or not universities sign on, what’s interesting here is that “White Label is coming anyway,” according to Dotcom. That’s quite a bold move, as Mega is only a one-month old brand, and allowing others to rebrand the service and appear as if they made it could be very costly.
This month, Dotcom has been on somewhat of a tear when it comes to Mega news. Most recently, he revealed Mega had surpassed 3 million users and 125 million files after one month of availability.
See also – Mega update: Dotcom’s service now accepts Bitcoin, will expand into email, chat, voice, video, and mobile and Closing in on 100M files, Mega projects investment round in 6 months, IPO in 18
Image credit: flippnjj
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