Interactive Business

Fueled by $4.1M, the startup has developed a browser-based "webtop" application.

These days, home PCs are chock full of digital music, photos, and videos. Sites like Flickr and MySpace attract millions of users—2.8 million visited MySpace alone in April. People are creating, collecting, and sharing more content than ever. But that last part, Mr. Patel contends, is still too difficult.
So for the past 14 months, he’s been working to make sharing content easier.
Fueled by $4.1 million in venture financing from ComVentures and private investors, the startup has developed a browser-based “webtop” application which sorts, tags, and lets users share their documents over a local network or the Internet.

Web Wonders
“What does the web do very well?” asks Mr. Patel. “[It] allows you to share the heck out of everything.” Glide, Streamload, Box.net, and Apple’s iDisk are a few examples of online services doing just that. Both let customers store and share files online. But they don’t offer cavernous amounts of space. Streamload’s offerings start at 25 gigabytes, while Box.net’s start at 1 and top out at 15 GB. Each also has limits on file size and the amount of data that can be transferred each month. So users must sort through their files and decide which ones to upload even before they start sharing. Storing files remotely creates another problem. If a file is changed, keeping track of different versions can be tricky.

Mr. Patel and Mr. Cordano aim to solve those problems with their software-meets-hardware solution. Both are former Maxtor executives, and they’ve signed a licensing agreement with their old employer, now part of Seagate. The world’s largest hard drive manufacturer now sells an external hard drive pre-loaded with Fabrik’s software.

Available since mid-June, the 500-GB drive, dubbed Maxtor Fusion, retails for $799 and is targeted at consumers and creative professionals.


Fabrik lets users tag files on the drive with appropriate descriptors—labeling a bunch of photos, videos, and songs “camping trip,” for example. If an Internet connection is available, they can be shared. The software also allows for the creation of different user accounts with varying levels of access. That means Grandma can connect from home to view pictures of the kids’ soccer game or coworkers can remotely access a folder of business documents.


But the Fabrik box isn’t yet flying off the shelves. “The good news is everyone who understands it wants it,” says Jack Wahrman, senior merchandising manager at J&R Music and Computer World, the first retailer to carry the drive. He says educating users will be the biggest barrier to big sales.

Storage Growth
At least Fabrik picked a good time to get into the consumer storage space. According to IDC, the hard disk drive industry broke records in 2005, shipping 381 million drives, a 24.4 percent increase over 2004. Revenue hit $27.9 billion, breaking a 1997 record of $27.8 billion. The firm expects shipments of consumer electronics hard drives will grow in excess of 23 percent annually through 2010.

Mr. Cordano says Fabrik is initially aiming to be a high-end, luxury product with an air of exclusivity. The sharing service will be free to owners of the hard drive for several months, after which customers will be required to pay a monthly fee. Pricing has not been finalized. Fabrik says it will offer the bundled software on additional drives later this year, at different price points. The company also plans to sell its software as a standalone product for online sharing.

Source link: redherring.com...

From Amazon.com to MySpace to Craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content, writes Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson. "Companies aren't just exploiting free labor; they're creating the tools that give voice to millions."

The evidence is all around us. There are standard-bearers like Wikipedia and Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service. There are entire realms that Second Life users are creating from scratch. And there is the enormous audience that YouTube has conjured with its idiotproof video-sharing technology.

There’s also gold in the casual Web droppings we all leave online. Much of the value of Amazon and Netflix comes from their tens of millions of customer reviews. Your click trail on Amazon is used to create better recommendations for those who follow. Your query on Google and the pages that you find relevant give feedback that fine-tunes the search algorithms. The ads you click don’t just boost revenue for Google, they also tell it how much to charge the next advertiser. These companies have found ways to harness the wisdom of the crowd, extracting information that was there all along, just latent and lost.

But it’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.

Source: Wired.com

[HU]
The 3G/HSDPA broadband mobile network is availabel in 8 cities in Hungary on the T-Moble Hungary network. The Hungarian T-Mobile announced to epand its 3G network to cover all major cities in the country and to deliver for customes fast internet access, mobile TV service.
Souce: Gondola.hu (only in HUN)

Time Warner's AOL unit may offer its full menu of services, including e-mail, free of charge to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, according to a published report.

AOL could give up as much as $2 billion in subscription revenue if a gambit aimed at boosting the Internet service's advertising revenue goes ahead, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Under the plan, AOL would stop charging subscription fees for users with high-speed Internet access or a dial-up service from another provider, the newspaper said.

Subscribers who have traditional "dial-up" Internet access through AOL would still have to pay their monthly fee, the Journal said.

AOL expects that 8 million of its existing dial-up customers would cancel their subscription to take advantage of the new offer. Nearly one-third of the company's customer base of 18.6 million in the first quarter already has high-speed access, the newspaper said.

The company is losing subscribers to high-speed Internet providers at a quick pace, losing about 850,000 in the first quarter, the Journal said. Total U.S. subscribers at the end of 2002 was 26.5 million, the newspaper said.

AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller presented the proposal to top Time Warner executives in New York last week, the newspaper said.

Source link: CNET News...