The Next Web

Wuala, online social storage from Switzerland, ready for your files

Written on August 14, 2008 – 11:15 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

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.

I hope you like that post!

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online storage, Switzerland, wuala

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Wuala: social storage from Switzerland (we have invites)

Written on June 29, 2008 – 5:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Dominik Grolimund from Wuala. This is a free social online storage service. The “social” 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. The files are encrypted, so that might reassure people who are still a bit afraid of online storing.

Developing a service like this, takes quite some time and effort. So I thought it might be interesting for you to learn from Dominik’s experiences. Moreover, although his service will remain in closed alpha, we do have 50 invites for you. Instructions follow below.

How did you come up with the idea of Wuala?

“We started research and development on Wuala 3.5 years ago at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Our goal was to build something that was both challenging from a research point of view but which also had a great potential. Distributed storage systems were a hot research topic at that time and building a system that can harness idle resources seemed very promising, as the need for online storage was rising and file sizes were increasing. The research projects had an academic focus only - we wanted to realize it and make it work in practice for millions of users.” (more…)

five questions for start-ups, online harddisk, online storage, social storage, Switzerland, wuala, zurich

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