We wrote about Box.net a long time ago when we did a wrapup of online storage startups, and again in October 2006 when they raised a venture round from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They’ve been keeping busy. Box.net now has 820,000 registered users and transfers 600,000 files per day.
Today they launched a new widget product. It’s effectively a public folder that can be customized and embedded in a web page. A logo can be added and a number of views are available. The folder can be password protected, and viewers can also optionally upload their own files as well (if the creator is a premium or pro account holder). Media files are automatically played when clicked, or they can be right-clicked and downloaded.
I’ve embedded an example folder below, although I’ve turned off file uploading. The files are examples only.
There are a number of potential uses for this, particularly for groups collaborating on documents or files. It’s also useful as a drop box for clients who need to transfer files, etc. Note that Box.net also has more customized versions of these widgets. See, for example, the widget about half way down this MySpace page.
Box.net offers a free account with 1 GB of storage and 10 GB of monthly bandwith. Premium accounts, which have no bandwidth restrictions, cost $8 per month and have 5GB of storage. A premium account, at $20/month, has 15GB of storage.
Disclosure: I am an investor and on the board of directors of a box.net competitor, Omnidrive.
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Love the Flash interface. Very slick. I can see this as being very valuable for easily passing big files to my design clients without having to explain how to download something via http://FTP. Seems pretty idiot-proof.
Ehm…. their website states that Premium accounts will have 15Gb of storage and that is not unlimited….
But, on the other hand. A business model like that should work. Storage becomes cheap, bandwidth becomes cheap. Sign these customers up for a long term. Profit.
- Unomi -
Great idea - because in theory if they are hosting it - you save bandwidth and it is more secure
In a sense - it is like the Web 2.0 version of the IFRAME
i think this will be a great service if it WORKS!!!
i am trying to download the files you placed on the folder but cant seem to…
does omnidrive have such a feature?
Umomi - yeah, that was an error. Corrected.
Michael, just curious, do you ever sleep?!
not lately.
I like webbased services like this for storage, but for backupping things like my mail I’ve been using BackupAgent.com. They received considerable funding just a few months ago. Love the way they work, since my Outlook mail is stored in exactly the format I like it, and easily retrievable.
Hmm… you can drag and drop from the Windows file system into a Flash applet?
News to me…
If so, this Box widget is really great.
It seems they call 15GB plan “Professional”, not “Premium”.
http://www.box.net/info/pricing-plans
adam: There are widgets that work with Omnidrive being written by a couple of third-parties, we aren’t working on one ourselves but expect to see a couple of widgets that read/write Omnidrive accounts to launch sometime in the next month.
Hate the Flash interface. Why use Flash?
Roger, presumably because flash is more flexible these days. You can’t embed iframes in myspace pages, for example. Flash is, unfortunately, a little bit more plug-n-play.
Nik! Fancy seeing you here. I thought you died or something. Haven’t heard from you in weeks.
Genius idea. This is the sort of thing that’ll move web based storage to the wider mass market.
Presumably though there will be inevitable third party copyright issues/violations?
Great comparison of Iframes for web2.0
- Also Flash is more plug and play then other options; Maybe having a java platform would be nice; as a alternative ..
- Im just glad its not some stupid download / -
-RB
The interface is great… I wish you could just buy that code so you could use it on your own servers, or with whatever backend you wanted (Amazon S3 for instance). I suppose I will have to get into Flash again and figure something out!
Michael, as a long time reader, I truly appreciate your disclosure and fair assessment of Box.net.
Nice concept, not sure about the execution. I’d add the ability to download viewable media rather than viewing it in the widget (it appears they’ve got right-click menus for this, but they don’t work for me). Also, some sort of hierarchy metaphor would be helpful - folders for example. I haven’t created one, so maybe it’s possible and just not represented in your example box. And how about a ‘download all’ option that gives you the entire contents in a zip file?
Linday: If you do write a generic widget, we would be more than happy to help you out with having it work with Omnidrive, you can get details about our API here:
http://dev.omnidrive.com
still best ever file storage services are 3
http://www.esnips.com
http://www.orbitfiles.com
http://www.box.net
Tell me guys, please, how did you get the box.net widget on your wordpress site here to stream the video file? I can’t for the life of me get my own box.net widget to do this. If I embed your box above in my site, it works fine. When I embed my own box, while I can see the files, when I click on an uploaded vid, I’m immediately presented with a download page. I can’t find any explanation for this. The files have been made public, there does not seem to be a file compatibility problem (because I downloaded a box.net vid sample, which streams fine from their site, but not from mine), and, as I say, I can get others boxes working fine on my wordpress install. Would be very grateful for any tips if you have them.
Cheers
Richard
Thanks Michael Arrington for Post
By now there is a plethora of online storage services. Some services concentrate specifically toward online backup. Others are nothing more than a “drop bucket” to quickly transfer large files outside email. Then their are sites specifically designed for file sharing via the Internet, yet they do not offer any backup facilities. One company, that I believe blends these areas best together, is http://www.myotherdrive.com.
The provide true online backup (scheduled backup operation, encryption), plus public and private file sharing. Private share allows you to control who can view your shared files.