Okay, I’ve been sitting on these too long. At the Web 2.0 conference, I met a young Swiss entrepreneur named Dominik Grolimund, who is the CEO of a peer-to-peer storage application called Wuala. TechCrunch UK covered it here. The first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who sign up will get into the alpha. (Enter code “techcrunch”).
Wuala is a P2P competitor to Xdrive, MediaMax or Box.net.. You start off with 1GB of free storage, and then if you want more, you need to make more space available on your own hard drive for other Wuala members. (The amount of extra storage you get also depends on what percentage of time your computer is online). The files you want to store get broken up into 500 encrypted fragments, each of which get stored on another Wuala member’s computer. In this respect, it works a lot like a RAID storage system with redundancy built in. But instead of being stored on a central server, all your files are distributed across other peer computers. You drag and drop files into folders just like on your desktop. You can also stream videos or music to a computer with Wuala installed on it. But, unlike BitTorrent (or Oink, for that matter), the service is more about storing your own files than sharing them with a massive amount of other people. Although, I’m sure people will figure out how to use it as darknet service. Thankfully, none of the files stored on your computer are executable.