file_sharing

Techchrunch has an small article about a online storage file service called Omnidrive. The service is scheduled for launch in January 2006.

Planned features of Omnidrive are:

• Virtual network driver. You are able to mount Omnidrive as harddrive under windows.
• Browser Toolbar (Firefox?)
• built in media player to access media files
• set upload and download speeds to work in the background
• Omnidrive will pick up where it left off after rebooting computer
• RSS for folders
• tagging of files
• permanent URL for each file
• syncing of folders on a hard drive to the Omnidrive
• each Shared folder has separate access controls

According to Techchrunch the “they will give a gig or two of storage for free, and sell 10 gb bundles above that for “not more thanâ€? $70 per year. That’s pricy, but way below the industry standard right now.”

I mean it’s usefull and i’d like to have the option to access my own files (music, pictures, videos, etc.) from every Inet connected device in the world. But how large is my willingness to pay for such a service? 1-2 Gigabyte isn’t much space. I only need around 20 Gigabytes for my music collection.

From my point of view Google or Microsoft (service bundling with the OS) will provide such a service in the future. Google has the infrastructure, their business is indexing, crawling and selling advertisement space. For example, based on my personal music files/tastes Google will automatically advertise some new CD’s or Artist.