Tubes

A note on the Tubes forums alerts customers to the discontinuation of the service effective January 31, 2008 while support is closed as of today. Here is the official message from Tubes:

Announcement posted at 8:00 EST on 14 January 2008 - The Tubes service will be going away as of Jan 31, 2008.

Any data/files you have on your computer will not be lost. However, the ability to synchronize your data/files will go away. All support services have been discontinued. Automated Knowledge Base articles may remain available and you may find some help at www.tubesnow.com/forums. However, you will not be receiving a response from Tubes to submitted requests.

Thank you for participating in our beta program. The Tubes Team

Mark over at Mashable has some thoughts on why the service didn't make it. When I met with VP Marketing of Tubes, Steve Chazin at a Starbucks in Manhattan last August, he was so excited about the new release. I thought the software was very smooth. My big concern that I raised to him was that his target was mainstream but I wasn't sure if the mainstream crowd would "get it" -- he kept talking about using this to share photos with my mother, I doubted that would ever happen.

Sharing large files with friends and family can sometimes be tough. Services such as Rapidshare and DropSend work for semi-large files with limited time accessibility. Tubes works well for collaboration. A new service out of Switzerland called Wuala aims to change the model by using both online storage space plus your computer's storage for file sharing. Their model uses high-grade security for protection (something the other services don't match), uses a desktop application to allow for drag & drop sharing and it let's you trade your disk storage for additional online storage.

I would love to see instant messenger integration in the future instead of having to setup your friends yet again. The way they split the files reminds me of the old days and grabbing Usenet files. They are hiring -- if you are in Zurich, they want to talk to you. Update: Wuala sent over the following update: "We currently have Skype and Facebook integration, which means that you can add/invite your friends easily from Skype and Facebook (plus other messengers are in development)"

Founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund attended the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this past week and took a few minutes to chat with me about Wuala. Our discussion is below.

Allen: Can you provide us with a brief bio about yourself?

Dominik: I am 27 years old and have studied computer science at ETH Zurich. In 1998, I founded my software company Caleido, and developed the Caleido Address-Book, a professional contact management software, of which over 35,000 licenses have been sold to-date in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

In 2003, I did an exchange semester at the TU Delft, the Netherlands, as part of the Unitech exchange program, focusing on business and management. In 2004, a six-month internship followed with Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey in the US, where I worked in the "Intelligent Vision & Reasoning" department, developing a product for power plant monitoring.

After returning from the US, I started the project Wuala (code-named 'Kangoo'), together with Luzius Meisser, as part of my computer science Master studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) in 2004. We founded our company Caleido in 2007 and now, after these three years, we are ready to show a sneak preview of Wuala to the first people.

Allen: What is Wuala and where did the name come from?

Dominik: Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free.

You can find more here: http://wua.la/en/what.html.

The name comes from the french word "voilà" which means "look there". For us, it means "wuala, here's your file".

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Tubes Networks (formerly Tubes) has announced three major distribution deals at the DEMO conference this week. Check out my interview with the Tubes execs for an overview of their 1.0 release this week, also at DEMO.

The three distribution deals are:

• SaaS Platform - Fully Distributed Web Applications to the Desktop
• Floorplanner.com - Offline Access to Popular Home Design Web Application
• Edmunds.com - Automotive-Related Multimedia Content Distribution Platform

Mark Andressen talked about the importance of distribution at TC40 with each startup. These deals that Tubes Networks have put in place should help them to gain some mainstream momentum, especially the Edmunds community.

This past Wednesday I had the opportunity to meet with the VP Marketing of Tubes, Steve Chazin. He shared the new version of Tubes which should be available by the time you read this (or shortly thereafter). Thanks to Steve for sharing the info early! Here are my notes from our discussion:

Tubes defines themselves as:

Tubes is a revolutionary PC+web application designed to let you create instant personal sharing networks of friends, family, classmates, colleagues, or your own devices. Tubes lets you instantly share photos, media and documents with everyone you know and have them share their stuff with you through the same tube.

The new version takes the product to a whole new level. The new version highlights are:

• TubeSites - a way to create an instant Web site from any of the files in your Tube
• HubPublisher
• Live Web Access - any file inside a Tube can now be accessed live on the Web and a specific URL is provided to give out as well

Other notes:

• The Tube concept comes from the pneumatic tube that banks use - but with these Tubes, you can send your files to multiple people at the same time and the Tube stays current
• When a person within the Tube edits a file (say a Word doc), all of the users get the updated version immediately
• Tubes has offline access - edit a file on a plane and when you plug into a network, the files update
• Product is shipping since January, new version to launch today
• Client is Windows only currently (runs on mac parallels) and is 12mb in size
• Basic account is free, premium accounts start at $1/gig/month
• Diggnation is looking at using Tubes to push out shows to their subscribers
• I couldn't get specifics on downloads except that it's in the "six figures"
• No real competitors in the space
• A full 1.0 version launches in September 2007

I asked about their revenue model:

• Tubes is privately-funded and in business for 4 years
• They are looking at revshare video models, typical ad models, content shares with producers and PPV (the PPV is interesting, setup a Tube, charge $10, users get the show in a secure environment)

My take:

It's a very robust product from the demo. It's strong in the transfer and sync of files between large groups of people (i.e. 100, 1000, etc.). The ability to edit my Tube offline (say on a train) and then sync it is tasty. My main concern is that there are no revisions saved. So if you edit my resume and I don't save a backup outside of Tubes, your version is now the live version. While this might not be a big deal for say a music publisher who is only pushing files to their fans, for a business to use this, I believe revisions will be critical.

If you need to share files with a group, this is very well worth a try. It's miles ahead of the standard YouSendIt/Skype/AIM type file sharing.