Exclusive: Tubes to Launch New Version Today

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.