/Blip Of The Week: BoxCloud

Last winter, I was involved in the production of a video series, called The New Visionaries: Rebooting The Web. I had become the complete videographer, traveling around with 20 lbs of gear: camera, tripod, iRiver digital recording gizmo, mixing board, mikes, cables, and power supplies. Yikes, what a pain it was, setting up, breaking down, schlep, schlep, schlep. I turned out to be not the greatest sound tech or cinematographer, but I learned a lot, and talked to a bunch of smart people: Jason Fried, Dave Sifry, Mary Hodder, Michael Tanne, Satish Dharmaraj, and Chris Messina (see The New Visionaries).

But fooling with the gear out in the field was nothing compared to the headaches I was to encounter back in the office. Messing around with software has always been fun for me, and apps like SoundConverter and iMovie were relatively easy to learn. The things that made it difficult were the balky apps that crashed frequently -- like Audacity -- and the problem of dealing with really large files.

Video is big. The future for Internet video it is unbounded. The success of YouTube is a great indicator of that, as is the expansion of videoblogging a la PodTech and others. But for the average person, even a relatively savvy technical person like me, messing around with large files was a pain.

First of all, my G4 Powerbook was relatively underpowered for what I was doing, so things like saving video and audio files was slooo-o-ow. I had to go out and buy external hard drives because I didn't have enough file store to have copies of the things I was working on. And I wasn't even doing anything very sophisticated.

And the biggest headache of all was when I wanted to ship copies of the videos to my sponsor for the project, so they could do final editing and hosting. I set up an FTP transfer, using their designer's site, and transfering one of the 40 minute videos at high quality was going to take something like 17 hours. So, I simply bought another 180 G external drive, copied the files onto it, and overnight mailed it to them instead.

I wondered at the time about serious, full-time designers, and the headaches they must have on a regular basis fooling with stuff like this. Or even things that are not quite so large, but still way too big to travel as a file attachment or via IM. And designers are not generally involved in this one time access to files: they often modify a graphic, audio, or video over and over, with partners or clients looking these newest version over and swapping comments and recommendations back and forth. I was spared most of that, but it's easy for me to imagine the headaces that most design people go through regularly.

BoxCloud is a solution that is designed to provide a fundamental building block for solving this problem. The company that offers BoxCloud, WiredReach, describes it this way:

[from BoxCloud]

BoxCloud is a dead simple way for sharing files with your clients and coworkers without any uploading or emailing. We feel that sharing files today is much harder than it needs to be:

• Email is a pain to use for large files
• Online storage solutions have size restrictions
• FTP servers are not for everyone

[Full disclosure: WiredReach is a client of mine, and I have a financial interest in the company.]

The user experience is based on the instant messaging buddylist idea. If I want to share a file with my buddy Ash, I simply drag the file onto his contact on the BoxCloud client buddylist. If Ash is a user of BoxCloud (and has downloaded the client) then he can access the file by clicking on my buddy icon in his lest. If he not currently a user, or only a casual user, he can instead access that file through his browser after being notified about the file via email.

Use through the client and the browser is nearly identical, but easier in the client. Here's a shot of the files I am sharing with myself -- a technique that allows me to access files on my PC from anywhere in the world:

When first uploading, the user can provide a lot of information about the file, a message to the contact is is going to be shared with, and tags for searching:

When sharing files, it's often that some threaded discussion accompanies review and modifications. BoxCloud provides and almost bloglike means for comments to be associated with a file:

Accessing files remotely is fast and simple. The tradiational notion of having to upload new versions of a file is completely dropped in BoxCloud, since the system relies on a peer-to-peer file transfer on demand. If I make a modification to a file, and comment on the reasons, Ash simply has to access it again. Groups are supported in the obvious buddylist fashion, and therefore group access is similarly obvious.

BoxCloud is a great example of what a Web app should be: simply and well-designed, highly focused, and easy for users to get up and running. The social dimension borrows directly from one of the most viral models, instant messaging, so that angle is well taken care of. And Ash Maurya, the CEO, tells me that he is going to be very focused on meeting the needs of professionals, rather than consumers: so it is targetting the needs of a well-defined community of motivated users. All good.

It almost makes me want to start lugging that gear and playing around with long videos again. Hmmm, on second thought...

[Full disclosure: WiredReach is a client of mine, and I have a financial interest in the company.]

tags: boxcloud, wiredreach, ash+maurya, /blip, /blip+of+the+week, file+sharing, p2p

Comments

[Ash Maurya]

Thanks for reporting the misleading email notification link on the comment notification. It assumes the viewer and not the sharer is reading the email. I'm surprised no one's complained about that! We're going to correct that in the next release.

And, point taken on using "email as notification". One of our goals is to reduce email churn. We are in the process of adding a bunch of enhancements to the client - including presence, event notifications, download indicators and an activity log. Once those are in, we'll give users the option to completely turn off email notifications if they wish.

Cheers -

Ash

[David Mantripp]

Sorry, I don't get this. Is there any other dimension than social ?

Unless I've completely missed the point, BoxCloud looks like a glorified iDisk, or even Backpack. Useful, sure, and quite possibly a viable business, but it doesn't solve the basic issue of transferring large files around.

If you need a copy of a file, say to edit a video, as in your example, you've still got to transfer it across a network. Peer to peer is still network transfer.

"If I make a modification to a file, and comment on the reasons, Ash simply has to access it again" - well yeah. "Accessing it" == "transferring 30Gb" (or whatever)

The collaboration tools are useful, but to be honest, apart from the packaging, there's nothing revolutionary here. Collaboration across a network was the initial scope of Web 0.1, wasn't it ?

[Stowe Boyd]

David -

Unlike Backpack or iDisk, the file isn't being stored off my harddrive, so there is no file transfer except on demand, on a direct p2p basis. Just to clarify.

And, yes, the cost of moving a new version of a file is still there. I will ask Ash whether he has plans for smart distribution of file changes in the future.

[David Mantripp]

If only there were someway of transferring incremental updates... If you had an algorithm which could break any file down into fragments, and reassemble those fragments without breaking anything, and be able to identify which fragments had changed, well maybe you could do something. I remember whem Mac OS updates used to be delivered in more digestable chunks... something like that.

[Stowe Boyd]

Your thinking is along the lines of what is at the heart of the Groove collaboration tool: the so-called "Delta Engine". And it's similar to what "reconciliation" of edits did in the second generation Lotus nots architecture.

[Ash Maurya]

Yes, collaboration over a network has been around for years but it's always been at 2 extremes - you either put everything on the web (server) or keep everything local and do p2p (e.g. Groove). The cost of the web model is upload for the sharer and download for the recipient along with other concerns for some - privacy, confidentiality, versioning. The Groove (p2p) model primarily failed because of the cost of participation - all users need to have paid and downloaded the Groove client.

We think we lower the barriers of collaboration through our peer to web model - Keep the files local, but let others access and collaborate over the web - using just a browser and nothing else. It doesn't entirely address the network tax but it does alleviate it from the sharer's perspective. We are also working on ways to help in the download through swarming. We haven't looked at a delta engine and don't know how well it works with rich documents - something to consider.