The company announced today it has reached one million users, about 75 percent of which are students. The company also announced it is piloting a new premium service that allows clubs and other groups to apply their branding to Wiggio (pictured) and offers an administrator level with custom analytics. Previously the product was free to all users, but having decided against adding advertising, Wiggio has landed on this route to monetization.

So how did the company, founded by a team of Cornell grads in 2008, gain its sizable following? CEO and co-founder Dana Lampert explained that their approach is to make users’ lives incredibly easy and then set up the product to grow virally.  ”Students are kind of a different beast,” he told GigaOM in an interview. “If they have to learn anything, if they have to read anything, if they have to watch a video even, they will be completely turned off by the tool. And, if I’m in a group of ten people and only eight of them really get it, it’s completely useless. From the very beginning we’ve been really focused on streamlined simplicity.”

Lampert explained Wiggio uses a powerful testing technique to ensure the product is incredibly easy to use – they give it to fourth graders. “I took one of our features to a fourth grade classroom and I said, ‘how would send a text message using Wiggio?’ Basically we adopted the mentality that we wouldn’t put the feature out until these fourth graders can use it easily,” he said, though the technique has run into trouble recently. “Fourth graders are getting pretty tech savvy,” he joked, saying he’s had to call in less tech-skilled family members for testing reinforcements.

So once Wiggio decided to focus on simplicity and ensured their product met this goal, how did they spread the word? “We raised a Series A round about two years ago and we made the decision to use that money to focus on product and not distribution, so our growth has mostly been natural,” Lampert said. “What we found is if we can demo the product to some student and faculty leaders at a university they find it really valuable and they’ll end up doing a lot of promotion for us. We often times have schools and leaders on campus evangelizing the product and bringing it out to the groups.” Growth happens naturally from there, Lampert said, as “the average person is inviting about 20 new people onto the platform.”

Students graduate, though, so what happens to Wiggio fans after they get their diplomas? Lampert hopes they don’t leave Wiggio behind along with their black light posters and dorm room mini-fridges, providing the product with a stealth way into the grown-up collaboration market. “We try to promote bringing it into your jobs, which is how we have some traction within businesses,” said Lampert, noting adult social groups and alumni associations are also using the tools.

According to Lampert this softly softly approach seems to be working, but his company is playing in a very crowded space. How does he see the welter of collaboration options fairing long-term? “From what I’ve seen, a lot of players are trying to become best of breed of one certain feature. Asana has beautiful task management. Dropbox is awesome for file sharing,” Lampert said, but also argued that there is room for tools that do a little bit of a lot of things. “For some organizations and groups with more tech-savvy members, it’s very easy to have them all create accounts and get access to these one-off tools. At least for the groups we serve — the less savvy consumer groups who just need to get things done — I think consolidation is the trend. I’m not saying us, but in general though the tools that bring together what I need into a one-stop shop are the ones that are going to see themselves win this space,” he predicted.

Which collaboration tools do you see winning the war of attrition – narrowly specialized offerings, suites that pull together lots of features or some of both?

Image courtesy of Wiggio.

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Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps, Google (left) and Scott Johnston, Group Product Manager, Google (right)

Do you want to put about 16 terabytes of data online? If you do, you might want to give Google a call. Mind you, it isn’t going to be cheap — that amount of storage will cost about $800 a month. On Tuesday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is taking the covers off its much hyped and long awaited online storage service, and it will be called Google Drive. It is available at drive.google.com. The Drive, which starts with 5 GB of free storage, is available to anyone with a Google account, including Google Apps for business accounts. In March 2012 I had first reported that Google would be launching its Drive with 1 GB of storage space in first week of April 2012. Well, I was off by two weeks and 4 GB per account of storage capacity.

The new service will be accessible from a Web browser along with different client devices including Mac OS X, Windows and Android devices (tablets and phones). The iOS version of the Drive will arrive soon, the company says. The first 5 GB are free, but every additional 25 GB is going to cost you about $2.50 a month or about $30 a year. The 100 GB will cost you $5 a month or about $60 a year. You can buy up to 16 terabytes of storage capacity. The Drive marries elements of Dropbox, iCloud and other popular apps such as Evernote.

Collaboration

At first blush, it might seem the Google Drive imitates Dropbox’s many features. However, the key differentiation point for Google Drive is the tight integration with Google’s productivity apps and other apps that are using Google’s SDK to build the Drive into their own cloud offerings. For instance, Google’s Drive allows you to seamlessly fax documents via HelloFax’s service. Another service, Balsamic, can help you create wireframes and share them with others. There are about 20 launch partners for Google’s Drive, and they are betting that Drive will bring them the much needed collaboration and sharing features that they currently lack.

Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps, went to extreme lengths in a briefing to point out that they are not operating just another online storage service. “This (Drive) is built around the idea of sharing and collaboration,” said Pichai. “We started from the underpinning of Google Docs and idea of collaboration.”

He went onto argue that as we start to spend more time living in the cloud, what matters to people is the ability to access their data in multiple locations on different screens. Pichai believes that “Drive is a bridge between cloud and local” data. He also believes that companies have to adapt to the BYOD (bring your own device) revolution that is sweeping the enterprises. (Stacey wrote an awesome post yesterday about why BYOD is unstoppable.)

Data anywhere

Start a document in Google Docs and Google Drive will save a local copy on your desktop. But that document is not editable unless you’re online to open these docs using Google Docs, which I find baffling. Sometime in the near future, the company will allow you to select a document and directly mail it using Google’s Gmail service. Google says last-minute bugs are the reason it hasn’t launched Gmail integration. Strangely, the company is offering integration with Google+. Go figure!

When you upload photos Google will use Google Goggles’ technology to look inside the photos and help you discover relevant photos by the search keyword. The OCR technology that has powered the Google Books effort will turn a PDF or a photo of a document into text for you to manipulate. Google isn’t the first company to offer such a service. However, it is the first one to bundle this and other popular features in its offering. (Oh, how very Microsoft of them!)

Of course, as it is Google, everything it does has to be viewed from the lens of search.  ”In the post-PC world the file systems don’t matter,” says Pichar. Instead what matters is data, which follows the flow from apps to devices. Pichar says that the key here is to provide context and add contours to all the information stored inside the Drive.

So what does it look like

Google gave me access to the Google Drive yesterday evening, and in whatever little time I had, I would have to say that I didn’t see anything that would cause distress. The web-based version of the Drive looks remarkably similar to the all-too-familiar Google Docs interface.

On the Mac desktop, it was dead simple to install the Drive, much like Dropbox. Once installed the Drive is represented by a folder and synchronizes in the background. The first installation automatically downloads all your Google Docs files to the folder. However, the app really shines when used on the tablets. Maybe it is because I have fewer files, but I found that I was able to access data from Google Drive on iPad a shade quicker than Dropbox, mostly because of better search capabilities.

We run our business on Google Apps for Business and I see Drive a perfect companion. Today we use Dropbox, but the process of sharing happens either on Google Docs, Socialcast or via email. Collaboration is too disjointed and the process is pretty cumbersome. Google Drive however makes it very easy to share and collaborate. I deeply dislike the icons they are using to represent docs and slides. Nevertheless, I have not had enough time to form a strong opinion (either way) about the service. I will write a post after using the service for a week or so.

Oh, it’s on

The pending launch of Google Drive has caused a frenzy of activity in the online storage industry. Dropbox, which currently leads the online storage market, launched a simple file-sharing feature yesterday that would allow them to compete with Google. Later, Microsoft talked about the availability of its SkyDrive personal cloud storage service with about 7 GB of free storage.

By being late to the market, Google has what Peter Thiel calls the “last mover advantage.“ And while the new Google Drive is a big threat to Box.net and Dropbox, if you ask me, the big target here is Microsoft. With the Drive, Google can start to nibble at Microsoft’s  highly lucrative Sharepoint business.

And while Google Drive’s launch is going to be hard on some of the smaller online storage services, thanks to Google’s massive user base, I wouldn’t count out Microsoft, Box or Dropbox — just yet.

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Now, with the advent of things like smartphones, tablets, and the iPad, new applications designed for those devices are making it easier and more practical to go paperless.

Penultimate: Your iPad notepad

Penultimate by Cocoa Box turns your iPad into a notebook, allowing you to jot notes and create sketches in multiple colors, separate them into notebooks by topic or project, and then email all or part of your notes in PDF format. It even includes three built-in “papers” (graph paper, unlined and ruled), but you can import images of different backgrounds or papers — or download paper packs — to create your own texture or style. Price: $1.99.

SignMyPad: Simple contract sign-offs

The Android- and iPad-compatible PDF reader SignMyPad has built-in annotation functionality, allowing you to sign and date PDF documents right from your iPad and then email it to another party. You can also save documents into versions for gaining multiple signatures, and the app can import documents from and save them to Dropbox. Price: $3.99 for the basic version, $19.99 for SignMyPad Pro, which adds geolocation tagging.

MyFax: Fax without a fax

If you work with clients or colleagues who still use fax machines, MyFax’s mobile faxing app, available for iOS and Blackberry, lets you send and receive faxes from your smartphone and via your email account. Just snap a photo of the document you want to send (the app is optimized for sending photos of text), choose the recipient from your Address Book and send. To fax by email, attach the document to an email message, address it to the fax number plus an @myfax.com and send. To receive a fax, simply give out your MyFax number, and your received documents will be available as an email attachment. Price: Free app, service costs $10/month after a free trial.

JotNot: Turn your iPhone into a handheld scanner

JotNot lets you scan from your iPhone, email the scan as a PDF or image, and fax the scan to U.S. numbers. You can add pages to documents, creating a multi-page scan, as well as delete and reorder pages and send documents to EverNote, DropBox, or Google Docs. JotNot can scan and save a variety of documents, including receipts, business cards, and notes. Price: Free.

DocScanner: Simple scanning

DocScanner is a scanner app for the iPhone, Mac, Android, Qt, and the Symbian S60 that allows you to scan documents simply by taking a picture. It then automatically crops everything other than the document out of the picture and even detects your document’s paper size. Other helpful features include the ability to search multiple-page documents, as well as words within documents. Price: $4.99.

Business Card Reader: Quickly add new contacts

The multi-platform Business Card Reader from SHAPE Services lets you take a photo of a business card, and then it “reads” the picture, extracts the contact data, and enters it into your smartphone’s address book. The built-in browser even lets you check out a new contact’s LinkedIn page right from the app. Price: $4.99 for multi-language support, $3.99 for Asian languages only.

OfficeDrop: Scan to the cloud

OfficeDrop‘s app scans documents directly to the cloud for storage and sharing. The ScanDrop desktop app is available for both PC and Mac, but the iPhone and Android Scanner apps allow you to scan and upload documents using your smartphone. Once uploaded, the document’s text is searchable, thanks to OCR, and sharable with colleagues. Price: Free

Square: Easy payments and receipts

Square, available for Android and most iOS devices, lets you accept credit card payments directly from your smartphone and uses “smart receipts” to send to customers via email or text message. You can create a display with photos and prices so that customers can view your products directly from your iPad, for example, and then keep track of the number of sales you’ve made in a given day. Price: Free app and reader.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mattjiggins

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You can elect to take screenshots of the whole screen or just the active window. Dropbox Screen Grabber actually has a few features that make it a little more versatile than Grabbox: You can redefine the hotkey combination; automatically resize screenshots before uploading them; and control which Dropbox folder they are uploaded to. You can also use it to automatically upload screenshots of your desktop at predetermined intervals, which could be useful if you want to monitor or record a process, for example.

Dropbox Screen Grabber is a free download from the Dropbox Addons wiki. Users of multi-monitor setups beware: it has a known bug that means it will only take screenshots on the primary monitor.

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ShareFile is worth checking out if you’re looking for a business-oriented file-sharing service, as it offers many features that you’d find in most of the other file sharing services, plus a few that won’t be found with more consumer-oriented solutions:

Security, user and file management

• Files transmitted and stored with encryption
• Tracking and alerts to confirm that clients have received files
• Granular folder-level permissions
• Bulk load client users from Outlook or spreadsheet
• Activity reports showing who uploaded and downloaded files and when

File access and transfer

• Upload individual files up to 10 GB
• FTPS over SSL transfers, compatible with traditional FTP clients
• Map a local drive letter to ShareFile account
• Automatic resume of interrupted transfers
• Access via the web, an Outlook plugin, and through desktop, iOS and Android apps
• API and command-line tools
• File versioning
• Full-text search
• Ability to request file copies on DVD or hard drives
• Ability to send a DVD or hard drive for initial population of files

Customization

• Custom branding
• Tools for your website, including a login widget and an upload form

Not all of the above features are available with all pricing plans.

ShareFile told me how one of its customers, a worldwide restaurant chain, uses the service to make creative materials available to their franchisees. The same customer’s HR department uses ShareFile to send sensitive employment documents.

The company boasts data centers on the U.S. East and West Coasts, as well as in Ireland and Singapore, but provides telephone and email help from a U.S.-based support staff.

ShareFile is available in several pricing plans, ranging from $29.95 a month for two employee accounts and 5GB of storage, to $499.95 per month for 150 accounts and 150GB of storage. All plans include unlimited client users. A 30-day trial is available.

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UPDATE: GoDropBox has been renamed GoFileDrop.

GoDropBox is a nifty third-party add-on for Google Apps that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. This is handy for web workers who would like to accept files that are too big to email and don’t want to have to use additional file transfer tools.

Once installed via the Google Apps Marketplace, you’ll be given a unique URL that you can then forward to other people, which allows them to upload files to your Google Docs account through their browser (they can only upload files and don’t have the ability to read or otherwise access your account). The upload page is fairly basic, as shown in the screenshot above. It is easy to use and supports drag and drop, allows batch file uploads and can show upload progress. Uploaded files appear immediately in your Google Docs account.

The installed version of GoDropBox is only a trial, offering up to 100 users on a domain just 50 MB of data allowance each. Additional data is priced at $5 for 2 GB per month, $9 for 5 GB per month, or $15 for 10 GB per month (subscriptions can be canceled at any time).

Note: Confusingly, despite the name, this has absolutely nothing to do with file-sync-and-sharing service Dropbox. Also, in order to use it, you’ll have to be a Google Apps user and an admin will have to install it on your domain.

(via Digital Inspiration)

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Email has transformed the way people shop, bank, communicate with family members and do business. Now an essential tool for approximately one billion mobile workers across the globe, email continues to dominate the way in which we communicate.

Four decades since the first message – believed to be “QWERTYUIOP” – email seems to be going strong. But is it about to hit a midlife crisis? With web workers now using more sophisticated collaborative apps and social business tools to communicate and share information, are we going to see email’s reign come to an end?

Email is a great communication tool. You can get in touch with business colleagues, family and friends at the touch of a button. Gone are the days of waiting by the front door for a letter from uncles and aunties across the globe, or sitting by a fax machine waiting for that signed document to come back from a client’s legal team. However, email isn’t a collaboration tool. Anyone who has tried to collate feedback from numerous colleagues on a document over email knows how painful the process can be. No one seems to remember which version the team is working on and there is always that one person who sends over some (supposedly) final amendments overnight. Hours can be wasted waiting for emails to go back and forth, searching through inboxes for missing documents, and putting large files onto CDs, USB sticks or FTP servers due to file size restrictions.

It is little wonder then that web workers across the globe are turning to the likes of Dropbox for storing and sharing files. Store your files on one computer, and they’ll automatically appear on your other computers with Dropbox installed. Simple. Indeed, Apple has finally joined the party and realized that emailing photos from your phone was so 2010 — its forthcoming iCloud service will provide a far smarter way to move your content between devices. Evernote is another popular tool with remote workers, enabling you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable. And, of course, there’s Huddle. Being cloud-based, Huddle enables you to manage your projects, files and people on any device, from any location.

With social networks making it so easy to stay in touch and share information with people in their personal lives, the demand for such simplicity in the workplace has increased. Take Facebook, for example: You can message your friends, share your photos and videos (and every other aspect of your life should you so wish), and co-ordinate events from wherever you are. With more than 500 million active Facebook users spending 700 billion minutes per month on the site, and more than 200 million people tweeting, email’s grip on our personal lives may well be coming to an end.

For business, however, it’s a different matter. Yes, there are tools being used to make our working lives easier, but removing email from the workplace completely will require more than just introducing intuitive, easy-to-use tools in the office. It requires a change in habit. Email is deeply entrenched in our daily working lives and moving to other tools will require a culture shift. Any new tools and services need to be integrated into processes from the outset of a project / program / campaign so that people become accustomed to using an alternative tool. And this is before you start the mammoth task of introducing client and partner companies to your amazing new tool. While email may not dominate workplace communication in another 40 years, there’s life in it yet!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew.

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com.

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The company now offers add-ons for Windows Explorer and the Mac OS X Finder that allow users to right-click (or control-click) on a file and be offered the opportunity to send or share that file directly from the desktop, as part of Version 6.0 of Egnyte’s Personal Local Cloud application. An Outlook plugin with the ability to share files as links or attachments is also available. In addition, Egnyte includes the ability for enterprise IT departments to enforce limits on file sharing and other security policies.

Egnyte positions itself as “Dropbox for the enterprise,” since it provides secure means of allowing workers to access their files while giving IT departments the control and security they need. The Egnyte “Local Cloud” service that synchronizes on-site and cloud storage is also popular in enterprises.

The folks at Egnyte told me that their product is becoming increasingly popular in large, 1,000+ person operations where mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous. In fact, in a recent study, up to 40 percent of the access to Egnyte’s service came from mobile sources, with the iPad being the single most popular device. Egnyte’s mobile apps are proving very popular, with more capabilities and other platforms coming soon.

The “Dropbox for the enterprise” space is getting more crowded, with the likes of Accellion and Box.net also offering enterprise-friendly secure file sharing and backup features. Egnyte will be hoping these updates help to keep it up with the pack.

The service is available at several price levels, and a 15-day free trial is available.

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Soonr is the first cloud file storage service to offer integrated editing for Microsoft Office documents on the iPad. Unlike cobbling together of file storage apps such as Dropbox and SugarSync with editing apps such as QuickOffice and Documents-To-Go, Soonr brings it all together so you can directly edit any files stored in the cloud using a single app. No configuration, no hassle, no cross-app interdependency. It also works offline when you don’t have a Wi-Fi connection and will sync back up when you do. And you can store, share, access, search, edit and sync your files from any tablet securely through Soonr.

Available both on iTunes and the Android Market, Soonr offers a 30-day free trail. A Premium account costs $7.95 per month for three users with 10 GB of storage, while Soonr Pro is $19.95 per month for five users and 40 GB of storage. Soonr supports Mac and PC, and mobile devices including Android, iPhone and BlackBerry; and iPad and Android (Honeycomb) tablets. The Soonr editing feature currently supports Microsoft Office 2003 (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) and Microsoft Office 2010 (Word only) files.

Here’s a short video demo of Soonr’s editing function:

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The Chatbox application’s window has a fairly basic interface: a field for entering status updates or comments at the top, with a pane showing recent updates underneath. It’s a fairly basic app, but if all you need is a simple way to discuss, comment on, or annotate the files you store and share via Dropbox, it works pretty well. A couple of minor criticisms I have of the app: There doesn’t appear to be a way to edit or delete Chatbox updates that have previously been posted, and also it’s not immediately obvious how you associate a Chatbox status update with a particular file. (You need to right-click on the file and select “Show Chatbox” to bring up the Chatbox window for that file; any updates are then associated with that file).

Dropbox isn’t the only file storage available, but its popularity and open API mean there’s a thriving ecosystem of third-party apps built on top of it. Chatbox is a pretty useful add-on (not bad for what was apparently a weekend project), but I wouldn’t be surprised to see developers building on this concept and bringing out more full-featured and polished collaboration apps for Dropbox.

Chatbox is a free app currently in beta and only available for Mac OSX; you can download it here. It requires a Dropbox account.

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