GigaOM » YouSendIt

Survey: How apps can solve photo management

suite48 — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:55:09 +0000

A recent survey found that 76 percent of respondents store their digital photos on multiple devices using multiple services.That means ample opportunity exists for companies offering solutions that tackle this “dispersed photo problem.” This report analyzes the aforementioned survey’s results, and also measures 18 different vendors against what respondents value most when it comes to photo-organizing solutions.

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Comcast launches app store for biz customers

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 18:14:32 +0000

Comcast opened Upware, an app store featuring nine services for its small and mid-sized business customers on Wednesday. The app store isn’t a new idea, but it’s one that will bring in a new line of revenue for the ISP and serve one of its fastest growing customer bases.

Comcast’s business services brought in $2.4 billion in 2012, up 34 percent from the previous year. That’s only 6 percent of the company’s cable sales, but it’s growing at almost 6 times the pace of total sales. And those customers were asking Comcast for choices on document storage, security and other resources, which led to the ISP building Upware.

While spokesman Charlie Douglas declined to give specific financial details associated with the app store, he did say it would be a revenue-generating service for Comcast. It will also be great for the partners who will have their services listed for Comcast’s business customers. Those companies so far include:

Data Backup – Carbonite, DigitalSafe and Mozy.
Data Security – Norton and Websense.
Collaboration – Box, Microsoft, Soonr and YouSendIt (see disclosure.)

This is a good example of how a service provider can add value for its end users — value that it can monetize beyond a monthly broadband fee. Comcast has been pretty aggressive about adding connected home products on the residential side as well as beefing up it’s pay TV service to compete more with web-based on-demand services.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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Yahoo, AOL vet Garlinghouse named CEO of YouSendIt

Barb Darrow — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:00:51 +0000

Brad Garlinghouse, who once headed up AOL’s Silicon Valley operations, is now CEO of YouSendIt, a provider of file sharing and storage software for businesses.

In early April, reports surfaced that the current CEO, Ivan Koon would be leaving YouSendIt (see disclosure) after six years at the Campbell, Calif.-based company. Now we know who will fill his shoes. Garlinghouse will also be chairman of the board.

In a statement released Tuesday, Brian Jacobs, general partner of Emergence Capital, one of YouSendIt’s backers said:

“Brad’s capabilities are well known to Silicon Valley, public market investors and the leading technology companies worldwide. He appreciates the loyalty of our users, our contagious growth and the massive global opportunity for YouSendIt.”

The company is in a white-hot market judging by the number of cloud storage, file sharing-and-sync companies duking it out for paying customers. There it contends with Box, Accellion, OwnCloud, LogMein, Egnyte and dozens of others all trying to convert non-paying “fremium” users to paid customers. They all want to be “the Dropbox of the Enterprise.”

Most of these companies are adding more than file storage and sync as they go along, forging into cloud-based collaboration. Early this year, YouSendIt launched Workstream to address that market and claims The Absolut Company, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and Pernod Ricard as Workstream customers.

Forrester Analyst Ted Schadler said YouSendIt’s longevity and experience gives it an edge. “Box wants to store all your stuff. YouSendIt can store your stuff but they really want to send, distribute all your stuff,” he said. Given that they’ve been around for awhile, they’ve got a pretty strong security model that makes them attractive to businesses which, face it, are run by people who share and collaborate using documents, he said.

YouSendIt claims 585,000 paid subscribers out of 30 million registered users overall.

Garlinghouse, a former product guy at both AOL and Yahoo, as GigaOM has reported, is best known for the 2006 Peanut Butter Manifesto, which he wrote at Yahoo and which outlined the challenges faced by the struggling Internet company. Now he’s bringing his talents to a much smaller company, but one that boasts paying customers.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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Cloud storage wars continue as Egnyte woos Box users

Barb Darrow — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:28:56 +0000

The battle for cloud storage customers — well, make that paying cloud storage customers — is fully on. By all accounts millions of people store at least some of their data in the cloud. How many of them are paying for the privilege is what’s under dispute.

As of Monday, Egnyte says it will give paying Box customers free Egnyte storage until the end of the year. This “Box Buster” offer includes help with data migration.

Box and Egnyte — along with Accellion, GroupLogic, SurDoc, Intralinks, YouSendIt (see disclosure below) and other companies are trying to win over businesses to their respective cloud storage and file synchronization services. Dropbox is the leader in consumer-oriented cloud storage, claiming 50 million users, and Box is trying hard to become the Dropbox of the enterprise, claiming 10 million business customers. But again, the issue is how many of them are paying and Box (nor Dropbox for that matter) isn’t saying.

Most of these cloud storage services rely on a “freemium model” — they offer free storage up to a certain limit, and then try to convert those users to paid subscriptions. Egnyte claims more than 600,000 customers. Till now, it has offered a 30-day trial then the customer either comes aboard or is out. This offer, in effect, extends that free trial to eight months.

Most cloud storage providers will tell you that converting free to paid accounts is difficult. Most put the conversion rate in the 2 percent to 3 percent range. (YouSendIt, which claims 550,000 paid customers, says it converts 7.5 percent of its freemium users.)

Clearly there is a demand among businesses of all sizes for secure, reliable cloud-based storage. What’s not clear is which company will become the Dropbox equivalent in this hotly contested market. That’s why it won’t be surprising to see more offers of this type cropping up in the next few months.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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Box rounds up a bunch of apps for cloud storage push

Barb Darrow — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:00:17 +0000

The cloud storage wars continue with Box calling in the cavalry. The company has gathered up a gaggle of applications that users can access from mobile devices and use with Box’s flagship cloud storage service.

This Box OneCloud conglomeration is just the latest volley in an increasingly frenzied move by cloud storage vendors — startups and established players alike — to win business accounts that will hopefully pay for the service.

With Box OneCloud, a smartphone or iPad user can pull up QuickOffice to create or open a document, save it back to Box and share it with colleagues. A reviewer use Nuance Paperport to annotate it. And. when it’s ready, users can sign it with Adobe Echosign. All from their device of choice.

The goal is to re-create a desktop application suite for use first with iPhones and soon with Android devices, said Matthew Self, VP of platform engineering for San Francisco-based Box. Box said earlier this year it would focus on Android and iPhone — but Windows? Not so much. Last seek Self said the company will work on a Windows phone version “in proportion to its market share.”

Box now claims 10 million users, up from the 8 million it had claimed as recently as last month. But the company does not break out how many of those users are paying customers. Box is free for the first 5GB of storage.

The battle among cloud storage vendors to become the “Dropbox of the Enterprise” continues at a frenzied pace with companies like Egnyte, Accellion, GroupLogic, SurDoc , Intralinks, YouSendIt (see disclosure) and others vying for the title. Dropbox is the prohibitive leader in consumer-oriented cloud storage with 50 million users claimed. Again, it’s unclear how many pay.

All of this maneuvering happens even as Google preps its long-rumored Google Drive storage offering and Microsoft pushes Skydrive and Windows Azure storage. This is going to be a long fight.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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New challenges for the IT organization

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:38:23 +0000

Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are combining to create another force that is overwhelming many IT departments: complexity. This report, the second in a three-part series, examines several types of complexity in the business IT environment, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and the related challenges for IT staff.

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Personal tools lead to practical business

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:55:00 +0000

Much of business communication activity still happens in email, but in this day and age that presents a problem. Easy access to and tracking of projects has become more critical as workers go mobile and teams assemble remotely, and right now, the pairing of large files and email takes its toll on speed and storage capabilities, lessening productivity. Simply put, it is essential for businesses to adapt to these changes and others by providing tools that are simpler to use. This report, based on a recent survey of business managers, highlights some of the problematic areas around business content collaboration, and it provides some options for working through them. Companies mentioned in this report include 39signals, Dropbox, IBM and YouSendIt. To see all companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:01:13 +0000

Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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YouSendIt sends iPad, Android apps to cloud storage war

Barb Darrow — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:16:08 +0000

YouSendIt added new iPad and Android client apps to its cloud-based document sync, transfer and storage service, as well as updated iPhone and Windows desktop apps. A Mac desktop version is in beta.

That means users can transfer documents to the cloud or other devices securely from the popular Apple tablet and more smartphones, according to the Campbell, Calif.–based company.

This is just the latest shot fired in an ever-hotter arms race of cloud storage providers both in the consumer and business realm. Competitors include Box.net, Dropbox, Carbonite and others.

YouSendIt’s (see disclosure) claim to fame is that it offers one suite of services for sending, syncing, storing and electronically signing documents. The alternative is to use a consumer service like Dropbox to sync files, DocuSign for signing them and someone else for project folders, said Brian Curry, YouSendIt’s VP of product and business strategy.

“We ended last quarter with 23.5 million users,” Curry added. “We think these are mostly professional users . . . people working in small or home offices, legal firms, design departments within larger companies — folks that need secure file transfer where classic email doesn’t work, people who need to set read and write permissions and to do electronic signatures,” Curry said.

A free version of the service allows use of all the mobile, desktop and web clients but limits users to transferring one 50 MB document at a time, 2 GB of cloud storage and five free signatures. The paid Premium version ($9.99 per month or $49.99 per year per user) has a 5GB memory limit , allows transfer of multiple files at once and 10 signatures per year. The Pro Plus version ($14.99 per month or $149.99 per year per user) offers unlimited storage and e-signatures.

There is another tier for corporate customers who need 10,000 seats at a time that integrates with the corporate Active Directory, allowing single sign-on and policy management.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Yutaka Tsutano

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