Social Online Storage Service Wuala Opens To the Public Today

Wuala is a social online storage service that is making its public debut today. We covered Wuala back when it was in invite-only alpha testing stage and even then we were rather impressed by the service and its approach to storage and sharing of files - even though it is hard to expect anything really creative from an online storage service, right? Wuala proves that there are some things that can be done in a very unusual way even in this industry.

The thing is that Wuala is based on a unique technology (researched mostly by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - it’s a Zurich-based startup) that allows it to use both online storage space on its servers and idle space on computers of users for storage to allow for more flexible storage and sharing of various files online.

Wuala is also very serious about security and protection of the files: all the uploaded files are encrypted on the user’s computer first and no one will be able to see the files or the folders they are stored in unless this user grants permission - not even the developers of the service themselves.

Wuala works on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines as a desktop application but can also be started from within the browser as well. A very distinctive feature of Wuala is that it allows for sharing of all file types without any limitations in bandwidth or file sizes. Every new user is provided with 1 Gb of storage space for free and if there’s a need for more, it can be increased further by trading some idle space on hard drive of a user’s computer for additional online space. This disk space will be used to store fragments of files uploaded by other users. This solid technology is exactly what lets the service not to impose any limits and stay free at the same time. Alternatively, if a user is uncomfortable about letting anyone use his own hard drive, it is possible to buy additional space needed from Wuala (10 GB for $25, 50 GB for $95, 100 GB for $160, 500 GB for $630, 1 TB for $1000 per year). The service team expects this one to become the major revenue stream along with ad revenue and commission they earn if you order photo prints via Wuala (available only for some European countries for now).

Wuala has been in development for over 3 years now. The guys behind the service claim that the 10-months private alpha testing was a huge success with over 30 thousand users and millions of files shared (which obviously means that people actually used the service instead of simply trying it out for the sake of testing).

Now that the service is public its developers hope for millions of users to arrive and start using Wuala for their files sharing needs. What’s more, they actually sound pretty confident in Wuala scalability and don’t foresee problems with accommodating this great number of users. I think only time will tell but I also hope it will work - simply because it is not all that often that you see a creative approach to files storage and sharing.