The cloud is becoming the preferred method of storing the data we need to access, and while there are many options in the market place, UpThere is touting its service as unique. Here’s why.
One of the inconveniences of cloud storage is the need to sync your devices. Depending on the service provider, this is a time consuming process that is redundant, not always correct, and sometimes fails to work altogether.
Company co-founder and CEO Roger Bodamer told TechCrunch: “We built a consumer cloud from the ground up. We questioned everything, literally. We experimented a lot. We want the cloud to be the primary place for your data.”
He went on to say the company has created a way to save, store and organize files that is able to exploit the capabilities of the cloud. That means direct access whether you are using a laptop, phone, tablet, phablet or desktop without syncing, making the cloud your hard drive.
The Palo Alto, California, company has been operating in “stealth” since it was founded in 2011 by Bodamer, Bertrand Serlet and Alex Kushnir. As the company comes out of stealth, it is letting the world know who it is and what it does, while announcing UpThere will be available for anyone to try out in the near future.
The company has two products in the trial stages: UpThere Camera and Home. They’re available on Android, iOS and Mac, with a PC version on the way.
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As you might have guessed by the name Camera, this is a service for storing images. When you take a picture, it saves your images directly to the cloud. You can also share these images with groups, with notifications whenever there is a contribution from the members.
UpThere Home lets you view all of your stored files. This includes documents, images, music and videos. Whenever you want to view these files, you can stream the entire library without having to download or sync any of those files to any device you are using.
The one obvious question that comes with this platform is, what happens if there isn’t an Internet connection? Because a good connection is critical to make this work, and the company told TechCrunch, it caches some of the files locally on your device.
With connectivity becoming as important as other infrastructures, the availability is going to be just as reliable. And UpThere is depending on this reliability to ensure the success of its vision of what cloud storage should be.
Blank Laptop Photo via Shutterstock
This seems pretty hyped without a good reason compared to the other cloud services like google photos, flickr or even carousel on dropbox. You don’t have to sync everything to your device with those either and they give you a lot more interesting services on top of just streaming the content you’ve uploaded.
What on earth does it mean to “stream the entire library without having to download or sync any of those files to any device you are using”? That’s a flat contradiction. If you’re streaming the files to the device, you’re downloading the files! “it caches some of the files locally on your device”. So it’s a partial sync, or if there’s space on the device you get a full sync if you stream everything? Isn’t this what everyone does for streaming content? Like spotify builds a big cache of music that it has downloaded. Hardly groundbreaking.
Doesn’t sound like “reconsidering” everything. Flickr for example published an explanation how they do their storage cloud using the open source Ceph system. I’m sure these guys are probably doing something very similar?
Another bad attempt to cash in on being a photo driven unicorn? If it took 4 years to do that it almost sounds like a late pivot after failing at something else.