Wuala has become a part of my daily tech life as a storage sharing/backup app. It’s very useful and lots of potential. I have given a lot of friends invites to the service and they’ve been impressed with the service too.
WUALA, SOCIAL ONLINE STORAGE, HAS LAUNCHED!
Zurich, Switzerland - August 14, 2008 - Wuala, the free social online storage which allows its users to securely store and share files online, launches today. After a successful closed alpha (invitation-only) with tens of thousands of users storing and sharing millions of files, Wuala is ready to open up to everyone at www.wua.la.
“After more than three years of development and ten months of testing in closed alpha, we are very proud to release Wuala to the public”, says Dominik Grolimund, CEO. “Our alpha users, who are storing and sharing millions of files, have given us tremendous feedback and use Wuala very actively and with great enthusiasm. We believe that Wuala is the right tool for millions of people to securely manage and share their files online.”
Wuala is exceptional in many ways and comes with a number of unique features. In contrast to other online storage solutions, all data stored in Wuala gets encrypted on the user’s computer before it is stored online. The user’s password never leaves his computer. This ensures that only the user and those authorized by the user can see his files and folders. Not even Wuala (Caleido Inc.) as the provider can decrypt the data.
Wuala bridges web and desktop, making it much more convenient than other solutions. Wuala is neither a website, nor a classical desktop application. Being a free application that can be started directly from a website, it allows for typical web use cases such as sending someone a link to a file or using it in places like internet cafes where installing software isn’t allowed. However, as a desktop application, it can perform most tasks locally on your computer, making it much faster than a typical website and allowing for a level of security that wouldn’t be possible if it were a web site.
“Wuala is based on a novel technology that reduces our costs.”, says Luzius Meisser, CTO. “Wuala users can choose to contribute idle resources to Wuala. In addition to servers, Wuala can harness these resources. All data is first encrypted and then split into fragments which are redundantly stored on our servers and in the grid network. This allows us to save costs for downloads - bandwidth, electrical power - and thus to provide a better service for free, with a number of advantages that others just can’t offer: unlimited traffic, no file size limits, fast downloads, etc.”
The closed alpha, which had been released in September 2007, has been very successful and generated a lot of buzz. Tens of thousands of people and thousands of communities around the world are actively sharing millions of files in Wuala. Now that Wuala is available for everyone, it’s ready to scale up to millions of people.
About Wuala
Wuala is a free social online storage which allows its users to securely store, backup, and access files from anywhere and to share files easily with friends, groups, and the world. Tens of thousands of alpha users and thousands of communities around the world are actively sharing millions of files.
Wuala is based on a revolutionary technology that was researched for the most part at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). Users start with 1 GB of storage but can get as much as they want, either by trading idle disk space or by buying additional storage. All files are encrypted on the user’s computer and the user chooses who gets access to which folder. No one else - including Caleido - gets to see the files. Wuala comes as a convenient application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that can also be started directly from within the browser, elegantly bridging web and desktop.
Wuala is developed and run by Caleido Inc., a start-up based in Zurich, Switzerland.
Find more information in our presskit at www.wua.la/files/presskit.pdf (3 pages), and on our website www.wua.la.
Contact
Contact us for more information about Wuala, or to request an interview with a member of our team.
Dominik Grolimund, CEO
Caleido AG, Buckhauserstrasse 30, 8048 Zürich, Schweiz
E-Mail: dominik@wua.la, Tel: 0041 43 3218416
