Today’s article is a bit technical and abstract but nonetheless interesting. Read our interview with David Zhao from Zumo Drive.

S.N.: What prompted you to start ZumoDrive?

D.Z.: We started ZumoDrive because online storage wasn’t usable. Most of the storage services consist of a web page with a upload button. We saw the vision where online storage would be seamless integrated with the operating system so that all of the applications can connect to the cloud.

S.N.: What are the primary goals for your product in terms of user interaction?

Our primary goal is to provide transparent access to the cloud to the users. We want to free people from thinking about backup, syncing files across different machines, and running out of space on their devices. They should be able to install ZumoDrive and be able to take full benefit of the cloud right away.

S.N.: Could you give us some info on the back end tech/logistics/team of running ZumoDrive?

D.Z.: We’ve built our technology from the ground up. One of the key piece of it is a virtual file system that integrates directly with the OS. It handles caching, random access, and direct streaming from the cloud. The server side is built on top of Ruby and other open source technologies. We use Amazon as the backend cloud.

S.N.: The proportion of free/paid accounts?

D.Z.: We have a very healthy paying to free ratio.

S.N.: What effect did Techcrunch have on the service in terms of new accounts and user retention afterwards?

D.Z.: TechCrunch was great, it introduced ZumoDrive to a huge number of people. While I can’t disclose numbers, I can say that retention ratio for the service is very good.

S.N.: Plans you could share for future developments of the service?

D.Z.: Better web interface, better performance on the client, Linux, and more mobile devices soon.

S.N.: Who do you think are your primary competitors in this space? What’s Zumo’s advantage in your opinion?

D.Z.: There are a few players in the space, namely Dropbox and SugarSync. One of our main advantages is the ability to provide access to files without having to first download them onto the device. This creates a unique value proposition for devices that don’t have a lot of local storage. We also have a stronger focus around media and have unique capabilities for dealing with these type of files.

S.N.: Is the PaaS concept going to affect ZumoDrive or is it already implemented?

D.Z.: Yes, it definitely will be. It’s of great interest to us. More information about ZumoDrive is available here.

ZumoDrive is easy to set up, but unfortunately, you can only upload files from Windows or Mac; Linux users will still be able to access the web interface but without any upload capability. The small installation program that helps you create an account and select your desired capacity. The free plan includes 1GB of storage, but you can go up to 500GB with premium accounts.

After you sign up, you’ll have a ZumoDrive icon in the notification area which will allow you to change settings and view the status of uploads.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with the upload speeds, topping at 200KB/s, which means you’ll have to wait a bit if you’re uploading a movie or pictures shot in RAW format. The same holds true if you want to upload your entire music library and use the iTunes integration.

An interesting feature specific to ZumoDrive, is that it caches frequently used files on your local disk – which means you can continue working even if an internet connection is not available. You can control how much space you want it to use by visiting the ZumoDrive Console.

ZumoDrive can also be used as a backup – if the hard drive in your laptop dies, you’ll still have the files if you uploaded them. It’s not very cost efficient though; Mozy’s Unlimited plan is 5$ whereas a 50GB plan for ZumoDrive is 11,99$.

Their iPhone application gives you about the same functionality of the web interface: view photos, listen to songs and read documents(Word, PowerPoint, Excel, .txt, .rtf).

I’ve found ZumoDrive useful in a couple of day-to-day situations, such as showing a colleague the revised presentation even though I forgot my flash drive and working in the lab using schematics saved on the iPhone/iPod touch application.

With Zumodrive, we help people store, access and share the bits of their life – their music, their memories and their ideas. People don’t want to think of where all this is stored and how to take it all with them on their various devices. They just want to know that it is all constantly protected, always accessible and easily shareable.  We have leveraged the cloud to make this more of a reality, and we would love to see cool netbooks where ZumoDrive could be added for a few more bucks with a click or two.  Would you be willing to pay a few more bucks to always have access to all your personal content? –Zumo Blog

I couldn’t get myself to pay for the premium service; the free option served my limited needs and I’d rather walk with my information stored on an IronKey, safely encrypted, not available to anyone who happened to pick up my iPod touch.

ZumoDrive has one advantage and disadvantage over Wixi: the iPhone application.

On one hand it doesn’t ask you for your password in order to access your files and on the other it provides great convenience over Wixi’s web app. I’m sure Wixi will get around to an iPhone application soon, if they want to stay competitive.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get a hold on the ZumoDrive team via email; I had prepared some interesting questions. I invite them to contact me via email. As always, I look forward to your comments and recommend you to try Zumo Drive and share with us your experiences.

Founded in early 2007, Wixi has continually added more functionality, and at this point is an quite amazing service. While being more Gamma than Beta, Wixi appears to be a feature complete service – allowing you to easily upload, manage, view and share media. I didn’t encounter any issues while using the service – no errors or freezes – and enjoyed reasonable fast uploads (200-300KB/s). I didn’t expect that a service using a mix of JavaScript and Flash will behave so consistent and snappy.

Wixi’s interface – clearly designed to appeal even the least computer-savvy users – resembles your desktop – windows, menus and, of course, a wallpaper of your choosing.

One of Wixi’s strong points is the ability to set access levels to files; private, friends or public. You wouldn’t want to share your final essay with the whole world, would you? Because you can pick individual people with which you want  to share a file or a folder, you can work together with your friends on a project, and not worry about sending each revision over email to the other participants.

Once you invited your friends to Wixi, you are automatically updated with their public activity via the Friends Activity Report. Arranged by media type, you could find pictures that your girlfriend took on the trip, or just as easily, the new school timetable posted by a colleague. Wixi has a lot of real-life uses that differentiate it from the other storage services – because of the tight integration with social aspects.

Social tools on the site allow users to interact with their friends online, across campus or across the globe, sharing a cool new song or photos of a recent vacation or family event. For those without access to their computers, Wixi offers long-distance access to media files. Registered members can also meet fellow users, browsing their Wixis, discovering new media and expanding their social circles.

Wixi also enables you to discover new content by simply browsing other people’s public ‘wixis’; if you find something you like, you can leave a message, save the file to your Wixi or request to be friends with that person.

Another interesting feature is ‘Web Channels’. Recently implemented, Web Channels lets you search, save and view content from YouTube, Daily Motion, Flickr, Hulu, CNN and MTV Music.

With offices in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and half a million dollars in funding, Wixi has set a high goal for itself, ‘a world-class community for millions of users’. Their goal is far from unattainable if they continue adding features, maintaining the service reliable and easy to use. Wixi certainly gets my thumbs up, with the same concerns I have for any cloud storage service: privacy and data safety.

You can sign up for free at wixi.com; the free option gives you 3GB of storage and just a couple of restrictions, such as streaming files under 100MB. The premium option removes al the restrictions and gives you unlimited storage.

The first 50 readers who send an email leave a comment on the blog will get an code for the premium service; If you want to say thanks, include in your email a cool service, website or software you’ve discovered or a topic you’d like me to cover. This will help me pick future stories according to your interests.

As always, I love hearing what you think, in the comments. Have you previously used Wixi or a similar service? What could be improved?

I have a Mac laptop and a PC desktop at home. I also use Bootcamp with Windows XP and have several virtual machines (Vista, Ubuntu) installed with VMware and VirtualBox.

I want an easy way of syncing my files from the Mac at home with the PC at work without having to leave the Mac open all day long, like with Windows Live Folder Share.

• When running  Windows in Bootcamp I don’t want to buy MacDrive to access the Mac partition
• When on the Mac I don’t want to buy Paragon NTFS just to work on a few files.
• I want to transfer files between my Mac and desktop PC  and I don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a home network between the two and fiddle with the sharing options – I may forget to unshare folders on my Mac, inviting everybody to steal my files when connected to a hotspot.
• When playing with Virtual Machine software I don’t want to learn how to use VM shared folders. I want an easy way of transferring a bunch of files on all my virtual machines, no matter what VM software I use.

Looks like I need some syncing software: Dropbox and SugarSync.

Interface

DropBox has no interface. After installing DropBox you get a DropBox folder in you Documents folder. It may look like any other folder but it’s actually special. Every file you drop here will be automatically uploaded into the cloud (Amazon S3 to be more specific) and then downloaded to all the computers that you linked to your DropBox account(when they go online, or instantly if they are online). The same happens when modifying or deleting files. A green checkmark will be overlayed on the icons if the files are up to date (on your machine and online) and a blue arrow when files are syncing. Unfortunately there is no indication of transfer progress, speed or ETA. Growl Notifications/Tray Tooltips when syncing is complete is all you get.

SugarSync’s interface is quite pleasant. You use it to set up the folders you want to be synced and backed up online. There is a DropBox equivalent also – the Magic Briefcase. It’s a folder in you Documents that acts exactly like the DropBox folder- all your files you drop there will be synced on all the computers you installed SugarSync on. There is no graphic representation of what is happening to the files like you get in DropBox, but if you return to SugarSync Manager you are able to see details about the transfer: speed and ETA. Too bad you can’t hide SugarSync Mac client from the dock, and access the manager just from the menu bar.

Supported platforms

Dropbox works on Mac, Windows and Linux, while SugarSync works on Mac,Windows and Phones (iPhones,BlackBerrys). So no Linux love from SugarSync.

Usability

When using Dropbox you are actually using just familiar software: Explorer, Finder or Nautilus. There is nothing to configure, just start to drag & drop files in the DropBox folder. You can access functionality like sharing or viewing all the versions of a file by right clicking on the file and choosing the appropriate item in the DropBox submenu.

SugarSync has a nice and intuitive interface (SugarSync Manager) but I’d rather it took a transparent interface approach like DropBox did.

Sync files on multiple machines

DropBox and the MagicBriefcase of SugarSync work flawlessly across platforms with no user intervention.I tested all the scenarios posted in the challenge, and both programs performed marvelously.Both offer automatically resume support so don’t worry if your connection drops or you need to turn off your machine when syncing.

Backup

DropBox is not really suited for backup. You can’t select which folders or files you want to backup online. You only have the DropBox folder where you drop files you need to be synced with other computers. You can use it for backup though: just copy the files in the DropBox folder but now you will have two copies on the machine you want to back-up, and a copy on all your other machines when they sync.A little to redundant for my taste.

SugarSync is a good backup solution. In the SugarSync Manager you can add which folders you want to back-up and sync online. Any changes you make in these folder will instantly reflect online and vice-versa. Only the files in the MagicBriefcase will be synced across all of your computers.

Access your files online

DropBox and SugarSync offer similar web interfaces where you can download or upload files. The days of emailing files to yourself or putting them on flash sticks are over.

As expected, in SugarSync you can choose between the computers you backed-up. The web interface looks a lot like the offline SugarSync Manager.

Share files

In DropBox you have a Public folder. All the files dropped here get a public access link that you can send to your friends by IM or e-mail. To reveal this link just right click the file and choose DropBox->Copy Public link. The link is now in you clipboard, just a few keystrokes away from pasting it in your IM window. For sending large files to your friends it might be easier and safer now to use DropBox than uploading you’re file through a web interface with services like FileDropper, Drop.io or YouSendIt. Just don’t forget to delete a file once everyone got it, because it will be automatically downloaded to your other machines when they get online.

The process of sharing a file in SugarSync is not as smooth. Once you select a file in SugarSync Manager and click the big Send File button on the toolbar, you are taken to the web interface, in a new browser window. Here you need to specify the email addresses where you want the file to be sent. You can import your contacts from you Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail/AOL account in the SugarSync Adress Book. Unfortunately you can’t get just the link to quickly send it by IM.

Photo Gallery

If you wanted to quickly and painlessly share an image gallery with friends, colleagues or family from a Mac you had three options :  export the gallery from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums or Flickr (with the help of plugins) or publish it to  your .ME  account. Now there is an even faster way!

In the DropBox folder you have a folder called Photos. When you drop a folder with images in here a web gallery will be automatically created. You follow the same steps as in sharing a file to get the public link to the gallery. The gallery is very basic, with maximum 16 thumnails per page. When you click a photo thumbnail you will be presented with a scaled down to 640 by 480 version.

In SugarSync any synced folder that contains images will automatically have it’s own web photo album. To see this albums click Go to Photo Gallery button which will take you to the web interface.

The photo gallery is more advanced. You can choose between slide show, small/large thumbnail view or mosaic view (when you click a photo in thumbnail view). To share an album you have to to go through the obnoxious process of clicking the Share Album link and then selecting the emails where you want the gallery link to be sent. One thing to notice: after sharing the gallery with someone by email, you can now directly copy and send the gallery’s link in your browser’s address bar to your IM friends.

File Versioning

Both applications are similar to TimeMachine in Leopard. They store previous versions of all your files, so you can easily restore them at a later time.

After initial synchronization, every time you modify a file in DropBox, only the changes will be uploaded in the cloud, not the whole file. In the DropBox submenu click Versions to see all the revisions you made to that file.

SugarSync works in a similar manner, but it only stores the last five versions. Luckily, only the most recent version of each of your files counts towards your storage quota.

File Collaboration

One important feature that SugarSync lacks is collaboration. In DropBox you can create special folders you can share with other DropBox users. Any member of a shared folder can add, edit and delete the contents within and changes will be instantly synced to all members. So if you don’t fancy Google Docs and rather work on your offline document editor together with a colleague now you can!

Size and Price

DropBox offers a free plan with 2 GB storage and  $99 a year or $9.99 a month with 50 GB.

SugarSync has no free plans but at least you can choose a 45 days trial with 10 GB space. There are five paid plans:

Conclusion

There is no clear winner in this fight. They both do the job extremely well. SugarSync may have more features (like iPhone sync) , but the free 2 GB plan, Linux support and the unbelievably ease of use of DropBox, makes it more appealing for many (including me).

And if you wish DropBox had backup features for any folder on your disk, like SugarSync , instead of waiting for the implementation you might want to take a look at Mozy’s free 2 GB plan. But that’s the subject of another article!