Dave Tang, 44
Vice President, Fabrik, Inc., San Mateo, Calif.
Chris Williams, 20
Sophomore, University of Illinois, Champaign
By now, most people know about photo-sharing Web sites, where you can upload your digital pictures and invite family and friends to view them and–the companies hope–order prints for themselves.
Conversely, fewer people know about Web-based storage firms such as Xdrive (www.xdrive.com) and Streamload (www.streamload.com) which “rent” Internet-accessible hard drive space.
The upside: You can back up your photos, videos, music and productivity documents while being able to access them from any Internet-enabled PC.
Downside: Your files are stored on the Internet. And while the site’s descriptions include words like “authentication” and “encryption,” many people might be uneasy about storing confidential company documents online.
(By the way, “rent” is in quotes above because both companies offer a free version of their service. Xdrive offers a generous 5 gigabytes for no fee.)
Now there’s a new company that combines photo sharing with Web-based storage into a single service called MyFabrik (www.myfabrik.com).
The San Mateo, Calif.-based Fabrik Inc. offers a way to “store, manage and share personal media, whether it’s photos, video or documents,” said Dave Tang, Fabrik’s vice president.
Here’s how it works:
In addition to renting online storage space, MyFabrik includes multimedia functions that let you view your photos, watch your videos and listen to your tunes right on the site.
You can also organize them, and, if you like, view your photos as a slide show.
The site’s power, however, is in sharing files.
Chris Williams, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receives Fabrik slide shows from his parents in California.
“I just get an e-mail from my parents,” he said. “There’s a link there, and when I click on it, it takes me to their slide show on Fabrik.”
Williams also sends slide shows to grandparents in New Mexico. “They’re not very computer-savvy, and with this, all they have to do is click on a link and the slide show pops up,” he explained.
To send a slide show from MyFabrik, “you select the photos you want to share, and type in the e-mails you want to send them to,” said Tang.
The site also lets you plug your slide show–or, if you prefer, one of those moving “photo strips”–into an eBay auction, or, if you’re trendy, onto your MySpace site.
MyFabrik costs about $1 for 2 gb of storage space, plus about 50 cents per additional gigabyte. You can try the service for free with 1 gb of space.
The 15-person Fabrik staff also offers the same file-sharing results via another, decidedly higher-tech option: an $800, 500-gb Seagate external hard drive that “lives” at your home, but is accessible from the Internet.
More Top Picks What Are Colored Overlays And How Do They Help Reading
Think of it as a hard drive loaded with the same interface as the company offers to its online subscribers–except the drive connects to the Internet, no PC required.
“It’s a personal Web server,” Tang said. “Let’s say you have hundreds of gigabytes of photos, video and music, and you want remote access to that content. This is how you’d do it.”
Why use the hard drive when I can use the online service?
“Some users simply like the emotional value of having this content in the house,” Tang replied. “They’re more comfortable having it home.”
———-
Alex L. Goldfayn is host of “The Technology Tailor Show” on WGN-AM 720 on Saturdays from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.