While other file formats have faded, the lowly Gif has stubbornly stayed alive for more than 25 years through sites like Tumblr. Other apps like Vine and Cinemagram have also popped up to support the short-looping video.

Coub is doing the same and it’s starting to pick up some real traction. Over the last few months, the site, which lets people take YouTube or Vimeo videos, clip them to 10 seconds and loop them with music, has started attracting upwards of 1 million visitors a day from virtually nothing at the beginning of the year. Almost all of this traffic is from Russia, where the company has its Moscow headquarters.

The name is a play on Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception. (They had to add the ‘U’ because Cobb was already taken as a domain name.)

The two brothers behind the site, Anton and Igor Gladkoborodov, have a long history of building and selling media projects in Moscow. One of their last projects, Lookatme.ru, became more hipster hub for Russia, while another project catalogued public lectures in the city.

After selling Lookatme.ru, they started to brainstorm about other possible projects. They bootstrapped Coub and launched it last year, although it only started to pick up momentum in January. Now they’re seeing 5.5 million uniques per month.

Unlike Vine or Cinemagram, Coub is web-first and it’s mainly designed for people to manipulate existing videos, not create new ones from their phones. The Gladkoborodovs say many of the existing Gif-making sites aren’t that intuitive to use and the file formats can take longer to load and have poorer image resolution than their looping videos, or Coubs.

Russians are using Coub to mock celebrities and politicians, like the one below making fun of famed director Nikita Mikhalkov or the one below that of Vladimir Putin. There are signs that Russia is heading in a more politically oppressive direction after Putin’s re-election last year. Earlier this year, two of the founders of Russia’s top social network VKontakte, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev, abruptly and mysteriously sold a 48 percent stake in the company to UCP, an investment fund run by a financier with close ties to Putin.

Some are worried this will mean more limits for online political criticism.

But looping videos and Gifs meanwhile are pretty harmless, and funny, at the least. The two brothers, who moved to Moscow years ago from near St. Petersburg and the White Sea, say that their product is more comparable to YouTube than to other meme sites like 9gag or Reddit.

The site is starting to see pick-up abroad, with pockets of usage in places like Portland, Oregon. The Gladkoborodovs are hoping that they can find a way to help Coub take off in the U.S. and other sites outside of Russia.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Docurated is a enterprise tool targeted towards enterprise users — it is publicly launching onstage at Disrupt NY. It aggregates all your documents in one place, turning them into a beautiful searchable and customizable database. Docurated will now provide Dropbox integration as well.

“We don’t need any more 20 file sharing solutions,” co-founder and chief product officer Irene Tserkovny said onstage. “We just need one place that are worthy of their idea,” she continued. After installing Docurated, the file and folder metaphor disappears. It’s all about searching for the documents you need and collecting them.

For example, if you want to prepare a presentation on one of your products, you first do a search query. Not only will it return relevant documents, it will search for text inside the documents and show those passages as well. Then, you can pick paragraphs, graphics or entire files to add to a collection. You will then have all the information you need in one place. Finally, you can export this data in a single PowerPoint presentation or PDF file.

Docurated users can choose to host their files on Docurated’s servers or to install the product on their private servers. After this simple installation process, you can start adding files and using the visual search and curation tools to create collections.

Now that it integrates with Dropbox, Docurated can become a powerful search and curation tool for your Dropbox-hosted files as well. Docurated competes with Sharepoint or Autonomy, and in some way Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. The main difference with the file-based alternatives is that Docurated does not host any file, it only crawls content to make it searchable. The company counts on its curation features as well to set it apart from the competition.

One of Docurated’s key advantages is that you don’t need to maintain a folder hierarchy or to tag files. Everything is automatic and transparent.

The New York-based company received $1.6 million in funding from David Eisner, James Lyle, Leon M. Wagner and Elliot Wagner.

“We are currently selling directly to enterprises,” co-founder and CEO Alex Gorbansky said. “We are also looking at building out our reseller partner program and are exploring OEM opportunities,” he continued. Enterprises can sign up right now for Docurated or the Dropbox vertical.

Questions & Answers

Judges: Heidi Messer (Collective[i]), Peter Pham (Science), Dave Samuel (Freestyle Capital), Scott Stanford (Sherpa Foundry)

Q: How did you come up with the idea?
A: I kept losing time by searching for a PowerPoint presentation. We started prototyping and here we are.

Q: Where do you get the content?
A: We have a sync tool that auto-crawls anything. There is an email bot as well.

Q: How much do you charge?
A: This is a subscription model. It depends on the number of users. It’s $80/user/month. And we have an enterprise account as well. We sell to people that consume the most data.

Q: Those testimonials… Are these from actual customers?
A: We have a pilot at Netflix, Coca-Cola is using it pretty widely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google keeps integrating Google+ deeper into all of its products and today it’s Drive’s turn. When you open a file in Drive, you will now see the Google+ profile pictures of other viewers at the top of the document. Hovering over them brings up their Google+ card with their cover image and which Google+ circle you currently have them in. This, Google says, will make it easier to see who you are collaborating with on any given Drive document.

Google is also making it a bit easier to start group chats in Drive. You can now simply select the new chat button at the top right of the page and start chatting away. In the previous version, you first had to open up a drop-down menu to see who else was looking at a document and then start a chat from there.

Anonymous Chupacabra

In case there is an anonymous user who is looking at your document (which could happen if you decide to share your file through a link or with somebody who doesn’t have a Google account), Google will now identify them as an “anonymous [animal name].”

There seem to be quite a few of those, as Google Operating System’s Alex Chitu noted last week when Google first started testing this feature publicly, ranging from “Anonymous Anteater” to “Anonymous Dinosaur,” with a few kraken and chupacabras thrown in for good measure.

Google says these new features will roll out over the next few days. It also looks as if these new features won’t appear for all file types just yet. Google specifically highlights Google Sheets as a tool that will get these features later than other file types on Drive.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Buzzfeed has found a “security hole” in an app that is totally not used for sexting, Snapchat, and an app that is also totally not used for sexting, Poke. The two apps totally not used for sexting were found to have been caching videos that have nothing to do with sex as temporary files on the iPhone and other iOS devices.

You can replicate the “hack” by first of all getting someone to totally send you non-sex-related videos via either app and firing up the old iPhone file browser you totally have handy. I used iExplorer above, but Buzzfeed used iFunBox. Which doesn’t sound at all sexual.

To use this “method” to check out and save videos from Snapchat, even after you’ve viewed them, hit up the Snapchat app via the file browser and open a folder called “tmp.” If you want to check out Poke videos, first make sure not to view them, then go to the app in the file browser, then “library” then “caches” then “fbstore” then “mediacard.” See above.

While this totally not sexting related “story” is totally at the top of Techmeme right now, one day soon we’ll all forget that this was such big news. Facebook has told Slashgear that it was working on a fix for Poke, while Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel shrugged it off.

Because WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANYONE WHO ISN’T A TECH REPORTER DO THIS?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Egnyte has raised $16 million from Google Ventures for its cloud file storage solution. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers  and Polaris Ventures also participated in the Series C round.

Egnyte provides a service that stores documents in a cloud environment with the file appearing on the desktop with shared and private folders.

For instance, with Google Apps, people may use Egnyte to access files from Google GDrive or any other file on the hard drive. Docs may be edited and updated on the local and cloud drives.

Egnyte’s strength is in its accessibility but with IT setting policy for how it can be used. With this type of control, IT can give access to users from both in and outside an organization:

Egnyte is banking on the popularity of the hybrid cloud for its long-term growth. It’s the trend all the major cloud services providers are talking about as enterprise shops seek the most logical path to cloud adoption. That means keeping the servers they need and extending out to a cloud service that anyone with permissions

CEO Vineet Jain said in an interview that the opening of the enterprise market traces back to services such as Dropbox, which raised awareness of how storage can be used.

Egnyte is playing in a deeply competitive space. It competes with the like of Box, Mozy,  Syncplicity, SugarSync and,Nasuni, Funding is deep for storage vendors, Box alone raised $81 million last fall.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As promised at this morning’s Google I/O conference, Google has launched a version of its Google Drive application on iOS today, which offers native support for the service formerly known as Google Docs on both iPhone and iPad. The app is live now in iTunes, and looks to give competitor Dropbox a run for its money.

Although Google Drive has offered a mobile web version of its service for some time, many people prefer using a native application on their smartphones or tablets. This is somewhere Dropbox has previously excelled, but it no longer has that same advantage after today.

Navigation

Where Dropbox uses the more traditional iOS layout of having buttons at the bottom of the app (for Dropbox, Favorites, Uploads and Settings), the Google Drive application uses the layout popularized by Facebook involving a button at the top left which you tap in order to slide the screen over to the right, revealing the navigation.

At first launch, the app starts you on a homepage where you can access your drive, your shared files, starred files, recent files, and those you’ve made available for offline access. This structure mirrors what you would see when logging into the service on the web, so it’s easy to quickly orient yourself and find your way around. As you move in between screens, you can return to the navigation screen at any time by hitting the top left button.

Details Screen, Offline Access & Editing

When viewing your Drive, the app lists your folders first and then your files, all in alphabetical order. From the main screen you can star files or tap an arrow to be taken to the Details screen. (Tapping on the file itself, of course, opens it). The Details screen is an important one to get to know because it’s here that Google has tucked away one of Google Drive’s key features: offline access.

By default, all your files are not available offline – you have to tap the toggle switch to turn the feature on. This is done on a file-by-file basis. If that seems inconvenient due to your large number of files, you’ll probably want to organize them into a folder so you can switch on offline access for the entire folder instead.

Editing files is not as smooth as you may like. For now, you have to open Google Documents and Spreadsheets in Safari to make changes, using the button at the top right of the screen. When edits are complete, you have to hit the device’s home button and re-open the app. You also can’t create new items in the app nor can you upload from the Camera Roll (see last section for more on that) or the phone’s storage, which is a plus for Dropbox. However, you can rename files and open and view file types beyond Google Docs, including image files, movies, txt files, PDFs, and all Microsoft Office files. These can be opened with a variety of apps you may have installed on your device, including competitors like SkyDrive, Evernote, Dropbox and Kicksend, for example.

Search

The sync between the desktop and Drive was not exactly real-time, but it was very quick. I uploaded a photo on the PC, hit the “sync” button in the app and a few seconds later, it appeared. (I admit I pressed the button a lot. I’m impatient). The search functionality was also really fast and is able to pull up results even when the keyword was found within the document, as opposed to the title. OCR support was shown off during the demo today, with a picture of a tax form as the example use. In practicality, OCR is far more useful for simply making PDFs searchable. It’s also a big advantage over Dropbox’s more basic search functionality.

One thing I was itching to try out was whether or not the image search feature demoed on stage would also work in the app. Google’s Clay Bavor had searched for the keyword “pyramid” and Google Drive returned pictures of the Egyptian pyramids. I attempted to reproduce this on iPhone but used this photo, which seems like a good example of pyramids. I named it “Egypt,” however. Google Drive’s search function didn’t find it. Bummer. Apparently, image recognition may be hit or miss.

Collaboration

Another big plus to the new iOS app is the ability to collaborate on files from within the application. On iOS, however, this means the ability to share files with collaborators within the app, not real-time collaboration. Instead, you can add collaborators by email address from the Details screen. By default, they will have “view” access (read-only). To allow them to edit, you’ll need to tap on their name again in the Details screen and then change their permission level. You can also revoke access from this screen, too.

Although you can’t work with someone else in real-time, every time you open the file, it will update with the most recent edits. So the workaround for now would be to close the file, and then re-open it to see someone else’s changes that took place in the meantime. Collaboration on Dropbox works in a similar way. Users can share folders and files with individuals, groups or even publicly with the world, but collaboration is not real-time.

Pricing

However, the biggest threat to Dropbox and other consumer-friendly file storage alternatives is the price. Where Dropbox charges for anything outside of 2 GB (not counting the upgrades from referrals), Drive gives you 5 GB for synced and uploaded files for free, and doesn’t count those created or converted to Google Docs format. You can buy more storage here. Additional pricing plans for Dropbox start at $9.99/month for 50 GB and go up from there, while Google offers 20 GB for $5.00/year [Update: this is the plan I'm on, but just realized it's no longer available to new upgraders], 25 GB for $2.49/month or 100 GB for $4.99/month. Dropbox may now need to come down in price in order to compete now the Google Drive is native on iOS.

That being said, Dropbox still has one clever trick – in addition to supporting uploads, a newer feature of the app allows it to automatically upload the photos from your camera roll and gives you up to 3 GB of extra space for doing so automatically. Google still has a confused message around photos, however. Today, it still maintains its flickr competitor Picasa separately, while offering a similar kind of instant upload feature like Dropbox has via its Google+ native apps. At some point, the company needs to make all these things work together a little better. If it’s a “Drive,” then the expectation is that it should also help your find your Photos, too – you shouldn’t have to launch a separate app for that.

Google Drive is a free download from iTunes here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today Facebook begins rolling out file sharing to all Groups, and while it’s got many restrictions, it could be good enough to limit the long-term growth potential of cloud storage / file sharing services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive. Music and any copyright files aren’t allowed and file size is capped at 25mb, as Mashable first reported. But this is just the first version, and you can be sure Facebook will keep hacking away at it.

Last month, the social network started letting users share files within Groups for Schools, but now we confirmed with Facebook that within a few days all Facebook users should have the option to upload and share files from the Groups post composer.

Facebook users often talk about downloadable files, but now they’ll be able to share those Word docs, images, e-books, PDFs rather than having to upload them elsewhere. The addition of file sharing has been a long time coming, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously worked on a peer-to-peer service called WireHog, which was shut down due to concerns about copyright infringement. It also comes after Facebook’s acquisition of New York City-based file sharing Drop.io in 2010, which brought Sam Lessin on board.

File sharing could help Facebook fight its public image as a distraction from getting real work done. If you already have a Facebook Group to organize discussion about a class, work project, or vacation with friends, file sharing will fit right in.

You’re not going to be able to share huge home movies or zip files of photos, and sadly amateur musicians won’t be able to share their own creations with friends. But Facebook file sharing could be good enough for a lot of people, especially if it ups the file size limit, creates perma-URLs for files, and creates a tab in groups specifically showing shared files. Most important it would need extend file sharing to the general news feed to really become competitive. If it makes these improvements though, it could pull market share from other file sharing system by focusing on convenience.

There’s still plenty of use cases for the big cloud storage / file sharing services…such as sharing copyrighted files. Plus people might feel like their files will be more private on a dedicated service, even though Facebook Groups are quite secure. Products specifically for file sharing might always rule for business, but free personal usage that Facebook could chip away at has been a huge lead generator for enterprise sales. That’s why Facebook moving into the space could limit their long-term growth potential — something investors who sunk $257 million into Dropbox don’t want to see.

Let me be clear: this won’t kill Dropbox or reverse its stellar growth. We’re fans of the service and it won the TechCrunch Crunchie for overall startup of the year. But Facebook could make it hard for it become so popular that it could deliver to investors a serious multiple on the huge amount of funding its received.

The “good enough” approach is becoming a Facebook staple. It’s asymetrical, interest graph follow feature Subscribe was late to the game by years, but because it lives in the news feed where 900 million people already spend their time, it could stunt Twitter’s growth. The same thing could happen here. Facebook’s popularity and how deeply it’s ingrained our lives give it a big advantage. Power users may always crave specialized products, but for average joe, the option to send a file from the Facebook account they already have might be enough to stop them signing up somewhere else.

[Additional reporting by Ryan Lawler. Image Credit: How Stuff Works]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Flipboard for Android has arrived! The app made a limited debut late last week with the Samsung Galaxy S III, but now it’s here for everyone — but not officially. You see, the app, is supposed to be exclusive to the Samsung Galaxy S III for a set amount of time. However, the 2.32mb APK hit XDA-Dev this morning, which should install on any Android device. The cat, as they say, is officially out of the proverbial bag. Here’s how to install it and start flipping.

As Engadget points out, this is a pretty easy install. Jump over to XDA where forum user Valcho uploaded the .apk. If you do this on your phone’s browser, just download the file and it should prompt to install the application automatically.

Or, if you use your computer, just download said file and then get it to your phone either by emailing it to yourself, using Dropbox or loading it on the device’s memory through a USB cable. From there, locate the file and click to install. It’s just that easy, kids.

The application installed without an issue on my aging Droid X and runs beautifully. I was able to sign into my Flipboard account and was instantly greeted by a lovely pic from last night’s wildly successful I Love TC NYC meetup.

Once Flipboard hits Android officially, it will likely skyrocket to the top of the Google Play charts. Flipboard is just that good. Hello Flipboard and goodbye Google Currents.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ever since Google released its cloud storage service Google Drive earlier this week, there has been some speculation as to what its integration with ChromeOS, Google’s cloud-centric operating system, would look like. Today, Google released the first developer version of ChromeOS 20 with support for Google Drive. As expected, Google Drive is now deeply integrated into the ChromeOS file manager, though this is clearly just a first effort and still needs quite a bit of work.

The Google Drive integration is rather basic in this first release. Drive currently appears as an additional folder in the ChromeOS file manager. While the file manager now features a column called “available offline,” I wasn’t able to actually find a way to download my Google Drive files to the laptop’s internal storage, though. There also wasn’t a clear path for uploading files from the file manager to Google Drive (though you can obviously always use the Drive web app to upload and download files). It’s obviously only a matter of time before this functionality becomes available, though. For now, Google Drive’s advanced search features also aren’t available through the file manager’s interface.

Adding support for Google Drive also puts more emphasis on the file manager in ChromeOS. In the early days of ChromeOS, the file manager was more or less hidden from sight. Over time, though, it clearly became obvious to Google that its users weren’t quite ready for an OS without the ability to manage their files in the way they had become accustomed to.

If you haven’t looked at the developer versions of ChromeOS for a while, you will notice that it looks quite a bit different now compared to just a few weeks ago. Google now uses Aura, a hardware-accelerated window manager for ChromeOS, which allows you to open multiple browser windows and not just one window like before. ChromeOS now also features a Windows-like taskbar at the bottom of the screen.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the words of Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, sharing documents and other files online is “bafflingly, still really difficult.” I mean, clearly it’s doable through email and, yes, services such as Dropbox, but it’s still kind of a pain. With a new feature launching today, Houston and his team are trying to make things as absolutely simple as possible. And it looks like they’ve succeeded.

Houston and Product Manager Ivan Kirigin demonstrated the feature to TechCrunch Editor Eric Eldon and me last week. It was one of those demos that went flew by — in a good way. Now, if you want to share a file in Dropbox, you just click on the file, then click on “Get Link”, and Dropbox will automatically generate a custom URL. You can share that URL via email or however else you like, and whoever clicks on it will be able to view the file in their browser. Simple, and also the first easy way for Dropbox users to share files with people who don’t have Dropbox accounts.

There are other things worth pointing out beyond the basic functionality. One is that the experience is simple for both the person viewing the file and the person sharing it. There’s no complicated upload process — you just need to drag something into your Dropbox folder (assuming it isn’t there already), and then it takes two clicks to get the URL. The Dropbox team showed us that it’s not just about documents, but also photos, videos, and even folders. You can also share files from the Dropbox mobile app, and view them in a mobile browser. (Dropbox has already quietly launched the feature in its mobile apps.) Oh, and there’s an option for deleting a file that you’ve previously shared.

Houston says the team spent a lot of time trying to create a beautiful viewing experience (in fact, a spokesperson tells me that Kirigin, engineer Makinde Adeagbo, and designer Jon Ying have been working on this for more than a year). He also imagines that this could be applicable to a broad range of use cases, from coach wanting to share photos with their team to a professor sharing the class syllabus with students.

One current drawback is the lack of security features, aside from the link itself — as long as someone has that link, they can view the file. On the bright side, that means there viewing experience is as easy as Houston wants it to be. He also notes that guessing a long, randomized URL is incredibly difficult. However, he wants to add more security eventually, like optional password protection.

You can read more about the links feature here. Eldon and I were actually so taken with it that we’re going to be encouraging companies to follow Dropbox’s lead. So startups and PR people: Please use Dropbox links to share press materials with us.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch