Over in Berlin Web 2 Expo I ran into Dominik Grolimund, CEO of peer-to-peer storage application Wuala (see previous coverage), who has kindly offered TechCrunch UK & Ireland readers 100 invitations. If you want to take up the offer do this:
1. Goto http://techcrunchuk.wua.la
2. Download Wuala
3. Use the invitation code “techcrunchuk” when prompted
The skinny on Wuala is that it is a P2P competitor to Xdrive, MediaMax or Box.net. You start off with 1GB of free storage, and then if you want more, you need to make more space available on your own hard drive for other Wuala members. (The amount of extra storage you get also depends on what percentage of time your computer is online). The files you want to store get broken up into 500 encrypted fragments, each of which get stored on another Wuala member’s computer. None of the files stored on your computer are executable. It’s like any storage system but the files just happen to be distributed across other peer computers. You drag and drop files into folders just like on your desktop. You can also stream videos or music to a computer with Wuala installed on it. But before you liken this to BitTorrent it’s worth remembering that the service is more about storing your own files than sharing them with loads of people, even though it has that potential.