File sharing service YouSendIt has just announced the acquisitions of email collaboration startup Attassa and e-signature service Zosh. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.
Attassa’s SDK adds a collaborative layer on top of Microsoft Outlook. Features include file-sharing, synchronization and backup service. Attassa’s nifty iPhone app, which we wrote about here, also synchronizes users’ email from Outlook and other Webmail servers. Zosh’s e-signature service, which launched at DEMO, allows users to view, fill, sign and transmit documents from a mobile phone. You can then email the completed documents as standard PDF files. → Read More
File sharing service YouSendIt has closed a $15 million Series D funding round led by Adams Street Partners, with existing investors Emergence Capital, Sigma Partners, and Alloy Ventures also participating. Robin Murray, a partner at Adams Street, will become an observer for the company’s board of directors.
YouSendIt’s core product allows users to easily send and receive files and folders as large as 2 gigabytes in size (rather than send the file itself via email, you send a link to the file that is hosted on YouSendIt’s servers). The service continues to grow, with 300,000 new registered users a month, and CTO Ranjith Kumaran says that the company is doing well at monetizing its freemium products: the site has over 215,000 paid users, all of whom are subscribed to plans that run $9.99 per month and higher. → Read More
File sharing services are not as popular today as they were four years ago. It’s not that people are sharing any less. Rather, they just found easier ways to do it. Would you upload a funny video from a friend’s email to any of those services or would you search for it on Youtube and share only the link? Would you upload an MP3 file in order to share with whomever, or would you search for it online, grab the link and then share it? And finally, would you use a file-sharing app just to share a picture on Facebook when you can do it directly from your desktop to your Facebook profile? Of course, you wouldn’t!
So why would you use an file-sharing app anyway? Actually for many reasons: for larger files, for privacy, multiple files, file format support, and more.
In this post, I compare 16 file-sharing services. I took three main issues under consideration when creating the comprehensive app list below: Free, Fast, and Useful . . . → Read More
YouSendIt has raised an additional $14 million in a Series C round led by Emergence Capital and all existing investors, including Alloy Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Cambrian Ventures and Sigma Partners. The round brings YouSendIt’s total to $34 million. YouSendIt is a file delivery service with over 7 million registered users. The funding will be used to grow subscriptions, and to develop content delivery and management services. The service enables users to send large files to any email address. Users can send files from the website or through plug-ins for popular applications such as Photoshop and Outlook. CrunchBase Information YouSendIt Emergence Capital Partners Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
YouSendIt, an online file transfer service with a focus on businesses, is removing the beta label from an Outlook plugin that automatically reroutes large attachments through its so-called “FedEx for the internet” system. Email accounts tend to place really low caps on attachments – don’t even think about sending 2GB of movies to your friends and expect them to land successfully in their inboxes. But with this plugin, all attachments over a designated size (2MB? 5MB? you pick) are automatically transfered by YouSendIt rather than standard email. Large files are uploaded to YouSendIt’s servers where they remain until the recipient downloads them via an emailed link, all without requiring the sender to change attachment his or her habits. This is just the first plugin that YouSendIt has planned for integrating into apps with which users tend to exchange files. A plugin for Thunderbird is under development, as are browser plugins that will deliver the same attachment functionality for webmail services such as Yahoo Mail. Two Facebook apps are also in the works (for sending and receiving with friends there). And a popular Photoshop extension already enables creative types to directly export their images to colleagues using YouSendIt. YouSendIt is a freemium service; a free version places a 100mb cap on individual files, while three paid versions – Pro, Business Plus, and Corporate – lift that cap and deliver extra goodies like branding, security, longer-term storage, bandwidth and tracking. I’m told that businesses embracing YouSendIt not only rely on it for handling large files; they also send smaller files through it so they can be tracked and managed more effectively. The company claims about 7 million registered users and says it transfers about 10 million files per month. It runs two data centers in the US (one on each coast), and a fairly new center in London for supporting European users. Competitors include Pando (which also has an Outlook plugin), Leapfile (ditto), Drop.io, Megaupload, SendThisFile and Rapidshare – not to mention online storage and syncing solutions like newly-(re)introduced MobileMe, Dropbox and SugarSync. CrunchBase Information YouSendIt Pando Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
File delivery company YouSendIt told TechCrunch yesterday that it had recently surpassed its three millionth user. While our initial experiences with YouSendIt were not smooth, we have since come to consider it quite a good service. We spoke to CEO Ivan Koon today to see what the company has been up to lately. “The real reason behind the press release, aside from just wanting to brag a little bit, is that we are a very good case of proving Web 2.0, Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, whatever you want to call it,” Koon said. “We started as a free-for-all where anyone could come to our site and use us to send large files and we have very successfully evolved from a Web service for consumers into a Web service for business users.” Koon said that the majority of YouSendIt customers are business users from small to medium-sized business. The company is also reporting 300 percent growth since September of this year and 200 percent growth in paid subscribers in the same time period. “Our quarter-to-quarter growth in terms of total revenue is about 50 percent,” Koon said. “Consumers don’t necessarily pay for the service but business users are very willing to pay for services as long as it helps them do their work and it is a service they trust.” With YouSendIt, the sender chooses either password protection or authentication through login to control who receives their files. Koon said that the company has over 200 highly-secured file servers on both coasts. Other file sharing sites that we’ve found comparable to YouSendIt are Pando and Zapr. → Read More
I never wrote about You Send It because I could never get it to work. Well, today I had my first positive You Send It experience, and so I’m writing a quick note. If you haven’t heard about it, you can use it to “email” very large files. You upload the file to the site, tell it the email addresses to send the file to, and the recipients receive a link that allows him or her to download the file. The maximum file size is 1 GB. You cannot send multiple files in one email, but you can send a zip folder. Only a free version of the service is offered, which allows a single file to be downloaded 25 times over seven days. Oddly, you are allowed to send a file to up to 50 people. I guess only 25 of them may download it. This is a good, free service that would have made my “most loved” post last week if I had been able to use it before now. I’m glad they are working out the kinks in the service. → Read More
