Podmailing: the next p2p craze?
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to interview Louis Choquel CEO of zSlide the company behind a new service called podmailing. Podmailing is a simple way to send and receive large files and folders by e-mail. Prior to launching in the US last month the service had over 40,000 registered users mostly in France and Spain. You can listen to a podcast of the interview here.
The service works by uploading file(s) from your computer to a tracker/server hosted on Amazon web services through the podmailing client. The provided software is a modified version of the original open source Bittorrent Inc python client. Once you register and upload your files a link to the torrent and a direct download option are emailed to the recipient who may choose to use either option. Seeding of the torrent is handled on the podmailing servers.
In order to get to either the torrent or direct download link the user must first visit a webpage covered in advertisements. Currently the service is free with few restrictions on the file sizes. I asked Louis directly if advertisement was the only planned source of revenue for this service. His reply was that eventually users will be able to purchase premium accounts which will offer larger file hosting, encryption and higher bandwidth downloads.
At present the average file/folder size sent through this service is 200 megabytes. Another interesting point is that the amount of successfully completed downloads made using the direct download link versus downloads made using the podmailing bittorrent client are approximately equal.
While podmailing is an interesting twist on the existing one-click hosting concept, I am unsure as to whether the p2p aspect sufficiently differentiates them from giants such as rapidshare and others.
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