Lauren Goode

Recent Posts by Lauren Goode

Hey, Big Senders! YouSendIt Bulks Up Mobile App.

If you’ve ever transferred obnoxiously large files that your regular email account won’t let you send, there’s a good chance that you’ve used YouSendIt.

But YouSendIt doesn’t want to be just about sending anymore. It’s aiming to chip away at the cloud storage market, where Dropbox and Box are household names. Just last week, it acquired Found for its file-searching technology. Now YouSendIt is launching a newly redesigned mobile app.

The new app includes sorting functions meant to make file-finding easier, and provides the ability to send photos and videos straight from your phone without saving them to the cloud. It’s also heavy on swipe functions for prompting different actions or for renaming files.

The app is available for iPhone and Windows 8 devices. It’s free to download, although big senders will be prompted to pay $10 or $15 a month for “pro” or “pro plus” access.

To be sure, YouSendIt’s cloud-based competitors also have a variety of mobile apps that complement their desktop services. Dropbox has long had apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Kindle Fire; SugarSync offers apps on iOS, Android and Windows and also comes preinstalled on a number of hardware devices, like Samsung “smart” TVs and select Lenovo PCs.

YouSendIt says its apps are focused more on productivity (there’s a “quick sign” feature that lets you save and use your e-signature, as one example), and aren’t just mirroring the file-sharing structure that already exists on the Web.

Around 70 percent of YouSendIt’s paying users are corporate customers, and CEO Brad Garlinghouse has said he thinks it’s a fine time to get in on the “BYOD” trend.

AllThingsD boss Kara Swisher spoke to Garlinghouse last week about the company’s plans to become more “cloud-nostic,” as well as Garlinghouse’s goal to change the YouSendIt name sometime in the early part of the year. The name is too synonymous with simply sending, he has said, and is not indicative of a bigger cloud storage service.

Looks like a lot of combinations of “box,” “cloud,” “sky,” “drive,” “drop” and “sync” are already taken, so it will be interesting to see what YouSendIt comes up with in its next incarnation.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik