Wuala - a distributed file system

Google Tech Talks
October, 30 2007

ABSTRACT

After three years of research and development on a distributed storage system, we are ready to unveil the result: Wuala. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free. In the talk, I will explain what Wuala is and how it works, and I will also show a demo. All attendees will also get an invitation code to join the early alpha version.

Speaker: Dominik Grolimund
I am 26 years old and have studied computer science at ETH Zurich. In 1998, I founded my software company Caleido, and developed the Caleido Address-Book, a professional contact management software, of which over 35'000 licenses have been sold so far in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

In 2003, I did an exchange semester at the TU Delft, the Netherlands, as part of the Unitech exchange program, focusing on business and management. In 2004, a six-month internship followed with Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey in the US, where I worked in the 'Intelligent Vision & Reasoning' department, developing a prod...

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[Dominik Grolimund]

This is Dominik. Thanks for your interest! I assume you have received your invite by now. If not, please let me know.

[Marcel van den Boer]

"Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free."

They just killed this feature. A bad, bad, decision.

[Istvan Meszaros]

Hi guys, we are working on a similar system right now:

Check out our site, it is currently only a prototype, but we have some different methods.

It will be a free applcation

crowdybackups com

[tedtdu]

if a fragment is lost , you must apply erasure code to cover it? you said local machine has copies sth like that..........what is point of archiving then?

[Trololololoish]

LOL, Wuala is a piece of shit now, who would pay $359 for 100GB of storage?

[CassandraAbbey]

This more computer stuff.

[lx45803]

What to dlls and torrents have to do with Wuala?

[Graham Perrin]

agreed. I posted to Posterous:

LaCie: Wuala ceases to trade storage, loses essence

[hhan44]

More Torrents! Fucking DLLs sucks... -.-

[lalujai]

why invent a pen for space? just use a pencil!

Cloud Computing and worldwide CDN is going cheap, HD space / CPU power also go cheaper and cheaper, n Home broadband going 1G speed now

Any highschool kid can subscribe awazon S3 + worldwide CDN and provide a higher speed, more stable service in 3 hours? u charge $45 for 25G??

The only good point I can think of is to share priate stuffs, since it uses P2P and difficult to trace the source unless the company disclose such information.

[Graham Perrin]

36:08 comparison with Freenet

37:30 comparison with Mojo Nation

43:05 comparison with Deep Store