Gobbler Hooks Up With Box for More Cloud-Storage Options
By Lauren Goode
The forecast for this year’s D10 conference? Cloudy, with a chance of Box and Gobbler.
At D10 today, the two cloud companies announced a partnership that will combine parts of Gobbler’s storage app for serious media creators with Box’s cloud-storage solution for business users.
Gobbler CEO Chris Kantrowitz — along with musician John Legend — joined AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher onstage to demo how Gobbler works.
Lots of details are still to come, since the tie-up won’t come to full fruition until the fall, but basically, Gobbler says its media-making users will benefit from some of the more enterprise-y features of Box’s service, while Box users will be able to find important files more easily, regardless of which service the files are stored in. Another feature added to Gobbler projects? Task assignments and commenting.
Kantrowitz touted Gobbler’s smarter search function, or ability to scan both your local drives and the cloud when users are running searches for super-large files, as a way to find files more quickly.
“Something like DropBox is a good product for the novice layer, while we’re focused on enthusiasts — pro-sumers and pros,” Kantrowitz said. He added there are three problems for professionals: Organizing of large files, collaboration when working on massive files and version control — making sure you’re working on the most current version.
Legend — who will be joining Gobbler’s board of advisers — updated one of his music files on the fly during the demo, then showed how a new version was immediately uploaded to the cloud, without erasing the previous version, and became searchable and available through Gobbler.
“We used to use YouSendIt, and the person on the other end would have to download the whole thing again. Almost none of our collaboration now happens in the same room, and having all these versions floating around can be confusing,” Legend said.
Gobbler was founded in February 2010, after Kantrowitz witnessed rock musician Lenny Kravitz lose all of his concert-related media due to a failed disk drive.
The company has tried to set itself apart from other consumer-facing cloud services like DropBox, SugarSync, Apple’s iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive and the new Google Drive, by targeting its product at serious media producers who require lots of storage space.
Box, on the other hand, has been largely focused on the enterprise market since its launch in 2006. The start-up company has been funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, US Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Salesforce, to name just a few, and claims 10 million users to date, with 120,000 businesses using the software.
Gobbler, which charges users $8 a month, is available as a desktop and mobile app (iOS); Kantrowitz says a Web version of Gobbler is in the works.
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