There’s a lot of talk about online backup and recovery, especially at the enterprise level these days. What’s worse than losing your information, especially when you entrust it to a service that’s supposed to keep it safe? A company called HomePipe is saving those troubles for someone else, focusing on access instead of cloud syncing, organization and upload wait times. Instead of managing everything in the cloud, why not just access it directly from whatever machine it’s on?
HomePipe’s take on virtualization has been around for some time, but the growth in the mobile sector has certainly increased the number of management and interaction options that one can take with their own content.
“We looked at what’s happening on the mobile side and realized that with devices, especially the iPhone and Android, it’s all about content again,” says Chris Hopen, president and CEO of HomePipe Networks. “Users are not just viewers, but also editors, from a productivity perspective.”
To that end, the HomePipe Android app has been updated to include more security offerings, along with additional sharing options for the content you access through the service. It’s an important update for HomePipe as mobile security, especially on Android devices, is a hot topic and is pertinent in the file-sharing industry.
HomePipe addresses security concerns with a new feature called SecureShare. It authenticates for users to securely share digital content from any Android device by providing selective recipient access, essentially creating a private-sharing option that automatically signs out once the user closes the app. Since there’s no uploading or syncing, the recipient has access to the content only in a streaming option, and will not have their own copy saved to their device through this new option. It protects the content owner on a few levels, and extends a new sharing option that considers mobile’s risky environment.
Other updates include deeper integration for sharing content to Facebook, which provides a link to the file and a thumbnail of the photo, though files are not uploaded by remain securely stored on the user’s computer. This way you retain control of your files instead of handing them over to Facebook’s servers, which should give you peace of mind once you take them down. TextShare also allows users to share streaming digital content via text message. Through the app, you can send an sms with a shortened URL, boosting security as the link can’t be tracked, and all shared files remain on the user’s home storage device.
But it’s one of the other updated sharing options that has me most excited. iTunes on Android lets you gain full access to a user’s shared iTunes library, which sort of adds to your own music library. The A La Carte Playlist function actually lets you manage all shared music files from the app, creating a playlist of your own, from multiple libraries.
“Back in the day when everyone had CDs and passed them around…we felt there wasn’t a good analog for that,” says Hopen. “We tried to create this ability for you to privately share music amongst your close friends. The content stays in the iTunes library, and we open that up to allow people to, in effect, create a playlist–choose music from people that have shared music with you.”
It’s a feature that fits nicely with the developments we’re seeing amongst streaming music services, and more specifically, Apple’s own iCloud, which will feature song matching for iTunes users. Opening up playlists, especially around iTunes, is an important step towards this shared vision of the future. In many ways the development had to be borne of a security perspective, aside from DRM protections and sluggish adoption from traditional music companies. But embracing more levels of interaction around shared content is an important focus and point of differentiation for HomePipe as the industry gets more crowded.
Today’s updates are socially driven and seemingly consumer-centric, but it’s actually the professional sector HomePipe is after. Noticing that users were buying multiple licenses for its product and requesting more business-oriented features, HomePipe recognized the emerging opportunity to address this growing sector. It’s just one of the many ways in which the mobile industry has encouraged service updates for HomePipe, enabling it to bridge this gap between personal devices (smartphones and tablets) and the emerging work environment (a little bit virtual, less physical than ever before).
“We’re working on the ability to buy additional licenses and group-based licenses,” Hopen explains. “There’s a trend behind that–people were asking us to buy multiple licenses for small business purposes. So that’s the direction we’re seeing things head. I think it’s because they’re getting so much value out of these mobile devices.”
[...] there. It’s not entirely different from the plan many consumer-level products take, even as HomePipe looks to make a similar leap based on its growing [...]
[...] still has its original HomePipe features, such as SecureShare and Text Share. New features include Multi-lingual Support with six [...]