UPDATED 15:00 EDT / AUGUST 30 2012

NEWS

Dropbox Competitor Takes Leading Edge via BitTorrent Support

BitTorrent is far and away one of the best tools for moving large amounts of data. It’s used everywhere by video game companies to deliver patches to clients and some media streamers to lighten the load of trucking around pretty pictures. Realizing this advantage, Maxxo, a new cloud hosting and synchronization service has added support for BitTorrent downloads, allowing users to download torrent files quickly and anonymously. Maxxo is Dropbox’s new competitor, and has marked this by adding BitTorrent support as a native feature.

“By using BitTorrent through Maxxo our users can download files fast and completely anonymously,” Maxxo CEO Luka Hovat told TorrentFreak. “It’s a feature that none of our competitors have. Because all torrent downloads go directly though Maxxo’s servers, users don’t have to worry about being watched by third parties,” he added.

As of now, Maxxo is offering free accounts, with five gigabytes of storage and a maximum of two simultaneous BitTorrent transfers, and paid accounts with download of 10 torrent files at a time, and higher storage and transfer limits.

Back in June, Dropbox also had similar functionality added by third-party Boxopus, the new BitTorrent startup that allowed downloading torrents directly into a Dropbox folder. This kind of hybridization was actually useful from the availability standpoint, as users don’t have to wait for a file to download at a location. Boxopus used the Dropbox API directly and didn’t download into one machine first and simply downloaded the torrent into Dropbox, while the cloud service did the heavy lifting of making sure all the computers are synchronized.

But just in a day, it was banned by Dropbox, of course, out of piracy concerns. As soon as the news of Boxopus surfaced on the Internet, the service’s member count surged to over 50,000. While the service provided by Boxopus is very useful, it is suffering an identity crisis due to being associated with BitTorrent, whose piracy stigma is bothering Dropbox. Therefore, it has banned Boxopus from accessing its API.

Dropbox turning their back on this functionality may be sharp move for them to avoid copyright cartels; but it also weakens their value to the general customer base. And perhaps Maxxo will take the advantage now.


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