BitTorrent, the once-notorious P2P file sharing site that has turned a new leaf as a legit, distributed computing provider, is today launching SoShare, a service to send large files from one computer to another, with the first terabyte of files sent free. Out today in beta for Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari for Mac; and Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer for Windows, the service competes with the likes of YouSendIt, as well as DropBox, Box and other cloud-storage and file transfer services. SoShare was previously available in alpha as Share, and it complements Sync, Bitorrent’s cloud-based service that syncs your computer’s files with a cloud storage service, which itself launched in alpha in January. The idea behind SoShare is to target creative professionals – designers, photographers, musicians, and so on –  who handle large data files and need to send them to others. That makes sense, since it also targets that community for content for its consumer-facing services. SoShare is built by BitTorrent engineers, on BitTorrent’s P2P framework (not clear whether it uses Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services for caching, as it did in the alpha version), and will sit alongside Sync in Labs, BitTorrent’s “test kitchen,” where it puts work in progress for its community to try out and develop into potentially more commercial products. “For now, we’re going into the public beta without fees,” Catherine Meek, BitTorrent’s director of product strategy, noted in an email exchange. “Leveraging the distributed BitTorrent protocol has helped keep our costs low. We’ll be looking at a few options along the way, but building something that is reliable and adds value to the user is our primary objective.” With a number of companies like YouSendIt and SugarSync, newer players like Mega, and more established startups like Dropbox all already developing names for themselves in the same space as SoShare, it will be worth seeing whether BitTorrent can entice more people to its platform by way of the very large file size threshold — one free terabyte being possibly the largest data allowance yet. BitTorrent is taking the approach of targeting one vertical first. “We saw a gap in the current offerings, a chance to introduce something new,” says Meek. “A key learning from the alpha was that there was a need within the creative community and we had the ability to fix a problem for them.” Meek cites figures from the Americans for the Arts that estimate 3.34
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