
Kicksend (YC S11) goes free. Send unlimited files to anyone. - brendanlim
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/15/kicksend
======
whyleyc
So what's the business model here now ?

~~~
larrys
It's the "wild goose chase" business model. You tie up a bunch of capable
guys/gals with some money and prevent them from working on something that
might harm some of your other investments and/or prevent them from getting
into the hands of other angels/vc's. If the idea fails you then pivot the team
into one of your other investments. If the idea succeeds you make a profit off
of that. So in essence tie up the team. Companies have been doing this for
years, tying up the best legal minds so their competitors don't get to use
them.

After all, YC will invest even if you don't have an idea. So what's the big
leap if you have a mediocre idea and they manage to tie you up and then steer
you to another idea with a little investment?

~~~
ericflo
This is such a cynical and negative comment. The only purpose it serves is to
belittle the founder's motivations, as well as belittling YC's tireless
efforts. Ugh, just thinking about such a negative comment has put me in a bad
mood :(

~~~
larrys
I said:

"prevent them from getting into the hands of other angels/vc's."

I'm going to pay you a complement here to get you out of your bad mood.

Your team is a perfect example of what I meant. I went and took a look at
clutch.io. It looks beautiful and it's obvious you and your co-founder are
very talented and will create something great even if the market for clutch.io
isn't that large (I don't know what the market is, I'm just saying "if" it
isn't that large). So if you pitched me and said you wanted funding you would
be exactly the type of person that I'd want to "tie up". Nothing wrong with
that.

But it does look like a great idea. My question as an investor would be "how
large of a market is there" but the fact that you have talent means any
investment will pay off in the long run.

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DenisM
"Now that we've got you setup with using your Facebook account, you need to
create a password for Kicksend. This allows you to login to our apps with your
email address (xxxxx@yyyyy.com) and password."

I think you guys need to drop that password requirement...

~~~
DenisM
More feedback:

1\. This is also broken:
[https://img.skitch.com/20120517-fq5cdhtchw39nrfti2a3qcw8t9.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20120517-fq5cdhtchw39nrfti2a3qcw8t9.jpg)

I was trying to type in 123456@myemail.com and the problems are:

    
    
      1. I can't see 123 anymore
      2. I can't move cursor at all, cursor keys seem to be ignored.
      3. the last letter is partially obscured.
    

Using latest Chrome on Lion here.

2\. Next, the upload dialog does not have a cancel button and no completion
estimate. The upload is slow; my files are large and the uplink is slow, so
it's my fault, but there could be better handling of this problem I think.

3\. Further, there is no way to send feedback. When I click "feedback" I am
presented with a search box for FAQ. I don't think it's time yet to be afraid
of too many people sending in suggestions and feedback. It's safe to let
people send you email.

4\. Finally upload is complete and I received my sharing email, and it has a
separate link for each file. This is a show-stopper for me - I am not sitting
there and clicking links one by one. How about a simple "get all the stuff as
one zip file" link?

------
rdl
It is kind of crazy that in 2012 this isn't already a solved problem for most
people. (for me, I just do an scp to a machine with shared unix accounts,
which is the 1990s solution (very similar to the unencrypted 1980s solution),
and obviously not an option for the 99%.

I'd really like to see this take off, get integrated into various apps, etc.

~~~
unnamed
That totally reminded me of <http://xkcd.com/949/>.

~~~
rdl
I wonder how many XKCD comics could become startups, or be mapped to existing
startups.

~~~
DenisM
And I wonder how many startups can be mapped to an XKCD comic. :/

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aymeric
Services that don't charge hurt the rest of us entrepreneurs.

It sets the expectations that this kind of service should be free the same way
the iPhone AppStore has created the perception that $2 is expensive for an app
:(

~~~
wvs
Only if they're unsustainable. If they _are_ sustainable, then that's
disruption.

------
dsrguru
At first glance this looks like a more polished 42share
(<http://www.42share.com>) but forces you to sign up before using. The only
about page is linked to in tiny print at the bottom and is just about the
members of the team. That might just be because it's in beta, but it will net
more users if they can see some kind of description of how it works before
having to provide information for nothing in return. Better yet would be to go
the 42share route and make signing up optional.

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biot
I find it rather amusing that the stated problem is people stalking you
through your social media timeline, but then to get started with Kicksend's
solution to this problem the only authentication option offered is to use
Facebook connect.

------
ChrisClark
How is this different from Google+? I can send my photos to specific people
through Google+ and if I don't give anyone else access they will never see it.
I can even restrict them from re-sharing the photos with anyone else.

------
Timothee
_“However, sharing those photos with a subset of your contacts or sending full
quality personal images to just your family members is still remarkably
difficult. That’s where we come in.”_

Hmm, not really. My sister who is not the most technical person has been
uploading pictures to PicasaWeb and sharing them with specific people and
groups. With the extra storage (whose price sadly increased with Google
Drive), I also always upload my files at full resolution and sharing is easy.

The odd thing to me is that if you position yourself against Facebook (who is
the implicit target of the first paragraphs), and you go completely free, you
have to wonder what the catch is. I pay Google _some_ money for the storage at
least.

~~~
cargo8
If you sign up for Google+ dont you get unlimited photo storage on PicasaWeb
and can do the same thing + with circles?

------
larrys
"We were living far from our families and needed an easy way to send and
receive large batches of original quality photos, videos and other files."

Although many good ideas start this way obviously you have to take into
account how many others are in the same situation.

By "original quality" I'm assuming they mean the full, say, 3 to 8mb file not
some 60k jpg. While there are certainly people in the printing and graphic
design industry (and others) who might need this even keeping in mind that the
service is free I don't see a large user base developing. And the relatively
small user base won't even be paying for the service.

~~~
DenisM
On the other hand, I never recompress/resize my pictures because it's too much
work, and the cameras are geting ever higher resolution.

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tlogan
Maybe, just maybe, they should not require that receiver needs to register
also.

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verve
"Discretely?" Really?

~~~
cypherpunks01
Yep, each distinct photo is independently sent.

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mmahemoff
Is it a response to Dropbox, Google Drive, et al? Seems like they're a more
elegant way to handle this problem nowadays, but since Kicksend launched well
after Dropbox, I'm possibly missing something.

------
brianfryer
Another startup that doesn't make money. Woo.

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barbazfoo12
This seems easily doable without involving a third party that needs to keep a
record of every file sent, the time and the sender and recipient.

But at least this is a step in the right direction.

Now, what if she sends an encrypted file consisting of copyrighted materials?
RIAA, MPAA, are you reading along?

What are we going to do to prevent that?

~~~
notJim
I wonder if this could be done as a desktop app that makes a peer-to-peer
connection. The peer-to-peer part makes it so that no one has to spend any
money relaying the files (as well as your security/privacy point), and that
plus the fact that it's a desktop app means no one has spend any money hosting
servers or anything.

~~~
barbazfoo12
The answer is yes. There are multiple (non-VPN) ways to do it, all variations
on a common theme. It's been done, multiple times over the past 10 years. But
not much effort has gone into making these solutions user friendly and giving
them the marketing push of something like this venture.

Obviously if you release somethng like this you run the risk of triggering the
usual "illegal file sharing" issues.

But you absolutely do not need cloud storage to move large files. There are
other ways to do it.

~~~
notJim
> But not much effort has gone into making these solutions user friendly and
> giving them the marketing push of something like this venture.

This is the key thing. The desktop app I'm imaging is user friendly, and
probably at least somewhat pretty. I think the main technical issue is
probably the fact that most people are NATed by their routers, so peer to peer
is tricky, but I think with uPnP, you could get around that.

I was originally thinking of this as an open source app, but I suppose one
could go the paid app route.

~~~
barbazfoo12
"I think the main technical issue is probably the fact that most people are
NATed."

It's really not much of an issue as long as at least one peer has a reachable
IP. I sometimes wonder how many people are under the impression that NAT's are
a showstopper. This is simply not true. The showstopper is probably the RIAA
and MPAA.

Skype slipped under the radar because they branded themselves as VOIP not file
sharing. But it's really no different. It's peer to peer data exchange.

Only if both peers are behind the same NAT does the NAT pose a problem, in
which case an external "supernode" is needed. But that's easy to set up. And
it does not need access to packet payloads.

You could do a paid app. But the code to accomplish the job is very simple and
has been made public in various forms multiple times.

File sharing copyright concerns, monitoring communications to catch bad guys
and all that stuff is what's holding this back, not lack of a solution for
connecting through NAT's.

~~~
notJim
> File sharing copyright concerns, monitoring communications to catch bad guys
> and all that stuff is what's holding this back, not lack of a solution for
> connecting through NAT's.

Why? It's software transferring files between two parties, just like you can
do with email and things like Skype and even AIM, and hell, even the service
we're talking about. Is there precedent for the people who write such software
having legal problems? I'm aware of cases like rapidshare and torrent sites,
but for example, are the authors of bittorrent clients also targeted?

> I sometimes wonder how many people are under the impression that NAT's are a
> showstopper. This is simply not true.

Hmm, I'll admit I don't fully understand this, but back in my torrenting days,
you always had to forward a port to be reachable. How do you get around that?

~~~
barbazfoo12
If you want some interesting precedent, do some research on "Internet2" and
the testimony of the RIAA to legislators.

Do you know what a LAN is? It is an evil invention to share copyrighted works.
It must be stopped.

If you want a better understanding, read everything you can find on UDP,
Ethernet, firewalls, NAT and encapsulation, in that order. I would suggest not
to waste time trying to figure out "pre-packaged" peer to peer software
solutions (i.e. all the different approaches people have taken, e.g., aeroFS,
Kicksend or whatever). They often include far more complexity than you need to
accomplish peer to peer. As such, they won't help you much to understand the
basics: how connections are made.

------
TommyDANGerous
Never heard of the site until now, I really like the design and the idea. I
can see why this can be useful.

------
zanek
I'm really surprised this company received money from so many VC's.

They're offering photo & video sharing by email ! Seriously ? Is it that hard
for someone to login to Flickr or YouTube and click the email icon.

I feel like any 1/2 way decent engineer could make a clone of this company in
8 hrs

------
sgdesign
I kinda miss the previous design, I thought it was more distinctive:

<http://mikekus.com/archive/kicksend-homepage-page-design/>

~~~
huhtenberg
But current one has a ballsy

    
    
         letter-spacing: -0.05em;
    

:)

~~~
DenisM
Okay, _now_ I know why I could't read the text I was typing in. Thank you,
fellow hacker huhtenberg.

------
nchuhoai
Just curious, could one use this as a backup solution for your own files?
Because it looks like you can if they truly go unlimited

------
skyahead
can believe this is a YC company, can not see any value out of it....

~~~
mbreese
Sharing files between people who do it infrequently is still an unsolved
problem. How do I send pictures of my kids to their grandparents for example?
It is still easier for me to just email photos to them.

Hell, I _just_ got my lab group to start using Dropbox for group sharing...

~~~
Splines
> _Sharing files between people who do it infrequently is still an unsolved
> problem. How do I send pictures of my kids to their grandparents for
> example? It is still easier for me to just email photos to them._

That sounds pretty solved to me.

~~~
mbreese
Except when they try to send me every single picture that they took over the
holidays en masse. I end up with 10 emails, each with 10 pictures, in such low
resolution that they are barely useful for anything other than viewing on
screen. I want the full resolution photos online so that I could download the
1 or 2 that I really want to have.

~~~
notJim
Are there really people who are sophisticated enough to resize images but not
sophisticated enough to use a zip file?

And free flickr accounts work well enough for people who don't need to print
the photos out (which is really the only case you need full res, right?)

~~~
mbreese
They use the default crapware that came with the camera to send pictures. It
auto resizes the photos in the worst possible way. Plus, even zipped, a
moderate number of original sizes photos is still larger than a lot of email
programs can handle.

I think you're drastically overestimating the sophistication levels of a lot
of people when it comes to sharing photos and files. Plus, I doubt my dad has
heard of Flickr, let alone know how to spell it.

~~~
notJim
Your point regarding crapware makes sense, I hadn't thought about that
possibility.

And regarding Flickr... You're advocating that you would have your dad use
Kicksend, which presumably he won't have heard of either.

