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Sharpcast Puts $16.5M To Good Use: Releases SugarSync

Sharpcast, founded in 2004 and funded in 2006, has just announced the launch of their SugarSync product (formerly known as Project Hummingbird).

Similar to the products I talked about last week in the article, "FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, Oh My…", SugarSync is a tool that keeps your files synchronized across multiple computers (PC & Mac today, maybe Linux as well someday), including mobile devices.

One of the things that sets Sharpcast apart from the others is the support for many mobile platforms. They support Brew, J2ME, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian (coming soon). I don’t really think that the mobile aspect of this is where the market is right now, but I could be wrong. And, Sharpcast certainly has enough VC money to address the perceived needs of the mobile users. In any case, Sharpcast certainly has a big enough market with just the Universal Sync service.

Sharpcast charges $9.99/month or $99.99/year for their basic plan, which includes 30GB of storage in the cloud. I have 40GB of music, 30GB of photos, and 50GB of documents, so for me to use the service for just that (not counting my 450GB of camcorder video), I would need the Business Plan, which runs $499.99 yearly and covers 250GB of storage in the cloud.

Yikes! That’s pricey.

For data protection, I think I’ll just buy another Time Machine drive.

A Note About Sharpcast Photos:

Sharpcast has had a product in the market for a couple years now known as Sharpcast Photos. Focused on synchronizing just your photos between your computers and mobile devices. A subset of what SugarSync provides, to be sure. However, it does not appear that Sharpcast Photos has gained many subscribers. The site https://www.sharpcastphotos.com/ doesn’t even register traffic on Quantcast or Compete.com. Does anyone have any paid subscriber data for Sharpcast Photos?

When Sharpcast Photos was first released, my feeling was that they had priced themselves out of the market. The cost is $5.99/month or $64.99/year, which is a bit steep for just photo protection - especially since the sharing part was limited to their photo sharing service. Perhaps the limited subscriber base backs that up. Anyone?

Tags: Sharpcast, Photos, Sharpcast Photos, SugarSync, Dropbox, FolderShare, Syncplicity,Synchronization, Sync, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

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Comments

  1. SugarSync Responds To Negative Pricing Coverage at Brian Berliner’s BrainJune 22, 2008 at 1:43 PM

    [...] my article about Sharpcast and their recently released SugarSync product, one of my key criticisms was the fact that the service was priced too high. It appears that I was [...]

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sharpcast SugarSync Launch Statistics at Brian Berliner’s BrainJune 22, 2008 at 2:06 PM

    [...] folks at Sharpcast have taken notice of the articles that I have written recently about the online file synchronization market. They contacted me and shared some of the [...]

    ReplyDelete

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