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TransMedia Puts File Sharing On Phones

InformationWeek

Sun claims, "The network is the computer." For social computing company TransMedia, the computer is the phone.

On Wednesday, TransMedia plans to open its secure file sharing environment Glide Effortless to mobile phones.

Glide Mobile turns mobile handsets into what amounts to a limited portable desktop. Subscribers will be able to access and share the same files available to them through their Glide accounts and their PCs.

Glide is a hosted file storage and social networking service that lets users store, edit, and share media files -- contacts, documents, E-mail, images, music, video -- through a Flash-capable Web browser. Consequently, it works equally well on Macs and PCs, and now on mobile phones.

"There's nothing even remotely close to this out there," says TransMedia CEO Donald Leka. "This is revolutionary in the sense that what we've done is basically removed the borders between platforms."

TransMedia's transcoding technology makes cross-platform harmony possible. It converts file formats including Windows Media Video, MP3, QuickTime, and the like into streams calibrated for whatever bandwidth is appropriate for the destination device.

The result is the ability to share a massive 40 GB video in the form of a tiny 5KB or less reference file that points to the sender's Glide source file. Mobile phone users and PC users can view or listen to the source file at whatever bandwidth their devices can handle without having to provide storage for a large download.

Downloading is an option if the sender grants the appropriate rights and there's enough storage capacity on the device in question.

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