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Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours
Kim Dotcom's new "Mega" cloud service appears to be a hit. According to Dotcom over 1 million have signed up for their free 50 gigabytes of storage. Although that is about 1% of the Dropbox user base, it's not a bad start. From the article: "Mega quickly jumped up to around 100,000 users within an hour or so of the site's official launch. A few hours after that, Mega had ballooned up to approximately a quarter of a million users. Demand was great enough to knock Mega offline for a number of users attempting to either connect up or sign up for new accounts, and Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing."
Considering the reputation that megaupload had, I don't think he'll have any problems getting users. I think, like so many other websites, he will have trouble monitizing the service without becoming obnoxious.
...
I'm sure adblock will deal with the obnoxious ads
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
The patchy availability will be resolved soon I hope, but there's a major flaw I ran into, which is that when you sign up it doesn't ask you to confirm your password by typing it twice. This means you can make typos without realising it. Because the password is also an encryption key, you can't reset it. You can't delete the account either, nor can you register two accounts to one email address. I made a typo in my password. Net result: I permanently can't access my account, nor can I register a new one with my preferred email address.
I'm sure adblock will deal with the obnoxious ads ...
But isn't that their monitizing plan? To you mega you will need to run their ad blocker which replaces normal advertisments with ads from mega.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Look what happened to data of the last people who trusted him for cloud storage.
The connection to New Zeland is via undersea cable over a monopoly called the Southern Cross.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable
Is one fiber cable going to be able to handle the traffic?
The truth shall set you free!
2. He has lots of money.
3. He is investing in a new enterprise and knows that he has to spend money first in order to make money in the future.
I assumed all that was fairly obvious. What's your theory, by the way?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/building-mega-ars-pre-launch-interview-with-kim-dotcom/
The Mega business plan will be a distributed model, with hundreds of companies large and small, around the world, hosting files. A hosting company can be huge or it can own just two or three servers Dotcom says--just as long as it's located outside the US.
"Each file will be kept with at least two different hosters, [in] at least two different locations," said Dotcom. "That's a great added benefit for us because you can work with the smallest, most unreliable [hosting] companies. It doesn't matter because they can't do anything with that data."
More than 1000 hosts answered a request for expressions of interest on the Mega home page. Dotcom says several hundred will be active partners within months. Successful hosts will get paid E500 per month per server; each server needs to supply 24 hard drives with 72 terabytes of storage and one gigabit of bandwidth, among other requirements.
That's all down the road, however. For now, Mega is launching with just one, professional, hosting operator--a subsidiary of Cogent, based in Dotcom's home country of Germany.
According to other articles, he has a (maxed out) 10Gbit pipe from this Cogent subsidiary
And FYI - Cogent was the US host for megaupload.com, so they believe in his business plan enough to host for him again.
If he can get Mega back into the big leagues again, it's going to put some serious strain the undersea fiber that feeds the USA.
That's the most expensive wired bandwidth around and he's planning to host nothing in the USA.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!