TransMedia Puts File Sharing On PhonesTransMedia Puts File Sharing On Phones

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.

In coming weeks, TransMedia plans to add a purchasing option to the sharing process. When a Glide user shares, say, a song by Green Day with a dozen friends, the recipients will be able to hear the song and will have the option to purchase a legitimate copy.

Glide's right management system will prevent unauthorized downloads by comparing shared songs against a database of known major and independent label music.

Glide Mobile has potential applications for business users as well, particularly among media professionals who need to share large files. In situations where the processing power and content creation abilities of notebooks aren't needed, Glide Mobile could make workers more mobile by giving them limited document authoring capabilities and access to corporate files in a secure environment, without the security, portability, and connectivity challenges that come with notebook computers and wireless networking.

However, Forrester VP of research Ellen Daley expects Glide Mobile will more interesting to consumers than to business users. "The ability to access your desktop data sounds compelling," she says, "but what we find is what enterprise users want is not access to all their data but to relevant data."

Moreover, Daley suggests, constrained viewing and input options make mobile phones better suited for specific applications like E-mail than for more general purpose computing. "The mobile device has not replaced the laptop yet," she says.

Glide Mobile is initially available for the Treo 700W and other handsets that run Windows Mobile 5.0. In coming weeks, it will be available for Motorola Razr, Nokia 60 series, and Sony Ericsson handsets. Palm OS support should follow thereafter.