Hands on: Minbox merges e-mail and the cloud for frictionless file sharing
In most of the world, the asymmetric nature of your average Internet connection means that, unless you are lucky enough to be on a corporate network or fiber reaches your house, sending large files to your friends and colleagues is often an exercise that requires a lot of patience. Most of it is spent waiting for files to upload and dealing with complex workflows that tend to take up more time than they're worth.
This is where the recently-launched Minbox comes into play. Its developers have set their sights on turning file sharing into as frictionless a workflow as possible, while keeping costs down to a rather cool zero dollars.
There is, of course, no shortage of competing products that attempt to reduce the stress of sharing data—Dropbox and Droplr come to mind—but their focus is primarily on providing you with storage in the cloud, rather than on simplifying the process of sharing one or more files with a specific group of people. It’s this latter case that Minbox hopes to streamline.
Sharing with flair
Minbox is made up of two components: a cloud-based backend and a small OS X app that is free, weighs in at a little more than 1MB, and works with Snow Leopard or later. Once installed, and after going through a few set-up steps, the app sits quietly in OS X’s menu bar, awaiting your orders.
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http://www.macworld.com/article/2039429/hands-on-minbox-merges-e-mail-and-the-cloud-for-frictionless-file-sharing.html#tk.rss_all
