4Shared Has Free 15GB Cloud Drive

 

As many of you know, Microsoft has had a free 25 GB of cloud drive storage for some time with its Skydrive service. Now 4Shared.com is trying out to offer an alternative. You can have up to 15 GB of free storage, as long as you confirm your email account and don't upload any files larger than 2 GB each. More storage without ads and removing the file size and other limits can be had for $10 a month, less if you purchase an annual contract.

The service works similarly to Box.net, Dropbox and other cloud file storage services. The news this week is that it now comes with applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian devices, along with a synch service for Windows users and a separate Mac desktop app too. You can set it up to post any uploads to both your Twitter and Orkut accounts.

4Shared is also making its API available to developers and is offering up $5000 prize each month to the developer "who most creatively utilizes the 4Shared virtual drive framework in their app," according to the company. Now we here at ReadWriteWeb just give away a MacBook Air every month - there you actually get hard cash money, along with up to a million ad banner impressions promoting your app! One early winner is an app that allows one-tap backup of your iPhone contacts to the 4Shared cloud repository.

How to Easily Transfer Files Across Cloud Services

Cloud storage services like Google Docs, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc. have made it easy for you keep your important files and documents online. These services are mostly free and you can have multiple accounts on them as long as you use separate email addresses.

This leads to another problem though. When you have files spread across multiple cloud services, managing them can be challenge. You may have stored one group of files on Dropbox, the other on Google Docs while some of the older files could be hosted on your old Google Docs account that you abandoned long ago.

Would it be nice if there were an easy to way to manage / search all your online files from one place without having to download them to the computer first?

Meet Otixo – an impressive web-app that lets you access files stored across different cloud service from a central location. To get started, you associate your Dropbox, Google Docs, Picasa, Amazon S3 and other online accounts with Otixo and then you can easily move or copy files between any of your accounts via simple drag-n-drop.

Otixo supports FTP so it can also be used to directly transfer files from any FTP server to Google Docs or Amazon S3 without having to write complicated scripts. You can even add multiple accounts from the same cloud service - like your old and new Google Docs accounts – and transfer file across these accounts easily.

Otixo offers unified search to help you quickly find all your files that are otherwise spread across multiple cloud services. You can delete files, create new folders, or upload files from the desktop to any of the associated cloud services. Everything just works.