Automatic, the renown owners of WordPress.com have taken a great step to improve blogging on WordPress.com by acquiring Cloudup.
Cloudup is a fast, dead-simple way to share and view files on any platform (Without The Folders). In today’s world of email, social networks, SMS, chat applications and cloud services, there are plenty of ways to share share a file, folder, photo or video. And as intelligent devices and cloud computing infrastructure proliferate, and processing power and capacity improve, we expect file transfer and sharing to be speedy — and simple. Everything is about “real time” and accessibility these days (not that we’re complaining, but thanks to Twitter). Yet, file-sharing still isn’t quite there. Even with all the options — whether it be the Skypes, Facebooks, Google Drives, WeTransfers and YouSendIts of the world or the Dropboxes, etc. — We’ve still got one eye out for a better way. (Here’s xkcd putting a fine point on it.) The file sharing service to end all file sharing services.
Dropbox has gotten the closest, gobbling up a ton of mindshare as a result, but its layout and presentation is more storage service than a simple sharing tool. In other words, you may store your photos there, but it’s probably not where you’ll go if you want to show them off. On the June 21st, 2013, CloudUp became the latest to join a younger group of services that are pushing the conversation forward when it comes to speed and simplicity — and nibbling at the heels of the incumbents.
What’s cool about CloudUp (and distinguishes it from most apps out there) is that it focuses on converting the design of file transfer from one that makes it clear that “THIS PRODUCT IS JUST A UTILITY” to one that’s elegant and minimalist, Jony Ive-style. But the minimalism isn’t there for the sake of itself (sorry hipsters), it’s meant to bring more of the focus to consumption — to make the content the focus, not the app itself.
Today, Cloudtop announced on their official blog that they have been acquired by Automatic (the owners of WordPress.com).
“Today we are extremely excited to announce that Automattic, the brilliant company behind WordPress.com, has acquired Cloudup.”
This is followed up by a blog post confirming the story on WordPress.com Blog.
“Today we’re delighted to announce we’re acquiring Cloudup, a company that’s as fanatical about these core experiences as we are. Cloudup‘s built some fantastic technology that we can’t wait for you to try out.”
Not only will this new service improve the quality of bloggers on WordPress.com, Automatic is set to spread their tentacles accross other services owned by the company. This means that you can as well use this service in your self-hosted wordpress blog (WordPress.org) as long as you are using the jetpack plugin.
Credits:techcrunch ImageCredit:Cloudtop