Wuala Blog

In our series "Effective Usage", we are picking up some results from the activity in the Wuala Community and Wuala API groups. Some nice little and useful applications have been built around our service.

Wuala badge
The user perforin has built a PERL script to generate a Facebook-like badge for your Wuala identity including links to your public folders. We love it!
He published the script on his blog including a working example (see the right bar).

Wuala RSS feeds
Using Yahoo Pipes, our user mmmike enabled everyone to easily create RSS feeds for public groups and folders. It offers many possibilities, such as automatic notification of new files in a public group in your RSS reader, automatic import of your public files into your Facebook profile (Create an RSS feed and import it), file listing on your blog as a badge, etc. Please go to the Yahoo Pipes page to see an example and to learn more.

Wuala Google search
Lastly, since the public files are quite well indexed by Google, I came up with the simple idea to create a Google custom search engine and added it into the layout of our website. The really fast Google search for Wuala can be found in the Wuala Community group.

How do you like these "Wuala tools"? Do you know more of them? Which tools would you like to see in the future? We'd love to hear from you.

After a nice Sandbox dinner with fellow entrepreneurs, I'm now here at the LIFT conference in Geneva. I really like LIFT as it gives me a lot of inspiration for new things. In their own words, LIFT will look back to look ahead, exploring topics like change, solidarity, love, or design, during three days of intense networking and inspiration themed around a simple question: “Where did the future go?”

Lift gathers international entrepreneurs, artists, managers, researchers, investors, CEOs, designers or ethnologist, people who come to be inspired and meet those who make a difference.
If you're here, shoot me an email :)

Yesterday we played Montagsmaler against Doodle and Amazee. We were convinced that we would win, but it turned out quite differently: The first Zurich-Start-up-Montagsmaler-Winner is...Doodle! 

Sometimes we play Montagsmaler. Montagsmaler is similar to Pictionary, meaning that there are at least two teams competing against each other. In our case it was Person 1 from Team A who had to draw a term defined by person 1 from Team B. The team that first guessed the term would get one point.

Last time the teams were defined according to our gender: women vs. men. When you think of it, it is quite clever, because you could define terms that could be advantageous to your team. At least that's what we thought...It ended up with Carola guessing "Linux", while Andi actually guessed "nailpolish remover"!

Even though we were the actual winners, the men just didn't want to admit it. So we played a few rounds until they actually won...(aren't we nice? ;-))




Next week our Montagsmaler Game will continue. This time against Amazee and Doodle...stay tuned for the Zurich-Start-up-Montagsmaler-Winner!

The editors of anthrazit have chosen Wuala as one of the "200 besten Websites der Schweiz 2009". This award isn't about the design of the website, it's about utility. Content, usability, design, innovation and usefulness matter.

We were in the the category "Social Networks" together with Doodle, Pulstreff, Sammla and Xing.

In Wuala you have two options to view large music or video files: downloading or streaming them. Downloading a file is good if you want to work with it or edit it, which is almost never the case with most people's music and rarely happens with the majority's videos.

Streaming videos and music in Wuala
This is why we implemented the streaming feature into Wuala. You simply double click on a music or video file and it will start playing after very few seconds of pre-loading.


There are some pre-conditions for the streaming feature to work:

1. The file system integration needs to be up and running


2. You need to have a video/music player that supports streaming (we recommend the free VLC)

Downloading files in Wuala
We'd like to point out some things about download files in Wuala, too:

1. You can download whole folders at once (right click and choose download)


2. There is no bandwith and no file size limit


3. Downloading inside the Wuala client is fast because files come from hundreds of sources


4. Downloading a file means to download it inside Wuala, whereas "save as..." enables you to save it somewhere else on your computer. Read more in our FAQ section.

Was this blogspot helpful? We'd love to have your feedback in the comments.

Once again, Wuala was omnipresent. This time we were at the 5th Web Monday, which was hosted by Liip. I admit, we were quite jealous when we saw their office: interior design, a room with a table football and tasty food! (Later we found out that funky curtains with holes may look great, but don't really protect you against the sun, that those delicious bagels were ordered from mybagel.ch and their crispy vegi-chips were simply from Coop).

As our host, Hannes Gassert, co-founder of Liip, held a short talk about what his company is actually doing. LIIP offers anything that has got to do with agile web development. This includes everything from e-learning to web applications and to web projects.

The second talk of the evening was by Janni Penttinen, CTO and co-founder of XIHA Life, the world's first truly multilingual social network. XIHA Life is targeted at people living outside their home country and/or at multilingual people around the world. Currently XIHA Life is growing quickly and they are successfully monetizing the social network through their digital content store.

It was nice meeting many new people (some came from even as far as Lausanne and Lugano), and catching up with others.

While we're at it, I would like to call attention to the newest project we're organizing together with Amazee and Doodle. The goal of the project is to bring together Swiss-based professionals from all fields of entrepreneurship and to connect them. Therefore, we have created five projects that are all summarized under the word "Chuchi" (the Swiss German word for "kitchen"). Professionals from each field are called to participate in their specific Chuchi: The International Cuchi, the Marketing Chuchi, the Business Chuchi, the Community Chuchi and the UX Chuchi. Each Chuchi will have regular meet-ups, where one specific start-up will be analyzed and challenged. We want to share experience and learn from each other. 

In this post I'll show you how to use a file indexing software for faster access to files in Wuala. It will enable you to search through your Wuala files faster than with the built-in solution.

What is a desktop indexing software?
A (desktop) indexing software is a program which scans specific folders on your computer and stores relevant information to a small database. It will then enable you to search through its index of relevant information. Some advanced desktop search tools will even scan the text inside a pdf or text document.
The advantage of indexing is a very fast and complex search for files and folders of tall types: images, documents, etc.

How to use Locate32 to index Wuala on Windows
Now I'll describe how to install and use a indexing software for windows and Wuala: My program of choice is locate32. I'd much rather use a software that allows to turn off file content indexing because this can take a long time with large amounts of files. Please leave a comment if you know one.

1. Download and extract locate32 (1.3 MB and portable):
   
   Download Windows 32 bit version (standard)
   Download Windows 64 bit version


2. Run through the installation process and start the program.


3. Then go to Tools -> Settings -> Databases


1. Create a new database, enter a name for the database and specify a path where the database will be saved.
   
   


2. After creating a database you're ready to specify some folders via Wuala's File System Integration (FSI). Go to the "Include" Group and check "Custom".


3. Now you can add some folders (default: W:\La12345\folder) or even the whole network drive. (W:)


4. After this click "Ok" to save the temporary settings.


4. Now you're ready to update your database. Go to File -> Update Databases (or F9). Running the scane for the first time takes a while (depends on how busy Wuala is and how many files or folders have to be indexed). The update process will be a lot faster in the second run.


5. To search your indexed files simply type in a few words. You'll get an interactive preview of the files which contain the words you typed in. You can do a more complex search by using the search syntax (it's like Google): words in quotes will show you only the files which are exactly like your search words; plus and minus for including and excluding.
   
   

Some additional screenshots to show you how to search for:

1. Videos in Wuala
   
   


2. Specific folders in Wuala
   
   

Did you find this post useful? Please leave your feedback in the comments.

About the author
I am posativ from Germany. I've been using Wuala (since June 2008) because of its simplicity. I like the ease of sharing data with my friends. Additionally I appreciate having my data accessible anywhere. You can read more about my experience with Wuala in my personal blog: www.posativ.org/blog

Last Saturday five members of the Wuala team went on a little trip to Basel to attend the first StartupCamp Switzerland. The aim of the StartupCamp was to bring together young and future entrepreneurs focussing on high-tech, web or the life-science industry. Attendees should learn from each other and expand their network by meeting new and interesting people. Thanks a lot to the organization committee - Dania, Daniel, Patrick, Peter, Matthias & Co. - you did a great job!

Since the StartupCamp started at 8.30 a.m. (yes, on a Saturday!), you saw a bunch of (sleepy) people sitting in the train from Zurich to Basel all heading to the same event. So Wuala already met Doodle and Cassiber on the train, thus had some entertainment early in the morning.

The StartupCamp kicked off with a keynote by Suhas Gopinath, CEO and President Globals Inc., who has been announced as a "Young Global Leader" for 2008-2009 by the World Economic Forum, Davos. Many interesting tracks were held, consisting of many different topics such as Poken (with everyone pokening, they were everywhere), Swissnex, Synergies between Swiss Web Companies, Startups and the economic crisis, how to develop new ideas and the Basel beer Unser Bier. The Unser Bier brewery was the place were some of us ended up in the end, had a relaxing Networking Party and guess what: beer! :-)

Check out the pictures on Wuala: http://www.wuala.com/StartupCamp.


Sushi and her Poken.


Dominik and Andi.


Dominik and Carola talking with Myke (Doodle).