There is no way of getting information about the company on the company website, you have to go to the company web app.
So you get free unlimited storage, ad funded and to target you better with advertising they look at your content. This is hidden in the Terms of Service. https://beta.hive.im/terms/
At the company web app, there is no information about the company, the backers, the people etc. The 'about section' of the company is a bunch of marketing speak https://beta.hive.im/about/
There is an address if you look hard enough - in the Privacy section. https://beta.hive.im/privacy/ It is in Hong Kong. There is no information about team, backers etc.
Best of luck to anyone that tries this.
But yes - not everyone is going to approach this with their eyes open.
As in all things there's a tradeoff. I am perfectly happy with the tradeoff Gmail offers me as long as I am kept informed and I'm happy with the tradeoff here - which is that I don't assume anything as I've never heard of the company.
So - I'm going to upload a huge directory of stuff that isn't personal and is already safely backed up. In return I get web access to it without paying a penny - and a 'sort-of' backup.
Then again, I'm fully aware of the dangers of cloud solutions. Others are not. And that's the problem.
Create a giant tar.gz file, encrypt it, and store the encrypted file.
On a related note, free does not necessarily have to mean ad-supported if there are good backers, a good product and a good plan for the future (Trello is just one service I can think of that fits this description).
mp3s don't seem to come back bit-identical, obviously some editting going on remotely.
So, don't trust this with files where you actually care about your data not getting "adjusted".
"If you are not paying, you sell your friend's data as a product?"
Sorry, but that is some twisted pyramid scheme imho.
I also believe that the cloud has proven people are willing to forgo some privacy in exchange for the ease of use/access. I don't take part is such activities, but many seem to.
Or they don't understand exactly what they are trading away in exchange for the free service.
Which would be understandable, since it's not like any of those services go out of their way to explain it to them. It's just marketed as a free lunch.
Of course, it does mention documents and such as well, but I'm sure there are plenty of uses for "socially" sharing that type of thing too.
Don't get me wrong $9/mo for unlimited data sounds nice but there is no way I am using my upload pipe to move my 10-12TB of media into a cloud that I know nothing about and could shut down next month.
To be fair I doubt I am the user they are targeting. It's not a "All your media in the cloud" but rather "A way to share one-off video/picture/music in the cloud which is not something I am interested in at all.
I use dropbox+drive for friends/family or if I'm not going to be at home. My upload connection is decent for where I am but it can't handle multiple HD streams (3+) so moving content I know people want into Dropbox means faster streaming for them and less congestion on my network. I have 4x3TB + 1x1TB drives currently (no raid, yes, yes, I know I need to do it) and those are about filled up and my media server has no more room in it for more drives so if I want to add more it would have to be external (I do have a couple eSata ports though).
I am currently looking for a replacement, I've considered buying one of those 20-drive server rack mounts [1] and filling it with 3TB drives which at Raid 6 (zRaid 2 really since I would just use ZFS soft-raid) would give me ~54TB of space. That should last me for a while yet :). At that point I would also start looking into colocation (That way I wouldn't need the Cloud Sync) but then I lose the VERY nice local speeds I get by having it all 10ft from my TV.
[1] Something like this http://smile.amazon.com/NORCO-Mount-Hot-Swappable-Server-RPC... (First result on google, I would look more before I decided of course)
They must have some impressive social network analysis planned if they try so many different tactics to get you to build a large network quickly.
Sure it is.
