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Sending Huge Files with Pando
Thursday, February 7, 2008
what if you want to send a 25 megabyte audio file? Or a package of hi-res photos that tops 80MB? Or a 690MB video file?
Pando is an innovative and free P2P application that lets you send large files to your friends over e-mail. It doesn't use e-mail for the actual file delivery (that part is handled by a simple, downloadable client) but your friends are notified that you want to share with them over e-mail, and they get a small e-mail attachment they can click on to launch the client and initiate the transfer.
To share a file, you must have the Pando client (a free download for Mac OS X, Windows 2000, XP and Vista) installed. Open the client, drag and drop the file or folders you want to share and enter the e-mail addresses of your friends you want to deliver it to. Pando sends e-mails to your group of friends inviting them to share with a small .pando file attached. They click on the file and (presuming they have the free client as well) Pando launches and the sharing begins.
There are also add-ons for Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and Hotmail. Users can send attachments normally or as Pando-ized attachments without leaving their regular e-mail client.
Pando uses BitTorrent for the P2P sharing, but in our tests, the term "BitTorrent" wasn't mentioned at any time during the experience. So, it's perfect for sharing with people who aren't hip to BitTorrent or who have less-than-working knowledge up how to set up and share trackerless torrents. You also get BT's blazing-fast speeds when there are multiple clients sharing the same set of files at once.
The only barriers are the fact that the client needs to be installed on both ends to work, and the free version of the client displays ads along the bottom, which may turn some users off.
You can use Pando's free service to share any files up to 1GB. Since the shared files are hosted by Pando for a week or two, you should be careful if you're using it to share copyrighted materials. In a phone interview, Pando told Wired.com that it complies with DMCA takedown notices if it receives them.
Pando's e-mail service is its bread and butter -- and rightly so, since most of us still get away with sending e-mail attachments whenever we can, only resorting to other methods when our attachments are rejected for being too big -- but the company also has tools for sending files to friends over IM and by little links that can be embedded in web pages.
To share a file, you must have the Pando client (a free download for Mac OS X, Windows 2000, XP and Vista) installed. Open the client, drag and drop the file or folders you want to share and enter the e-mail addresses of your friends you want to deliver it to. Pando sends e-mails to your group of friends inviting them to share with a small .pando file attached. They click on the file and (presuming they have the free client as well) Pando launches and the sharing begins.
There are also add-ons for Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and Hotmail. Users can send attachments normally or as Pando-ized attachments without leaving their regular e-mail client.
Pando uses BitTorrent for the P2P sharing, but in our tests, the term "BitTorrent" wasn't mentioned at any time during the experience. So, it's perfect for sharing with people who aren't hip to BitTorrent or who have less-than-working knowledge up how to set up and share trackerless torrents. You also get BT's blazing-fast speeds when there are multiple clients sharing the same set of files at once.
The only barriers are the fact that the client needs to be installed on both ends to work, and the free version of the client displays ads along the bottom, which may turn some users off.
You can use Pando's free service to share any files up to 1GB. Since the shared files are hosted by Pando for a week or two, you should be careful if you're using it to share copyrighted materials. In a phone interview, Pando told Wired.com that it complies with DMCA takedown notices if it receives them.
Pando's e-mail service is its bread and butter -- and rightly so, since most of us still get away with sending e-mail attachments whenever we can, only resorting to other methods when our attachments are rejected for being too big -- but the company also has tools for sending files to friends over IM and by little links that can be embedded in web pages.
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