Simon Barratt

Of Pando and Plazes

Plazes has gone through a bit of an upgrade recently.  They really seem to be growing the functionality and reaping the benefits.  I recently received an email from them summarising recent activity around plazes I have been to.  This type of update help generate more interest in the product.  The web site has been redone and looks a lot nicer.  The plazes badge has been refreshed too.  A nicer, Flash based animated version is now available (in a variety of colours too!).  I have update my plazes badge to reflect this.

And now for something newer!  As a part of the email consolidation project I am running, we have been discussing how to minimise the impact on the WAN and keep the mail databases efficient, after centralising the mail servers into regional hubs.  Capping the maximum email message size is one way of achieving this.  But this then leads us to the thorny topic of trying to come up with an easy to use tool, for users who need to share larger files.  This is were Pando comes in.  Currently (as of August 3rd) version 0.9 Beta is available.

This client (which integrates into Yahoo Messenger and will plug in to Outlook soon) allows you to send large files (1GB per message) to anyone via email.  It's most attractive feature is it's ease of use.  Using a hybrid server/P2P model, it distributes the file through the Pando client.  The recipient receives an html email (about 70kb), summarising who sent what with a .pando attachment, which, when opened, invokes the client to download it.  The download can start, even before the sender has finished uploading it!  And, just like with BitTorrent, the more people that were sent the file and are online and downloading/downloaded, the faster the subsequent downloads are - true Peer to Peer power!  Additionally, Pando holds an encrypted copy (not accessible to anyone - other than the recipients) of the file on their servers for 14 days, to facilitate downloads, should the sender be offline or behind a restrictive firewall.

In all my tests it has worked very well.

If you are having problems sending large file attachments, then this is your answer.

All they need now, is a clientless version for downloads.  At the moment, both sender and recipient need the client installed.  It is simple to install, but is an extra barrier.