In an exciting but frightening transition from our desktops to a more virtualized way of handling our files and programs, Tonido seems to be the beautiful compromise between the two.
It allows you all the flexibility of having your documents and files accessible from anywhere via a URL you create, with the security of having them still stored safely in your computer or external harddrive. The Tonido website, is a cloud-based gateway where you create an account which will then allow you to access all of the files on your Windows, Mac or Linux computer from anywhere, even some phones, and use all of the features they have installed on their cloud.
This week, we will be giving away 20 WebShare Pro licenses and 4 Tonido Plugs, worth $700 in total. Find out how you can win one!
Some of the features of Tonido include:
- The Tonido Workspace, which allows you to manage your calendar, contacts, tasks and files from anywhere.
- One Click Webshare and Tonido Photos, which allow you to share your files (even very large ones) with family and friends or create photo albums open to the public. All of the sharing can be done with one single click, which creates the URL, allows you to choose who can see it, or if it will be public to anyone and view the history (who has seen the files).
It even allows you to set a date for the shares to expire, which means you can set the files to only be available for a certain period of time.
No more concerns about how to email that large file to your co-worker or how to send grandma the new video of Johnny taking his first steps without having to upload it to some public site.
- A Jukebox, so you can stream all of your music from any computer or from your phone.
- A web based Torrent Client.
- Money Manager, which is a recent addition to Tonido. It is a free personal finance software. It allows you to keep track of your stocks and assets, create categories to better manage your finances and manage your bank accounts. It has enough features to give some paid services a run for their money.
- Tonido Back Up. One of the greatest features of Tonido is that you can easily create backups of your files on other computers, no matter what file or operating system. It’s always a good idea to have a back up in a location other than where your main files are. That way, in case something happens at that location, you can retrieve your so important files from another computer. The back up feature simply copies all the files from Tonido to another computer with the click of a button. Think how simple changing computers or copying all your files to a laptop or remote computer can be with that feature.
Files also load with incredible speed on Tonido. I have used remote access programs, but what they do is display your desktop on another screen. The problem with that is that the whole desktop and remote software must load on the remote machine. That uses huge amounts of resources. At best you get a very slow machine. Tonido doesn’t work that way. It literally is a dedicated cloud system connecting you to your files. So they get listed immediately and load incredibly quickly, with minimum impact to the computer’s performance.
One great companion to the Tonido software is the Tonido Plug which is a little box, that can be connected to any USB or thumb drive and serve as an external server and NAS device that can be accessed from any remote computer using your account URL. The little box (which costs less than $100) is a power efficient green computing device which comes pre-installed with all of the Tonido applications. It is based on a 1.2 GHz processor which runs the Tonido software on top of Ubuntu Jaunty Linux OS.
Setup takes about 30 seconds and once set, you can leave the plug attached to the hard drive and still access all your files or upload files to the hard drive without the need for a computer to store them. That is in itself worth the plug for me.
All in all, Tonido seems to be ideal for those of us who love having access to our files but who also want to know they are not stored in some server somewhere; users who want to be able to share our files without concern for security and without having to upload them to various servers with size restrictions. And users who want to be able to listen to our music from anywhere or be able to update our financial information on the go.
In a world that is now being changed by cloud computing, Tonido seems to be one step ahead with a new wave: The personal cloud”¦
To get a jump start in personal cloud computing, we’re giving away 4 Tonido Plugs and 20 Webshare Pro accounts (view Pro features here) worth $700 in total. The Tonido Plugs will be sent to the winners anywhere in the world via FedEx.
How do I become a winner?
It’s simple. Just follow the steps.
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| Join our Facebook page by clicking on the Become a Fan button on the left. If you can’t see the fanbox, click on this link.
If you’re already a fan, skip this step. |
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| STEP 2 | |
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Share this post with your friends by clicking on the Share button on the left. |
| STEP 3 | |
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In the comments section below, fill in your name, email address, paste the link to your Facebook profile in the URL field and tell us why you’d like to win.
Make sure to enter your real email address so that we can contact you if you win! |
This giveaway begins now and will end on Friday at 2100hrs PST. The winners will be selected at random and announced the following day.
Spread the word to your friends and have fun!
MakeUseOf would like to thank Venkat and CodeLathe for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.
Tagged: cloud • cloud computing • giveaway
