iTwin goes commercial

Finally. After a year of hearing lots of buzz at Unconference 2009 and TechFest 2009, mentions on TechCrunch and Gizmodo, and a few stories in Straits Times and Digital Life, home-grown Singapore consumer product iTwin has finally officially been launched.

For those who are not acquainted with iTwin, iTwin is a USB dongle-type device that let’s you share files between two computers anywhere in the world.

It comes as a pair; plug one into one computer and another one in another one, and you can share files between the two no matter the distance between them.

“Think of it as an infinitely long LAN cable connection, except that it’s via a USB device,” said Lux Anantharaman, CEO, at the iTwin blogger launch party a few days ago.

The device, which retails for US$99 (about S$130), was officially launched on the auspicious date of 10th October 2010.

How it works is that it connects over the Internet, but uses AES256 encryption to ensure that the files shared are secure.

It is designed to be “simple enough that my mother can use,” said Lux. “Just plug and play!”

All well and good, but how does this compare to a cloud-based solution like dropbox, which is free (for space under 2GB) and can be shared between multiple users?

Kal Takru, COO of iTwin feels that the solutions are not comparable. For one, iTwin is not a cloud solution, and there’e no mirroring of files on both PCs. Secondly, there’s no limit on the disk size that can be shared.

Fellow blogger DK from Tech65.org, who was also at the party, summarized a most cogent and in my opinion, most astute observation about iTwin: “It’s either going to do very well or bomb terribly,” he said.

DK’s reasoning was that geeks wouldn’t use the device as we’re spoilt by all our dropbox and various cloud-sync solutions. However, the device is excellent for general end users, simply because it is really dead simple to use: Just plug and play!

Thus, how iTwin does depends on its channels marketing push to retail stores. For now, iTwin is available only from their website, but this will change soon, said Kal.

The device currently only supports Windows to Windows (XP, Vista and 7) file transfers, but support for Mac will be added by the first half of 2011.

Singapore needs more home grown companies like this; let’s hope that iTwin becomes a success!