Gadgetory


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Pipe Hands-on

2012-05-17
hey this is Ellis from the verge checking out German startup pipe which lets you transfer files up to a gigabyte in real time with friends over Facebook let's check it out pipe lives on Facebook because there really isn't much software involved it's all done on pipe servers and they also didn't want you to have to friend people like you might on other services where you share things or transfer files pipe works on top of Adobe's real-time media flow protocol which means that all you do is install the app takes a second and you're going click friends up in the top left corner pick a friend you want to share with and they don't need to actually be online in facebook chat for it to work but they do need to have this window open all you need to do to transfer file is literally just drag a file from your desktop into the pipe and it's going to ask Jordan for permission as soon as I click send file now on his screen he's gonna see incoming file transfer you're gonna accept the file and as you can see progress is symbolized by that bar which is the same on both screens because pipe is uploading and downloading at the same time in real time peer-to-peer computer-to-computer there are no servers in the middle to ever store your file once the file is complete you can just click save as again the company says that the one gigabyte limit for file transfers is due to the size of your browser cache if you try and send a file that's really big you generally get an error so this one is just under 700 megabytes even though that file wasn't the full gigabyte the company stated it says your browser memory is full please try restarting your browser and this is after I just cleared my cache pipe isn't trying to beat Dropbox or any other large-scale file transferring solutions all it's really trying to do is let people who are already friends on Facebook transfer files without installing any other software and there's also 128-bit AES encryption so your files encrypted doesn't live on any servers pops in pops out and that's it
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