After launching LIBOX in June and seeing it grow over the past couple of months, we’re really excited to announce the LIBOX iPhone application! The iPhone application provides you the ability to enjoy and share your entire media collection for free anywhere, no strings attached!

With LIBOX, you’re able to take your entire media collection everywhere. Whether it’s HD video, photos or music, you’ll be able to enjoy it while multitasking on your iPhone or browsing on any mobile device. The app works on any version of the iPhone, including those running iOS4, allowing you to instantly enjoy and share your media collections, no matter where it’s stored locally. No need to worry about storage limitations with LIBOX!

Not only is your media everywhere, it’s your media at its finest HD quality. LIBOX’s core value is keeping the HD media experience without ever charging you to enjoy your own media collection or limit how much media you can share with friends or family.

Besides being able to access your media anywhere with the iPhone app, you can easily add to your media collection on the go, while multitasking. Taking a picture you want to share with your friends couldn’t be easier with the LIBOX platform. Plus, LIBOX automatically syncs your media, so the picture will show up on your computer at home before you get there. This works with all of your media, take a video or download a song with you iPhone and it instantly syncs with any device you have running LIBOX.

So how do you get your media your way, everywhere? First download the LIBOX desktop app to all the computers you want to sync, then add media via the desktop app or via the iPhone app. View and play your entire media collection from your LIBOX account through the iPhone app or on any device with an Android or Safari mobile browser. It’s that simple!

We’re really excited to be able to share this application with everyone. Here are few more specifics about LIBOX’s answer to enjoying your high quality media hassle-free anywhere!

• Multi-tasking:

o   Fast switch between LIBOX and other apps, picking up where you left off

o   Listen to audio in the background

o   Get calls while enjoying your media - Complete tasks like uploading in the background while you use your phone for other activities

• Never-ending Playlist. Enjoy your entire music, photo and video collection wherever you are, regardless of the storage available on your iPhone.
• Intelligent Syncing and Streaming. Add any existing media from your iPhone to LIBOX and it automatically syncs or streams across all devices you use to access your LIBOX account based on your usage, without overloading the storage of any one device.
• Simple Sharing. Share your media with friends and family – the easy way. No email attachments, no uploading/downloading or wires required, and no limits on how much you share. Just hit the share button and LIBOX will transfer your media directly to the recipient in its original HD format without any loss in quality.
• All Media. LIBOX lets you enjoy all popular media formats for music, photos and video with “on the fly” conversion. With LIBOX you never have to think about whether you have the right type of media player.
• High Definition. Take full advantage of the 5 megapixel camera on the iPhone 4 by capturing HD video or photos with the LIBOX app. Your high def media will instantly be synced with all your devices running LIBOX, in full size and resolution and won’t be degraded when you share it with family and friends. Plus, view all of your HD media on the iPhone 4 on the great “retina display” screen with 326 dpi resolution.

You can also enjoy the full LIBOX experience in Safari on your iPad and we’ll be announcing native iPad and Android apps in the near future.

-The LIBOX Team
Your Media Your Way

Follow us on Twitter @LIBOX

One of Our Three Pillars – Sync, Share, and Play

It’s a pretty common drill: vacation is over and your digital camera is packed with hundreds of new photos that you want the world to see.  But, how do you best go about doing that so your friends and family feel like they were right there with you?

One of the most appealing features of LIBOX is the ability to share all your media in its original quality – unlike Facebook, Picasa and Flickr – and without having to upload it to the “cloud”.  With LIBOX, there is no cloud, there is no central server – media is shared directly from one computer to another, saving the user valuable time.  If you share something with your friends, they can access it immediately – even as data is being transferred between your computers.

So how does it work??

Below, we’ve provided a simple tutorial that explains how to best use LIBOX to share your most precious moments in a simple and efficient way.

First, take all your photos from a digital camera and import them into LIBOX. Plug-in your camera, you will see a yellow message at the top of the screen notifying you that LIBOX has identified a new device. Click the ADD MEDIA pane and look for your camera in the list of connected devices. Click on it and wait for the importing process to complete. Don’t worry about importing the same pictures again – LIBOX is checking for duplicate items when importing. After the importing process has completed you will see a new event in the “recently imported” screen.  Events are media collections that are generated automatically based on common attributes such as the date the picture was taken, artist name, Geo-location Tag, etc. Remember, you can always create custom media collections of your own to organize your media library the way you like it. Now that you have your photos imported into LIBOX’s database, you can share them with your friends.

But before you make all your friends envy you for having such an awesome trip to the Bahamas, add them as LIBOX contacts and assign them to a new group called “Collage”. Click the CONTACTS pane and then click the Add your friends button. If you’re using Gmail, Yahoo!, Windows Live or AOL – LIBOX can easily search your contact list for your friend’s email addresses and also show you if any of them are already using LIBOX. Once you’ve added your friends to the LIBOX contact list, you can create a new group by clicking on the Edit button. Assigning groups to your contacts makes it easier to share media with multiple users.

Next thing you want to do is select the photos you want to share and send them. Hit the Share button at the top of the screen and add the pictures you want to send. I’m also throwing in a couple of songs I’ve downloaded from the iTunes store. You can add any video, song or photo to the current message that you want to share with your buddies. Once you’re done – click the Share button again. On the left side of the screen you’ll see the group list. Select “Collage” from the list. Notice that sharing media with LIBOX is very much similar to sending an email – you can add a subject and some text to be included in your message. Once you’re done editing your message, hit the Send button and voilà! Now it’s time for all the magic to kick into action.

When you press the send button, LIBOX starts transferring your message to its recipients by directly connecting to your buddies. This saves you the time normally needed to upload your media to the “internet cloud” and because there is no central server for storing your media files, LIBOX preserves the original HD quality of what you share. Your friends will receive the message immediately, including any media items it contains. Don’t worry if your friends don’t see your message. LIBOX will send them an email notification that a new message is waiting for them in their LIBOX.

Now for the really cool stuff: LIBOX can actually stream the media you share from your computer to your friends’ computers, on demand. This means that if the original files are still in transfer, but your friends can’t wait to see them, LIBOX will automatically switch to streaming mode. When the media has finished transferring, LIBOX will play the files from your friends’ local computer. All these actions are happening behind the scenes and your friends won’t even feel the difference.

Another cool feature when sharing media with LIBOX is leaving comments on the media that is shared with you. After all, sharing media is all about socializing with your friends and family. You can also watch for your friends favorite items – they’ll be marked as “Liked”.

Sharing with LIBOX is definitely the smart way to go. It gives you and your buddies a simple yet powerful tool to exchange your precious moments. Whether you want to share photos, music or videos – LIBOX can handle it, without “cloud” storage limitations, or degraded media quality.

LIBOX is so much more than a platform to share your media and it’s changing and evolving every day.  Stay tuned for more blogging in the future, where we uncover more of the cool features offered for our users of LIBOX…

-The LIBOX Team
Your Media, Your Way

Follow us on Twitter @LIBOX

The conversation in the LIBOX forum has been extremely lively.  The energy and passion from our users is what keeps us going and makes all of this so much fun.  There have been more than 70 topics of discussion and over 230 posts during the first couple of weeks since our Beta launch.  Your suggested improvements and bug notices are helping us to improve the LIBOX experience for our early adopters.

The LIBOX team has worked tirelessly to investigate every suggestion and issue that has been brought to our attention.  Today, our users now have access to over 25 fixes and new features, including major boosts in performance when importing files (300 to 500% faster), and better streaming/loading while accessing LIBOX in a web browser.

All these updates happen without you having to do a thing – they’re just there following our new 1.2.1 release yesterday. Here’s a quick sample of some of the most prominent issues we addressed:

New Features and Improvements

• Overall radical speed improvements
• Performance and stability enhancements on Mac and Windows
• Importing Media – 300 – 500% speed performance boost
• UI improvements + touch friendly on mobile enabled devices
• Web Access – Better streaming/loading and faster sign-in experience
• Network performance improvements
• Clicking the thumbnail of a song that is currently being played will switch to the object view screen

Bug Fixes

• Mobile browser improvements: bug fixes for iPhone/Android
• FLAC audio files: now play nice while accessing LIBOX in your Web browser
• UAC fix: files are now accessible when running the UI after installing LIBOX – for our Windows users
• Volume reset fix: volume will no longer reset to the max level when a new track is being played
• Windows - Removal of sync folder: LIBOX no longer crashes when sync fold includes an apostrophe (example: C:\LIBOX’s Bug)
• Windows – fixed playback and streaming of media with non-English file names on external drives.

Our platform is your platform.  So without your suggestions and feedback we wouldn’t be able catch everything. Keep us on our toes and we’ll keep delivering for you: suggestions@libox.com

The LIBOX Team
Your Media, Your Way

Follow us on Twitter @LIBOX

LIBOX Users,

It has been a few weeks since the launch of LIBOX and the Internet has been buzzing with questions.  So, we took a few minutes to sit down with LIBOX Founder, Erez Pilosof, to answer a handful of the most frequently asked questions from our users and the press.

This is something we’ll do a lot so keep them coming!

- The LIBOX Team

PS: Remember to follow us on Twitter @LIBOX and Erez @pilosof

Why did you start LIBOX?

Erez – After I decided to leave Walla! in a full-time role, I took some time to clear my mind and travel around the world.  I found myself feeling this intense need to share my experiences with my friends and family back home in Israel, but the solutions I found on the Internet provided limited functionality for what I was looking to do.  I wanted to be able to share all my media with those who were close to me, and I wanted it to be in its original quality, have it happen instantaneously, and no matter what device I was using – Mac, PC or any mobile device – the experience would be exactly the same. Basically, I wanted access to my entire media collection no matter where I was or what device I was using, and I wanted to share my media files privately with those I cared about. It was a big task to take on but I knew it would not only make my life easier, but it would make me more connected with those I cared about the most.  It would also change the way everyone thinks about interacting with digital media in their lives.  Our goals are big, but unlike some of those other applications in our space, we’re looking to solve BIG problems and not just offer one-off solutions.

How can you keep LIBOX free?

Erez – This is the one question that people always seem to ask when I first start telling them about LIBOX- so how much does it cost?  LIBOX is free and it will always be free because that’s the way it should be.  Our reasoning is as simple as that.

We’re not a cloud storage solution, so from the start, we have very low costs in terms of storing data.  And, our plan is to build a sustainable revenue sharing model with media and content service providers.

The bottom line is that LIBOX is free and will always be free.

When are you planning on having mobile applications on iOS4 and Android?

Erez – We’ll be launching native applications for Apple and Android devices, and full web browser functionality this summer.  Think of what we’ve already done on your desktop or laptop computer, and you’ll get the picture of what our mobile plans are going to look like…  It’s all about consistency and making the lives of our users easy and more efficient.  Our mobile plans will be a big step towards our mission to completely rethink the digital media experience.

Will LIBOX ever offer cloud storage/backup for users media?

Erez – We obviously understand that some of our users want to store their media in the cloud.  It’s currently not in our immediate plans to offer such a solution internally at LIBOX.  Overall, we feel as if cloud storage/backup is an inefficient way to manage your media.  There’s too much uploading and downloading and the whole thing just gives me a headache.  In saying that, as we start to partner with other companies, our users will have plenty of options for cloud storage and backup if they choose to go that route.  It will probably happen at a price because that’s how most cloud storage solutions work.  That’s how they make their money, and why we’re in a unique position to rethink the status quo, and use technological innovation to offer a free solution to our users.

So LIBOX is a platform – what kind of applications do you envision developers making?

Erez - This is a great question and one that excites me!  We envision all kinds of applications within the LIBOX platform.  Maybe it’s an app from your favorite television station that gives you access to their public media and the ability to share it with all your friends.  Maybe it’s an app from a company in the photo business that lets you print the photos your friend shared with you, in their original quality, right inside LIBOX.  Or, maybe it’s something as simple as a music store for you to buy all your favorite tunes. How about your TV? An app that let’s you access all your media, from any device, easily on you TV.  It’s really limitless, but imagine an open ecosystem for developers to use their imagination and advance the consumer media experience.  This is our goal.