Remotely access your files with Avvenu

[Colin Dunstan]

Avvenu (Italian for 'highway') is a free file sharing service which allows you to remotely view photos and files on your home or office computer from any Internet-connected computer, PDA, or mobile phone. You can also use it to securely (128bit SSL) share access to these files with friends and family.

What's neat about Avvenu is that it matches the connection to the device you're using. For instance, if you are browsing a folder of high-resolution images using a high-speed DSL connection, you'll download the image in the same high-res form as it exists on your computer. But if you browse the folder with a mobile phone or PDA with lower bandwidth capacity, the images are downscaled on-the-fly.

Just recently Avvenu added optimized support (PDF) for Palm devices, including the new Palm TX with WiFi.

[via Download Squad]

[Antoine of MMM]

I started using this with my Treo 600 this weekend and came away quite impressed, albeit a bit wary with some security concerns. Its good and will most definitely work for a ton of folks. I'd like to see a busniess option with some security protocols in there to address those folks, but its nice.

(dont mean to plug me again, but I did write some on it here for some more of what i noticed - http://mobileministrymagazine.com/20...manywhere.html)

[Evan]

The notion of exposing my files to the internet, even via a 128 bit SSL, is still a bit terrifying to me. Even if the SSL connection is secure, how can Avvenue prove, in a day and age when reports of corporate network hacks is rampant, that their corporate network is secure? Most corporate network hacks go unreported as they cause too much embarassment to the effected company.

At the same time, out of sheer curiousity, I've experimented with Avvenue as well. It certainly shows some promise. But, still, how many people routinely use their PDAs in environments that would allow them to (a) expose corporate information via a third party tool (e.g., Avvenu) or (b) wish to show off photos, on a PDA, to family and friends in locales that happen to provide WiFi? For that matter, PDA storage is getting large enough that most files, save for high resolution digital photos and extremely large documents, are easily portable.

The notion is interesting but I'm not convinced that it's the earth-shattering service that so many consider it to be.

[Antoine of MMM]

Its not earth shattering in our sense of knowing what to do; but in the non-techie sense of things (the one sense taht i have to consider 8hrs a day), it works and simply too. Despite security concerns, this matters more to the layperson that it works easily.

One can argue they can build a nice GUI for a vpn system and call it a day but i digress else cause more issues

[Avvenu]

The Avvenu service is designed to meet the needs of consumers and mobile professionals to easily manage remote PC access and sharing without the need for IT assistance. Whether a consumer is accessing a photo from their home computer, or a business executive is accessing a presentation from their desktop PC, security is a core feature of the Avvenu service. Secure SSL connections are maintained between the PC and Avvenu’s servers using trusted Verisign certificates. Requests from the server are only made through this secure tunnel which blocks malicious attacks from the Internet. The servers also protect the user’s credentials to thwart the possibility of hackers stealing information that would allow access to a user's PC. Finally, all requests and data transfers between the Avvenu servers and the user’s web browser are done using SSL to protect both the content and the user’s authentication information from being captured on the Internet

For additional information on the Avvenu service or security concerns, please visit the Avvenu web site at http://www.avvenu.com/questions/index.html.