In an arena where media servers, personal servers, and appliances for sharing and backing up digital media are proliferating, Ispiri, a startup company based in Mountain View, California, has unveiled a new personal server targeted at consumers and SOHO professionals. The device, Mirra (www.mirra.com), incorporates software for saving, sending, synchronizing, and remotely accessing photos, e-mail, documents and other kinds of digital content.
Ispiri showed Mirra at this weeks DEMOmobile 2003 conference in La Jolla, California, and the company is positioning the product as a traffic cop, version manager, and repository for digital media. “As the number of multiple PC households increases, there is a growing need for a central repository of files that are archived, versioned, and sharable among friends and family,” said Randy Giusto, vice president of personal technology for research firm IDC, in conjunction with Ispiris announcement of Mirra.
In a recent meeting with PC Magazine, Ispiris CEO, Richard Mandeberg, said that keeping Mirras cost low had been a high priority. The device lists for $399 and is designed for plug-and-play use out of the box. Whether that price is low, though, depends on what you compare Mirra to. Some media servers, such as Prismiqs, sell for under $300. Mandeberg argues that such devices are not directly comparable. For example, the Prismiq device does not have local storage, while Mirra has a 120GB drive and is specifically designed for backup and synchronization tasks, not just for trafficking files between, say, multiple PCs in a home.
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