HyveUp – Mike Duggan – Oosah

HyveUp - interview with Mike Duggan, cofounder of Oosah.

Aggregating services are extremely popular these days. Friendfeed aggregates your friends’ online activities; Tubemogul aggregates your videos under one roof; and now Oosah steps in as the web-based application to manage all (at least a lot of them so far) your online media files.

The first thing that strikes when using Oosah is its file explorer interface: very much the look and feel of a desktop explorer. Every file is organized in folders placed in the left sidebar, making it really easy for any user to play with it. Just like a desktop explorer, users can create new folders, drag and drop files from one folder to the other, rename the folders…

These folders can contain files that users uploaded to Oosah, or files hosted on other media sites: So far, you can connect your Oosah account to Facebook, Picasa, Youtube and Flickr. These accounts show as folders in the Oosah explorer, making it super easy to access and manage.

Oosah is laser-focused on media management activities. From the Oosah interface, users can generate an embed code to share their media content, send it via email, make their files password protected, create RSS feeds, distribute their media as podcasts, print their documents on a local printer, create slideshows, and so much more.

So far, the slideshow is the first and only creation tool that users will find on Oosah. With a simple process of drag and drop, Oosah users can choose specific images or videos, add a music, a skinned player and transition effects, and Oosah generates a slideshow instantly. As any other media file on Oosah, users can share the slideshow through all the features mentioned above. Slideshows are even downloadable as zip files.

Oosah is working at connecting more social platforms to their services. More internal features are on their way too. Regarding the business model, Oosah is considering charging for users who shall use more than the 2 Gigabytes that comes with any free account. But things are not written in stone yet, and the team is mostly focused on development issues so far.

I see in Oosah a great opportunity for content creators like myself who need flexible distribution tools. With Oosah, I could put three videos in a slideshow (let’s call it a widget at this point), distribute the widgets on other sites where i might not be able to access it again, and freely change the content of the widget from the Oosah interface. A lot of Oosah features are unique, but this one is the graal for video distribution, as no other service allows such a flexible tool to create, distribute and modify media files. Oosah has even developed an analytics feature for creators to track their content.

My personal request would be to get access to Revver from Oosah. That would seriously add a professional flavor to their services.

Really a fun toy to play with. Check it out: Oosah

More info about Oosah:
HyveUp Oosah Video Interview – Oosah blog
Extremely rich “Web 2.0″ digital media content management site – Amazing Startups
Oosah: A Hub for Your Personal Online Media – Techcrunch
Oosah Connects Social Sites for Easy File Transfers – LifeHacker
Will Oosah be the web’s photo hub? – VentureBeat