Jolicloud Introduces Jolicloud 2, Your Digital Home On The Web

It’s been five years already, and Jolicloud still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Yesterday, at an event called the Jolicloud Ecosystem Party, the company presented its long-term vision for the company. It also gave everyone a sneak peek at Jolicloud 2, a step forward in the company’s ultimate goal to build the only platform you need to simplify and centralize your life on the web.

“I always considered Jolicloud as an incubator to experiment and start new projects,” co-founder and CEO Tariq Krim told me in an interview. “And today, we’re taking down our operating system. We are making a bet on HTML5, which is an open platform. Our vision is to make a personal cloud platform and to empower our users.”

While Jolicloud already had a web platform, a second version is coming out in March. Users can expect multiple products around the same idea. The company wants to unify all your services and make everything works together. The first two products are Jolicloud Home and Jolicloud Drive. Chrome users will get more features, but Jolicloud will work in every browser.

With Drive, you can connect your account with all your cloud storage services. Many people use separate services — for example Dropbox for your personal files, Google Drive for your documents and professional stuff, Box for your company, etc. You can unify all your accounts in a single interface.

But you can also interact directly with your files. You can open a PDF, an MP3, a movie, an epub book and more. For example, let’s say that you use Dropbox camera upload on your phone. When you take a photo, it is automatically uploaded to Dropbox. You can open this photo in Jolicloud, add a filter, crop and edit without ever leaving the website. Then you can save to Dropbox or even save to another storage service.

Similarly, you may want to move a big movie from your Dropbox to your Microsoft OneDrive account to free some space in your Dropbox. You can just drag the file to the OneDrive tab. Then, everything happens in the background — Jolicloud’s server will begin downloading the file from Dropbox and then upload it to OneDrive. You’ll have to pay $4.99 a month for this feature. With the pro version, you will also be able to connect multiple Google accounts (or multiple Dropbox accounts, etc.).

The second service, Jolicloud Home, is where you will find all your online activity in one place. After linking all your social accounts, such as your Facebook, Tumblr or Instagram accounts, you can browse these feeds directly in Jolicloud. For example, if you can’t remember the name of a SoundCloud song, you can even filter to see only the stuff you have liked. You can create and save custom searches like on Twitter. All of this is very visual and intuitive.

In parallel, Jolicloud wants to go all in with Chrome. “One billion people are now using Chrome on all their devices,” Krim said. The next step for the company is probably to build a Chrome app and take advantage of all the Chrome APIs. Chrome evangelist François Beaufort took the stage at the Jolicloud Ecosystem event.

“People still use their computer a lot. We live in the cloud, but we still have many files on our computers,” Krim said. “We want to address that by letting people access their online files when they are offline. We also want to merge local and cloud storage so that you can move from one to the other without even realizing it.”

Finally, Jolicloud invited a few French startups to pitch at its event — Bunkr, TVShow Time, Mixotv and Whyd. The idea was to showcase France’s talent when it comes to designing beautiful and effective products. All these services will be available in Jolicloud 2 as well.

Jolicloud’s vision is still mostly the same — the startup wants to become the center piece of the complicated cloud puzzle. But the execution is much better with Jolicloud 2. Now 1.3 million users strong, the existing users will be migrated to the second version in the coming weeks. “I learned a lot with our previous mistakes. We communicated too much on the products and didn’t talk about the big picture,” Krim said. “We consider Jolicloud 2 as a rebirth for the company.”

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