Advertisement

NTT Japan builds a USB box for sharing with the cloud

This unassuming black box, the N-Transfer, has one purpose and one alone -- to stick Japan's USB 2.0 storage devices, scanners and printers firmly in the cloud, without the need for a intermediate computer. In that respect the device is much like a certain Pogoplug, but telephony provider NTT Japan's doing the formula one better, as this box doesn't just share a pair of USB ports across a web interface. You can transfer up to 500MB files point-to-point across the company's high-speed fiber optic internet with boxes at either end -- each equipped with gigabit ethernet -- or upload documents from a Fujitsu ScanSnap or Epson Colorio scanner (and hopefully others) directly to Evernote. If you live in Japan, have access to a fiber optic connection and don't mind the copious amount of hate regular ol' DSL users are directing at you right now, you can grab one for ¥7,350 (about $90) at Amazon.