The seller shared his story in the comments at http://www.thedomains.com/2011/06/30/domain-investor-brian-w... (scroll down to July 25). It's interesting to see that while the buyers claimed to be a "math educational non-profit startup", the seller was skeptical of the story.

It is a great domain, and that feels like a good deal for a five letter, very common word .com. (though I'm sure it feels like a lot of money for a startup).

The only compelling aspect of the offering is the promise of free 10 GB of storage. I don't see a dollar sign anywhere on the site, so I don't understand how they intend to keep that promise for very long. I refuse to sign up for a product, much less take the time to integrate it into my workflow, without knowing that it will be around for longer than a few months.

But "we spent 100k on a domain name for a non monetised service which competes with dropbox file hosting on one hand, picasa and imgur on image hosting, letscrate and sendoid on file sharing, and has nothing to match Dropbox on the high end, and is 'just' framing S3 storage" screams "hello? Bueller? What are you doing?"

I can get 25Gb free from Windows Live Skydrive with Microsoft behind it, soon to be 5Gb free from app-integrated iCloud with Apple behind it, 5Gb free from JungleDisk, 2Gb free with industry leading sync from Dropbox, and miscellaneous 10Gb free from 4shared.com, 50Gb free from Adrive.com temporarily, 1Gb from freedrive, 1Gb from flipdrive, 1Gb from fileden, (and stuck in the past there's 20Mb from filegenie).

There is a lot of noise in the space and a lot of competition, and as someone new entering the space, we definitely have a long way to go. We've only setup a team and started working on Minus full time about a month ago here in NYC. The vision behind Minus is and will be focusing on creating a simple and universal sharing experience.

Minus will evolve over time and we are open to all suggestions and feedback on how to improve and hopefully you'll think differently in few months :) Not sure if you saw, but we have many apps also available via http://minus.com/pages/tools that we're working on simultaneously and improving along with the web front.

Thanks!

Listen, I'm glad you are enthusiastic about your product and I wish you guys luck. But, seriously what is not simple about Dropbox? Are you hoping to grab market share simply by offering people free space? Who is dying to switch over to your service over Dropbox (or any other large competitor)? OR are you just trying to go along the journey to see if there is anything in the market that will differentiate yourself?

If you don't have one, my suggestion is to start with native folder support. I use Dropbox because I don't have to use my browser to use it. That would be a good place to start.

As funding continues to dry up, this problem will take care of itself. (It's already far better than back in the days of the tech bubble, which was really where the "ignore profits" stupidity went parabolic.

We're also seed-funded and that gives us room to go further without monetization for longer period of time while we work the features/bugs out :)

Thanks again!

---- How can I use Minus?

* You can use Minus to:

* Create an online portfolio of your work with your Minus profile

* Share photos and videos from your recent trip

* Publish your work whether it's an ebook, music, photos and more

* Brainstorm and share your next killer project

* Collaborate and share design mockups, code snippets and beta apps

* Backup your important files, documents and access or share it later

* Share lecture notes with your class

* Share all aspects of your life

These are just ideas we came up with. Start sharing today with Minus!

----

FWIW, if I were someone new to the cloud-sharing thing, that last 'idea' would freak me out.

Congrats on the launch!

Plus, the name "minus" sounds negative. Who would want to store data on a "minus"?

Thanks for the feedback and I can understand your concerns. We created Minus to create a universal sharing platform that focuses on simplicity and minimalism and the name Minus itself reflected that, and our original name was http://Min.us which is still active.

We are working hard to improve and create a unified experience across all platforms and here's some of the other tools: http://minus.com/pages/tools -- so it is not only a web experience.

Additionally the data you upload and store as a registered user will be kept and stored in Amazon S3.

Thanks!

Cheers!

Why the limitation? Filedropper has been offering 5 GB uploads for a while now.

1. Love the simple drag and drop to upload idea. it didn't work, though, when i simply drop that big folders. it just hang, ie seems to be working away but gave no errors. after 4 hrs, i stopped it.

2. created a folder then dropped 688 photos in. Error msg: max limits # items is 100. why is this limit? I can think of many cases where people need to store more than 100 items in 1 folder.

suggestions: 1. please spelled out your limitations somewhere. 2. remove that 100 items/folder limit.

I like your website flow and UI. keep at it, guys.

2) Agreed, we will work on communicating more clearly!

We will add options to earn more free storage soon, but I would love to see some stats behind other similar services if they are available!

http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/02/10/alan-schaaf-interview-im...

In the 10/2010 interview, Schaff said imgur served 471 million images totalling about 65 terabytes. It had just started pro accounts at that point.

One might say Dropbox has a similar (or the same vision). My question, more directly, is how are you any different than those "direct and indirect" competitors?

I don't feel that your vision is different based on your statement.

However we have API v2 coming out soon, over next few days.