Steve Iverson

CEO, Streamload

Larry's World
13 minutes, 6.2mb, recorded 2005-05-13
Steve Iverson
50,000 Gigabytes of online storage. Send 2GB email attachments. Free! Store your entire media collection online and we are not talking about your MP3s here but your DVDs and DVR data! No kiddin', San Diego based Streamload offers a service which allows unlimited storage at no cost. On this week's edition of Larry's World, Larry Magid talks to Streamload's CEO Steve Iverson about this service and their unique business model which makes it financially viable for them.

How does the service work? How does Streamload make money if storage is free? What do people use it for? Steve Iverson explains Streamload's business model and the kind of innovative uses its customers are putting it to.

He says that they are managing 400 Terabytes of customer data at the moment. That raises interesting questions. What happens to DRM protected data - will they let it get shared? Will it face the same legal issues that Napster faced if its customers start sharing illegal copyrighted material? And if customers store critical data, how secure is this storage?

Where is this storage explosion heading? Is there an end in sight?


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Steve Iverson is the President and CEO of Streamload. He studied at Pomona College of California, where he was awarded two research grants to study digital data compression, and eventually developed a new and innovative technology for his undergraduate thesis while studying adaptive data compression algorithms. This new technology built the foundation for Streamload and has since evolved into a service that allows users to send, receive, and access their data files online, including entire video and music collections. Under Iverson's leadership, Streamload, which has 10 employees in its downtown San Diego headquarters, is starting to make sense and cents to more and more people. The company, which has been profitable since June of 2001, recently closed its first round of institutional financing from San Diego's Windward Ventures. Iverson was a 2004 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year finalist.

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This program is from the Larry's World series.

For Team ITC:

  • Description editor: Arun Tanksali
  • Post-production audio engineer: Tim Butler

This free podcast is from our Larry's World series.