Former Alibaba exec launches an app that tackles the nebular problem of cloud backups for photos

Serial entrepreneur and former Alibaba executive Xueji Wang is now running Airtake.

Cloud storage for photos is one of the most annoying things on the internet for ordinary people. You could use Dropbox or Apple, but their free allowance is ridiculously tiny. Or perhaps Flickr, but it’s the slowest and buggiest site on the planet. Or Google… but doesn’t that involve goddamn Google+? Maybe Microsoft’s OneDrive is more promising, with 15GB for free? But I get the feeling I’ll need more space.

A new startup created by a former Alibaba executive is hoping to offer a better and bigger solution. Unusually for a Chinese startup, it’s aiming at users around the world. The new app from Xueji “Jerry” Wang, called Airtake, not only saves your photos to the cloud but also preserves precious space on your mobile by not storing the photos on your phone at all. It starts off with 10GB of upload space for free, but it’s easy to invite and add friends to get an extra 10GB each time until you have a maximum of 100GB of cloud storage for free.

The Airtake team tells Tech in Asia that the idea started when Wang and the eventual co-founders of this new startup sat down together and realized all of their smartphones were nearly out of device storage, mainly due to hundreds of photos and videos.

This is the first app from Wang’s new startup, but it’s definitely not his first venture. In 2003 he started the PHPWind social network for coders, which was acquired by Alibaba five years later. Wang then moved to the ecommerce titan and eventually became a founding executive and general manager at Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud business division.

See: Sorry, Jack: Alibaba founder no longer tops Forbes’ China billionaires list

Head in the clouds

Airtake is a camera app as well as a photo storage service – but you don’t need to use the camera for the cloud storage to work as the app has the option (turned off by default) to upload every photo and video on your phone to the cloud. You can sort them into albums or group them by location.

If for some reason you don’t want it to save everything you snap on your phone, it can instead only upload the stuff you capture using Airtake’s camera, which comes with filters and some editing features.

In my brief test it works well as a cloud storage service, though I’d rather stick with my minimal iCloud storage for now as I’m happy with my system of using iCloud simply as a recent safety net before I save photos from my phone to my laptop and then make both offline and online (not iCloud) backups. This is probably more suited to people who bought phones with 8GB or 16GB of storage and who are therefore feeling twinges of “capacity anxiety” as their phones reach bursting point.