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Tech Week Ahead: Controversial Founder Of File-Sharing Site Launches New Service

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

I'm Robert Siegel. And it's time now for All Tech Considered.

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SIEGEL: We start things off today with our quick look ahead to the week in tech. First up, Kim Dotcom, founder of the file-hosting service Megaupload, is back in the news. Last year, the U.S. Justice Department charged the New Zealand resident with online copyright infringement, but that hasn't stopped him from launching a new website just last night. It's called simply Mega. Here's NPR technology correspondent Laura Sydell.

LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: And this site will let people store 50 gigabytes of stuff for free in the cloud.

SIEGEL: That stuff includes photos, music and videos.

SYDELL: So, you know, there are services - what he's doing is he's getting into the market of services like Dropbox, which lets you, for example, if you have a big file to send to somebody of a whole bunch of pictures or video or a huge amount of documents, instead of emailing it to them, you can just send them a note and say: Go to Dropbox and store the file there, and then they can download it.

SIEGEL: But Mega's 50 gigabytes of free storage is more space than services such as Dropbox currently offer. Kim Dotcom tweeted that Mega had received 250,000 user registrations within just a few hours of the site's launch. Also in our tech look ahead, a note on what Facebook calls its new graph search. It's a tool that will allow users to search for, say, a restaurant and show results based on their friends' preferences.

SYDELL: Search is incredibly important. And if you add sort of social relationships to search, you can get results that might be more meaningful to you than they would be if you're just doing a random search.

SIEGEL: The new feature was unveiled last Tuesday and starts rolling out to the public this week. And that's our look ahead to the week in tech news with NPR's Laura Sydell. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.