VentureBeat

Oosah, a photosharing site that launched back in April, has unveiled a cool new site for iPhone users. But the most interesting part of the site doesn’t have anything to do photos — Oosah will allow users to access up to 1 terabyte of any media for free, including music. That means Oosah site turns your iPhone into a 1 terabyte music player.

There are other applications that allow your iPhone to stream your music library remotely — Remote Buddy, for example. There are rumors that Apple is developing its own technology on this front. But unless you’ve got a 1-terabyte hard drive, Oosah’s player probably offers the most storage. (And it dwarfs the iPod proper, whose biggest model stores only 120 gigabytes.)

Of course, there are some drawbacks to streaming the music, rather than playing it directly off your iPhone. For one thing, Oosah chief technology officer Dan Khasis says that the player won’t work with music that’s restricted by Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, i.e. many of the tracks available on iTunes. (Personally, I see this as another reason why DRM sucks, not as a knock against Oosah, but someone who owns a lot of DRM music probably feels differently.) For another, Oosah users must rely on the quality of their phone connections, which has been erratic on the iPhone 3G.

The music player seems like a promising avenue for Oosah, which also works as a meta-photosharing site: Its biggest selling point is its interface for managing photos stored on other sites. The iPhone site looks like a solid offering, with most of the regular Oosah site’s functionality.

The latest news makes me even more curious about how the Palo Alto startup plans to make money, which it has been secretive about. After all, storing 1 terabyte of data for each user can’t be cheap.

A startup called Oosah is launching a new service today that can help you sort through the plethora of photo and other media sites online. Through the Oosah Media Explorer, users can upload photos, movies and music to the web, and easily move them between sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook.

Oosah’s goal isn’t to compete with those photo sites, says chief operating officer Mike Duggan; in fact, it’s less of a strain on the Palo Alto startup’s servers if you store your photos elsewhere. Instead, the company wants to help you manage your media on other sites, and the Media Explorer’s big selling point is its interface. Other sites like Slide and RockYou help you share your photos across the web, but there’s really no management hierarchy — in other words, you can sort photos by storing them in an album, but that’s about it. With Oosah, you use a file management system similar to your desktop’s. That allows you to create a hierarchy of folders within folders (see screenshot below), and to move folders (and media) around by just clicking and dragging.

Oosah also has some of the basic features of other photo sites, like creating slideshows that can be shared as widgets.

Right now, Oosah supports sharing with Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and YouTube, but will soon add compatibility with other sites — Duggan can’t say which, but he says they’re the “usual suspects.” Duggan also declined to get specific about the company’s business plans, but he noted that Oosah should be able to make money through advertising, and is also talking to other companies about partnerships.

Oosah is funded by unidentified angel investors, and is currently working on a seed round.