Seagate Technology on Wednesday announced the limited release of the Maxtor Fusion, a networked personal media server designed for consumers, small businesses and creative pros. The Maxtor Fusion debuts this month for $799, and is available exclusively at J&R Music and Computer World in New York. Seagate will expand the Fusion’s retail availability this summer.
The Maxtor Fusion is equipped with a 500GB hard disk drive and Gigabit Ethernet network interface. Using software licensed from Fabrik, the Fusion lets you store digital photos, video, music and applications and retrieve them using a Java-enabled Web browser.
The “webtop” application that controls the Fusion utilizes Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX), an increasingly common Web technology used to deliver rich media content (Apple’s latest major release of iPhoto utilizes AJAX to deliver online slideshows, for example). you can drag and drop files to transfer them, preview and select images, video, music and other content using thumbnails; view stored content as slideshows, lists and other viewing options. The Fusion uses QuickTime where suitable for providing an interface to the stored content. You can also use the interface to apply metadata tags to your content to help organize and search, blend and share videos, music, photos and files.
Access to the content can be restricted to specific users with password protectionk, and you can also create “microshares” and “microlinks” to link specific content to online auction sites like eBay and social sites like MySpace. You can also create a “Public Site” to share content directly from the Maxtor Fusion with the outside world.
Maxtor’s Web site had not been updated with a product page for Fusion as Macworld posted this article, but it does have a pre-launch site with some preliminary information.