One of the companies I left out in my DEMO reports (as I had to leave for L.A. that day) was www.esnips.com. ESnips is headed by Yael Elish a Silicon valley veteran who now considers to come back after some years of 'exile'.

eSnips is funded by shopping.com founder Nahum Sharfman and Gemini Ventures.

The company has set some ambitious goals for itself:

eSnips makes it easy for people to make information readily available to others. The service provides a centralized place to gather, store, share and publish content made up of files, web clips, photos, video, screen shots and anything related to their area of interest, or cause. The eSnips toolbar makes it simple to upload, organize and store anything from the web or desktop directly into their web space. The user can then annotate and tag the pieces of information and post their personal assessments and thoughts in a simple blog-like authoring environment. Tagging files allows users to easily find content or discover other people that share their interests. The company offers end users 1GB of free storage space to fill with content, and the ability to control access to their content. eSnips currently has 60,000 registered users and attracts hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. The service is enjoying fast, pure viral growth.

Yael mentioned one million registered users since February - that would be quite a feat! Obviously the biggest issue of such a big hard drive service is how NOT to become a simple backend - what you need is page views and people selling content through the site (from which eSnips takes a share). The company employs some algorithms to avoid that trap but I guess the hosting provider for eSnips might already get up to speed with some extra spare servers...