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Motorola introduced a new branded service - SHARE - at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. SHARE enables users to remotely access and distribute files on their PC with their mobile handset. Today, the company behind SHARE, Avvenu, Inc., connected its service with Palm, Inc.'s Treo 700w.

Founded in 2004, the Palo Alto, California company is funded by Charles River Ventures, Worldview Technology Partners, and Motorola Ventures. Avvenu VP of product management David Trescot told SmartPhoneToday, “We’re excited about expanding our mobile device support to include the Palm 700w. The Avvenu service allows users to have secure access to their critical data from anywhere in the world."

Aimed at small businesses and consumers, Avvenu (company and service have the same name) leverages the fast - Wi-Fi and 3G - connections available to PDAs and smartphones to help users manage, route and distribute peer-to-peer PC content. Shared media doesn't have to be downloaded to a handheld or uploaded to a centralized server behind a firewall, as all sharing is done directly off Avvenu's own hosted server.

With Avvenu, users can view a photo or Word document, for example, from a PC on a handheld. Photos are re-sized to fit any screen; PC or PDA. There are no file size limits, so users can use their Treo 700w, for example, to quickly share hundreds of megabytes of data, such as a very large PowerPoint file.

"Any cell phone, PDA, or computer that has internet access can now be a portal to their remote computer. And, not only can a user remotely access their own files, they can instantly and securely share them with anyone else – with no limits on file size,” added Trescot.

So in the PowerPoint example, a handheld user selects a presentation on his PC from his device and sends a link to it to someone else. That other person now has full access to viewing the file, without either individual having downloaded it.

Avvenu says users want to access their data, whatever it is, with the mobile device as a gateway. "The handheld is a portal into your life," according to Tescot. Controlling PC files remotely is a different animal.

Competitive solutions like Go To My PC emphasizes desktop control from a handheld. Yes, smartphones are powerful little computers, but they don't have 100 GB hard drives. You're still going to do most of your work and hold most of your files on a PC.

Remote control of those files—manipulating them live on the desktop from a mobile device—isn't efficient, Avvenu asserts.

Avvenu provides password-protected access to user's files and folders. All data transfers are encrypted and transmitted using 128-bit SSL, the Web standard for secure transactions.

Connectivity options - EV-D0, UMTS, Wi-Fi, etc. – available today make Avvenu viable. According to Tescot, users are happy as long as the connection is fast enough and there is no difference perceptually as to how content is accessed.

The company told us there will be more branded versions of its service coming soon. So, for example, a carrier may offer Avvenu under a different name as part of a data plan. Unlike a hardware vendor like Motorola, carriers are likelier to want to host the service themselves—rather than have Avvenu do the hosting for them. That's because all the data runs through their networks already.

While the baseline service to view and share PC files to multiple computers, PDAs and phones from any browser is free, Avvenu plans to unveil a paid service - on the order of a $5 per month flat fee - later in the year. An example of a paid service feature is being able access PC files remotely even when your computer is shutdown.

How? Cached encrypted folders of pre-selected documents and files automatically uploaded to Avvenu's network.