October 19, 2009
Volume XXVIII, Issue 4
Tech Sector Trumpets Signs of a Real Rebound
Excerpted from NY Times Report by Steve Lohr
The calendar says we are well on our way to winter, but for many technology companies, orders are starting to bloom like flowers after a spring rain.
Strong and steady improvement, economists say, would suggest that the United States is truly emerging from the Great Recession. Yet if tech spending fades, it would mean that recovery is further off.
So far, there are many encouraging signs. The technology giants Intel, IBM, and Google delivered better-than-expected quarterly financial results this week, and their executives expressed confidence that the worst was over and a rebound under way. Top executives at Dell, Cisco Systems, and other tech companies have also been optimistic recently.
"The worst of the recession is clearly behind us and because of what we have seen, we now have the confidence to be optimistic about our future," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, told analysts Thursday after the company's strong earnings report.
Much depends on how the nascent revival in the technology sector plays out. Computer hardware and software are building blocks of the modern economy, as basic as iron ore and coal were to the industrial era. Together, technology products represent about half of all business spending on equipment.
Microchips and clever code animate consumer technology goods, like personal computers (PCs) and Apple iPhones. Larger computers in data centers power e-mail, electronic commerce, and the Internet.
"This will be a technology-led recovery," said Edward Yardeni, an economist and investment strategist. "And the improvement we're seeing from the technology companies suggests the recovery has legs."
Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, pointed to his company's solid third-quarter performance on Tuesday and said it showed that "computing is essential to people's lives, proving the importance of technology innovation in leading an economic recovery."
Please click here for the rest of this report.
Oversi Eyes Boom in 2010 for Caching Solutions
Excerpted from Business News Americas Report by Patrick Nixon
Over-the-top (OTT) caching and delivery solutions provider Oversi has added a number of new operator clients in Latin America this year and expects to see a boom next year, according to the company's President & CEO David Tolub.
The company landed its first client in the region - Chilean cable operator VTR - in March, and says it has received very positive feedback from that company.
Tolub said, "We are very active in Brazil and lately in Colombia." There are trials in nearly all South and Central American countries, he added, and, "We believe that next year will bring a big boom in orders, because the number of trials we are handling is so impressive."
Oversi's OverCache multi-service platform (MSP) is designed to enable operators to improve the Internet experience for customers when using video and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications.
Caching involves storing copies of frequently-visited web documents or videos in a server in the country where the operator is based. That means that, since those documents have already been downloaded from their original location, accessing them is much quicker, and in some cases up to 10 times faster.
Along with Asia, Latin America is the region seeing the biggest jumps in video use, Tolub said, adding that fast-moving video technology requires continual upgrades of Oversi's technology.
One trend that the executive is noting in Latin America is a move towards local file-hosting.
Unlike P2P video sharing, which is free but often slow, with the file-hosting business model, operators can charge users for quicker video download speeds.
Another trend in Latin America is encryption of files. In the region, a number of operators have deployed bandwidth management systems to enable them to prioritize traffic: for example, a university prioritizing academic-related traffic during the day and slowing down traffic of social-network sites.
This has led users to encrypt content to try and bypass those bandwidth management systems by making it difficult to detect whether the content is of high or low priority. Oversi's platform is able to deal with encrypted protocols.
"That is the beauty of the OverCache multi-service platform. We can evolve swiftly to respond to changes in the Internet," Tolub said.
In a second phase of development in Latin America, Tolub expects to start offering bandwidth-saving solutions for mobile operators.
P2P Streaming Surpasses File-Sharing Growth Rate
Excerpted from NewTeeVee Report by Janko Roettgers
Network security vendor Arbor Networks has been drumming up publicity for its upcoming Internet Observatory Report this week. One of the widely reported tidbits is that the file-sharing growth rate has "declined in the last two years," and that it has been replaced by exploding growth in P2P streaming and websites that feature video streaming rather than file downloading.
Findings like these are puzzling to anyone who's been frequenting any of the big torrent sites lately.
File sharers still seem to be as busy as ever, exchanging pretty much every movie and TV show episode you can think of. And didn't Cisco just recently forecast that global P2P traffic will keep growing in years to come? Turns out, it's all about how you interpret the numbers.
The "Internet Observatory Report," which is scheduled to be presented at the North American Network Operators' Group Meeting in Michigan on Monday, is the result of two years of research by Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan, and Merit Network. It's based on traffic analysis from 110 participating ISPs, and the total amount of data analyzed was more than 256 exabytes, according to an Arbor Networks press release. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes.
One conclusion in the analysis of all this data is that file-sharing traffic isn't as dominant as it used to be. In 2007, it accounted for 40% of all Internet traffic, according to Arbor. Fast-forward two years, and it's down to 18%. However, that just means it's just not growing as fast as P2P and web-based video streaming, which have been largely responsible for the huge overall growth of net traffic.
In other words: a smaller piece of a much larger pie can still be a whole lot of pie.
I asked Arbor Networks Chief Scientist Craig Labovitz about this, and his answer confirmed that the picture looks very different when it comes to absolute numbers. "We found overall average Internet traffic growing globally at 35-45% annually," he told me. "So the decline in file-sharing 'market share' just means that its growth rate is not keeping pace with the overall rate of Internet traffic growth." Labovitz also said that Arbor doesn't feel as comfortable publishing absolute numbers of file-sharing traffic because of issues like encryption.
So what does all of this mean? File-sharing traffic volume is less dominant than two years ago because of the explosion of web video, which includes P2PTV and P2P streaming, but it's hard to figure out how that relates to media consumption habits. Some users may give up on BitTorrent because of Hulu. Others may still download TV shows, but watch disproportionally more web-exclusive and user-generated content (UGC) on YouTube. Either way, file sharing is still very much alive.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 I hope to see you Thursday at our first-ever P2P & GAMES CONFERENCE starting at 9:30 AM in the Catalina Room at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. This special DCIA event is being held in conjunction with Digital Hollywood Fall.
The P2P & GAMES CONFERENCE will focus on business models, delivery services, and case studies that demonstrate the benefits of P2P and cloud computing for the distribution of games and game updates to networked devices ranging from PCs to consoles to mobile-phones.
We are pleased to offer a very exciting agenda of keynotes and panel sessions featuring industry leaders at the forefront of this fascinating new category. There will also be a continental breakfast and conference luncheon.
Keynote speakers include Jim Kott, Co-President, Abacast; Scott Tilghman, Principal, Hudson Square Research; Rick Buonincontri, CEO, Solid State Networks; Joe Porus & Milt Ellis, Vice Presidents, Harris Interactive; Chris Hennebery, Director of Software Distribution, Yummy Interactive; Norman Henderson, Vice President of Business Development, Asankya; Simon Morris, Vice President of Marketing and Product, BitTorrent; Nicholas Longano, CEO & Founder, Music Mogul; and Robert Levitan, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Pando Networks
The Consumer Protection panel will focus on P2P gamer issues and examine the key user concerns that must be addressed to ensure long-term customer satisfaction. What are the principal issues that consumers need to understand regarding P2P and cloud computing? What unique concerns apply to the delivery of games and game updates via these technologies? How should this information be presented to users? Which items require explicit consent? Who should be responsible for managing these customer notification and safety matters?
Panelists include Hal Bringman, Founder & President, NVPR; Russell Frackman, Partner, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp; Robert Hunter, Digital Rights Consultant, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA); Steve Masur, Managing Partner, MasurLaw; Seth Shapiro, Principal, New Amsterdam Media; and Chris Ullrich, Writer / Producer, The Flickcast.
The Content Protection panel will explore games publisher issues, and analyze the key intellectual property concerns that must be addressed to achieve optimal commercial success. What are the principal issues that digital game developers and distributors need to understand regarding P2P and cloud computing? What unique concerns apply to the delivery of games and game updates via these technologies? What business models can optimally exploit the unique characteristics of this distribution channel? How can digital rights management (DRM) solutions be applied?
Panelists include Jim Burger, Member, Dow Lohnes; Max Davis, Director, DataRevenue.Org; Mark Isherwood, Senior Consultant, Rightscom; Lawrence Low, VP of Product Management and Strategy, BayTSP; Michael Perricone, Principal, Omstream; and Rich Roberts, VP of Sales & Business Development, PlayFirst.
Laura Tunberg, of DCIA Member Services and We Get It Consulting, will moderate both of these P2P & GAMES panels.
Our DHF Next Generation P2P panel will address solutions development and zero in on how the distribution channel is progressing. The P2P industry is making strides in taking its technologies into the mainstream. With both download and live-streaming solutions and many evolving business models on the way - from paid-download with various DRM solutions to subscription and advertiser-based options - what are the essential strengths and weaknesses of P2P?
Panelists include Jonathan Anderson, CEO & Founder, Selfbank Mobile, Steve Masur, Managing Partner, MasurLaw; Matt Neco, Former General Counsel, Morpheus, Michael Papish, CEO & Co-Founder, MediaUnbound; and Dimitri Villard, CEO, ARTISTdirect.
To extend the reach of the P2P & GAMES CONFERENCE to those unable to travel to Los Angeles, the DCIA is partnering with Abacast to produce a live interactive webcast of the event. In addition to being available in real-time, the webcast will also be recorded and viewable on-demand after the conference.
The P2P & GAMES CONFERENCE is being held in conjunction with Digital Hollywood Fall, and registration for both events yields a substantial savings for attendees. For more information, please visit www.dcia.info/activities/p2pgc2009. To register, please e-mail P2PGC@dcia.info or call Sari at 410-476-7964 for instructions. Share wisely, and take care.
P2P Tech Companies Say Restrictive Bill is Unnecessary
Excerpted from Home Media Magazine Report by Chris Tribbey
Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), a trade group representing 150 companies involved in the utilization of P2P technologies for commercial purposes, said a Congressional bill that could interfere with file sharing is "unnecessary" and that "government regulation isn't the answer to unauthorized file sharing or identity theft."
The bill, "The Informed P2P User Act" (HR 1319), would make it illegal for file-sharing programs to access any files without first notifying the computer's owner and obtaining his or her consent.
"From the DCIA's perspective, even one instance of identity theft as a result of file sharing is one too many," he said. "But to put the underlying issue in perspective, ID theft costs US businesses and consumers over $50 billion in an estimated 15 million cases per year." He said the Department of Justice has prosecuted only two cases associated with file sharing.
He said that DCIA Member companies "turned their software inside out to address inadvertent sharing once this potential threat was identified."
"Inadvertently clicking on 'reply all' in an e-mail application actually poses a far greater risk than inadvertently converting a file to a torrent for sharing by means of a BitTorrent-based software program, for example," he said.
Lafferty said that the bill may set a precedent that "begins the descent down a slippery slope toward undesirable Internet regulation," and may just be an indirect way for the entertainment industries to attack neutral software, such as LimeWire and BitTorrent, that can be used to share unlicensed movies and music.
The intent of the bill is to protect the content on your computer, contends one of the bill's creators, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA).
"Too many people aren't aware of the risks associated with using popular file-sharing programs," Mack said of the bill. "When users log-in to these programs, they could be inadvertently sharing all of their personal information with everyone else on the network, including tax returns, financial records, personal messages, and family photos."
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a markup in late September and is currently putting together its report on the bill.
File-Sharing Site Coalition to Help Indie Filmmakers
Excerpted from TorrentFreak Report
Several of the largest BitTorrent tracking sites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay (TPB), and isoHunt have joined a coalition of file-sharing partners in an ambitious project to help filmmakers get their work out to the public. Founded by the director of "Steal This Film," the VODO project debuts its first title today.
BitTorrent and file sharing in general are often looked down upon, or even hated by Hollywood execs. On the other hand, most independent musicians and filmmakers see these new technologies as the ideal tools to publish their work at no cost, and reach an audience much larger than they could ever reach offline.
In an attempt to connect filmmakers with the distribution power of the file-sharing community, "Steal This Film" director Jamie King has launched VODO. The project includes partners well known to the file-sharing community like Mininova, TPB, isoHunt, Miro, Vuze, and Frostwire, which have pledged to promote the works of VODO films.
This week, VODO announced its first release titled Us Now, a documentary that looks at how user participation could transform the way countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose self-organizing structures promise to change the fabric of government forever. Needless to say, this is an ideal debut film with obvious connections to the file-sharing community. "Us Now" is currently featured by Mininova, and the other partners are expected to follow shortly.
With a strong backing from the BitTorrent community, including former BitTorrent COO Ashwin Navin and former TPB spokesman Peter Sunde, VODO hopes to establish itself as a top brand for high-quality film downloads that are of interest to file sharers. The filmmakers will reach an audience of millions of users, and have the ability to generate revenue through donations, which can be quite lucrative.
"Followers of release groups like aXXo will be familiar with the model. But VODO is a release group with a twist. Not only are artists voluntarily sharing, but also downloaders can choose to make voluntary donations to creators. VODO lets creators manage their own donation links, with all donations going directly to the filmmakers," The VODO team told TorrentFreak.
In the coming months VODO aims to release at least one film per month, including the premiere of "In Guantanamo," a documentary by first-time director David Miller that provides unprecedented access to the Guantanamo prison camp. "During 2010, VODO will build out a series of revenue opportunities for its creators, with the free-to-share model at their core," King explained.
VODO is an exciting and ambitious new project that harnesses the power of the file-sharing community to support independent artists, while bringing high-quality entertainment to the masses. It is file sharing at its best, it's what file sharing is meant for.
Oversi Introduces Portfolio Enhancements as Part of Net Evolution
Oversi, the global leader in high-performance Internet video and P2P caching solutions, this week announced enhancements to its OverCache multi-service platform (MSP) with support for popular file-hosting, delivery, and sharing sites. OverCache delivers faster user downloads, while strengthening the sites' business models with quality of experience (QoE) guarantees for premium packages.
David Tolub, Oversi's President and CEO, said, "Oversi's product development goes hand-in-hand with market demand. Support for popular sites using file-hosting technology is part of our network evolution strategy. From the start, we've offered unique support for encrypted and obfuscated P2P protocols, enabling easy adaption to changing P2P networks. We've also ensured that our platform supports all the main video sites, including local language portals. We remain committed to providing the most comprehensive video caching solution on the market to our customers."
OverCache MSP offers a "one-stop-shop" caching and video acceleration solution for online media content delivery, which is optimized for large networks. OverCache MSP enables service providers to offer subscribers a superior Internet video experience while generating large bandwidth savings.
Oversi's solution is based on a highly robust, distributed grid computing platform. The out-of-band platform integrates easily with an operator's existing network topology, with no risk to network reliability. The platform is fully scalable, supporting an unlimited amount of data and subscribers, and has proven to deliver the best network performance on the market.
Opera's Unite Touts In-Browser P2P at Launch
Excerpted from Computer World Report by Gregg Keizer
Opera Software this week released the beta of Opera Unite, a platform for authoring P2P and web server-based applications that it promises will reinvent the web.
In June, Opera touted Unite as a collaborative technology that would "enable every single computer to be a two-way street on the Internet." Four months ago, Opera delivered an alpha version of Unite with a preliminary edition of Opera 10, its next-generation browser. Opera 10 launched in final form more than a month ago.
This week, Opera delivered the Unite beta embedded in the preview of Opera 10.10.
"We invite developers all over the world to use their creativity and imagination to push the boundaries of what is possible with Opera Unite," Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, said Wednesday. "We are moving closer to our goal of reinventing the web."
Opera's pitching Unite to developers, who it hopes will come up with new applications and web-based services for sharing, collaboration, and social networking. The beta of Unite includes a half-dozen Opera-made services that include file sharing, a media player, photo sharing, a Facebook-style "wall" dubbed "Fridge" where users can leave notes, and a web server.
That last turns any Unite-equipped computer into a server, letting users host an already-created website via a special URL that Opera assigns.
Although Opera 10 is needed to run Unite and its P2P and server-style services, any browser can access the shared content.
According to the most recent data from web metrics company Net Applications, Opera accounted for 2.2% of all browsers used last month. Google's Chrome, which has been available for over a year, held a 3.2% share in September.
Opera has also received attention lately for initiating a complaint against Microsoft that led European Union (EU) anti-trust regulators to charge the firm with illegally bundling its Internet Explorer with Windows.
That case appeared to near a resolution last week when the EU said it had asked for and obtained changes to Microsoft's proposed "ballot screen," which will let European users of Windows choose which browser they install on their PCs.
Opera Unite is available with Opera 10.10, which can be downloaded for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the Opera site.
PlayFirst Premiers Cinematic Adventure Game
Excerpted from GameZone Report
PlayFirst is very proud to announce "Avenue Flo," the first-ever adventure game starring Flo, the iconic star from the best-selling "Diner Dash" series. Unlike the award-winning series, known for its time management-based entertainment, "Avenue Flo" takes a different, complementary approach that introduces fans of Flo to an entirely new style of adventure gameplay with a newly immersive and interactive story.
In "Avenue Flo," players are fully immersed into the streets of Flo's neighborhood, DinerTown, interacting with its residents, and helping Flo save the biggest wedding of the year. Sporting her signature red sneakers and blue apron, Flo answers a frantic call for help from Quinn, her roommate and DinerTown's premier Wedding Planner, as Miss Big's big wedding teeters on the brink of disaster.
As Flo chats with familiar DinerTown faces like Jo the jogger of the Fitness Center and Cassie at the Pet Shop, players will solve puzzles, uncover lost objects and assist friends all over town. From beading a wedding dress to hunting down wedding cake ingredients, Flo will dive into a series of cross-city searches and activities to help her community - and her roommate - save the big day.
"Avenue Flo" is available today for PC and Mac digital download, priced at $19.99. "Avenue Flo" is developed and published by PlayFirst.
Wi-Fi Spec Offers P2P Connections
Excerpted from Information Week Report by Marin Perez
The Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new specification Wednesday that will enable smart-phones, laptops, and other electronics to connect to each other without the use of a traditional Wi-Fi hotspot.
The Wi-Fi Direct specification will enable devices to create P2P connections that have similar data transfer speeds and range as typical Wi-Fi. The alliance said the new standard will be faster than existing ad-hoc modes, and it could be used to enable laptops to quickly connect to a printer, as well as for consumer-oriented purposes like P2P game machine connections. Wi-Fi Direct devices will also be able to connect with existing Wi-Fi certified devices for one-to-one connections, or several devices can connect simultaneously.
The alliance, anticipating that devices with the new specification could find their way into corporations, has built in some security features such as WPA2, as well as management options to ensure Wi-Fi Direct devices don't become insecure bridges between the corporate infrastructure and other networks. The alliance expects to begin certifying Wi-Fi Direct devices in 2010.
"Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn't available," said Edgar Figueroa, Executive Director of the Wi-Fi Alliance. "The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise."
The new specification has the potential to displace other P2P connection standards, but other wireless transfer protocols have been boosting their features. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has shown off the Bluetooth 3.0 standard, which offers faster transfer speeds than previous versions. Near-field communication is also gaining steam as a viable way to implement mobile payment systems, and Sony's TransferJet protocol offers wireless transfer speeds of up to 560 Mbps between devices.
Kontiki Addresses Growing Demand for Corporate P2PTV
Kontiki and DutchView this week announced a partnership that will bring corporate video delivery solutions together through the premier producer of online press and analysts' meetings, shareholders' meetings, and company product presentations in the Benelux region.
The companies will deliver a corporate video communications solution to help leadership at global enterprises connect employees to the vision of the company.
The offering provides an end-to-end solution for the production of live and on-demand video content, content discovery, and content delivery, and allows companies to quickly realize the value of video communications for their employees, without over-burdening their corporate networks.
Patrick Wildschut, Product Manager Online at DutchView, says DutchView is capitalizing on recent technology innovations to meet the growing demand in the Benelux region and the increased focus on live broadcasting of audio and video through Intranets.
"Many companies are now making use of webcasts and video production to strengthen their internal communications policies. The partnership with Kontiki means we will be able to help customers achieve their goals with the best solution on the market today," Wildschut concluded.
Kontiki's enterprise video delivery solution securely reaches every employee in a company with a desktop computer and in any location around the globe through its patented peer-assisted video delivery technology. Kontiki significantly increases the capacity of existing infrastructure to deliver high-quality live, on-demand, download, or push video, company-wide, without additional hardware expenses or dedicated IT staff.
Kevin Crayton, Vice President of Business Development, Kontiki says, "It is not financing. Not Strategy. Not Technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. Getting all employees to row in the same direction allows domination of any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time."
The solution is now available for Benelux organizations. Please click here for more information.
SunGard Launches Private Cloud Service in UK
Excerpted from Securities Industry Report by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld
A business unit of SunGard Data Systems in Europe has rolled out a series of private cloud services that promote pay-as-you-go economics.
The cloud solutions of SunGard Availability Services are promising its customers "the flexibility to subscribe to the compute power and storage" that they need, purchased from a network of data centers that SunGard operates in the UK.
Customers, in effect, will share the infrastructure and its costs. The customers will not have to buy any hardware, but will get 24/7 service, including regular updates to software and data-protection services.
SunGard's combination of network, security, load-balancing, computing power, and managed storage of data will compete with baskets of services from such players as Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud, Google, and Microsoft.
But SunGard may also be competing against its own customers' moves to create their own private clouds.
"I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers. But those investments will also make them better cloud computing customers in the future,'' contends Gartner Analyst Thomas Bittman.
Advances in virtualization and distributed computing in effect have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers who can meet the needs of their customers within the corporation.
In effect, a company's own network of data centers can be managed as a private cloud.
Spotify P2P Streaming Service: A Trillion Transactions
Excerpted from PaidContent Report
You can't say Daniel Ek doesn't think big. "We can increase the number of transactions that happen on the Internet to trillions," the CEO of the most talked-about digital media start-up said in a London keynote on Wednesday.
Ek communicated his desire to "package" music with mobile tariffs, ISP bundles, cable plans, and with devices including TVs - a broad long-term vision that's often overlooked amid the current Spotify hype.
"The key for us is getting music into people's existing billing habits," he told Screen Digest's Future of Online Media Distribution seminar.
"If we can transcend it so that, maybe you don't actually have to pay for the music, it's included in your data plan with your carrier or ISP or cable operator; it might be when you buy a new product, a TV screen, that you get one year of music included ... devices like new Samsung TV screens, where they've got Linux built in, which allows you to do software on it - they've got YouTube built in, they might have Spotify built in."
Spotify has inked one such deal - announced last week with Sweden's Telia broadband, mobile and TV operator - and another looks likely with phone carrier 3 by virtue of parent owner Li Ka-Ching's investment in the music service. Spotify's business development staff will need to strike more such partnerships to give it the kind of industry-changing breadth Ek envisages.
The US roll-out targeted for Q3 or Q4 is now scheduled for Q4 or Q1 2010, however, Ek later told PaidContent.
"If we can go to trillions, just think about the easy math," he told the crowd. "What about one percent of those converting into paid subscription, or purchasing a paid download, or deciding to buy a concert ticket? That's how we grow the music industry to a $40 or $50 billion industry, by getting it to work on people's favorite devices.
"We want to create a platform where the Spotify brand stands for ease-of-use and people actually build their library using Spotify and feel that this is an experience - and, through their carrier, can access that experience.
"That's the key for Spotify to make this model work. It's not about ad-supported music, it's not about subscription music, it's not about downloads - it's about all of those models in one."
"Already today, we are proving we are at the higher end of the freemium conversion rate. We think we can actually accelerate that even further. Ultimately, we have a much better position that most other freemium services - the content that we offer is so much better."
"Looking at other freemium services like Skype , the differentiation is merely whether you make a paid phone call (Skype-Out) - you could argue that the experience you get talking to someone on a computer (Skype-to-Skype) is better. With Spotify, the portability aspect really separates the two services. You'll see stuff on the social end as well that will lend itself to more paid users."
Spotify's current stats include: users are averaging 72 minutes a day listening to music - that's massive consumption; Spotify today has six million users; it's adding 30,000 to 50,000 new users each day; on the day it opened to users without invites, the service added 180,000; the iPhone app has been "an enormous success," growing premium subs "by a big number."
Ek said Nokia and Samsung are the world's largest MP3 device makers - "yet no-one actually uses them to play music on. The key now," Ek said, "is offering even better reasons for people to become subscribers."
"The truth is, if we only have ad-supported users, the model won't be sustainable - if we only had paid users, the model won't be sustainable either - if you look at the history of paid services, none of them really caught on. The key here is the balance of both."
Kazaa, Skype, Joost Founders to Compete with Spotify
Excerpted from PaidContent Report
They turned the entertainment world upside-down with Kazaa, revolutionized voice communications with Skype, and eventually gave up on their web TV ambitions through Joost.
Now serial entrepreneurs and investors Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark are trying again to disrupt the music business. They are launching a new subscription music service dubbed Rdio, funded by Atomico Ventures.
Their "secretive start-up," which has offices in LA and San Francisco, "is hoping to introduce a music subscription service by early next year that offers seamless access to music from both PCs and cell-phones." Rdio is seeking label deals and even has a CEO, Drew Larner, who notes the disdain with which the labels regarded the once-renegade P2P app Kazaa in yesteryear. "The ironies are very interesting."
No word on whether Rdio will re-deploy the same kind of P2P network that has made Zennstrom and Friis famous. The pair first developed the Global Index distribution system for Kazaa, then used a variant to underpin Skype's communication backbone. Then they thought they could make online video delivery more efficient using Global Index, so started Joost under the codename "The Venice Project."
But Global Index is currently the center of an acrimonious and complex legal dispute involving Zennstrom, Friis, and Skype, now owned by eBay, which licenses the distribution mechanism, which is key to Skype's functioning, from the pair's Joltid holding company. They accuse former Joost CEO Mike Volpi of pilfering the system's intellectual property (IP) when he left Joost for Index Ventures, the VC house that is now becoming a part-owner of Skype in eBay's sell-off.
Even if Rdio relies on Global Index, the legal mess won't necessarily hold up the start-up's development. In fact, given that 90% of digital music consumption is unauthorized, Rdio may do well to embrace P2P even further, offering the service as paid access to a Kazaa-like distributed file repository, in the same way the company behind the failed Pirate Bay buyout attempt had optimistically hoped.
Either way, with momentum among music labels clearly swinging behind the monthly subscription model, Rdio will find the space already populated by Pandora (which doesn't offer on-demand), Napster, and, most significantly, Sweden's well-thought-of Spotify, which is planning a US launch and itself uses a form of P2P distribution.
GigaTribe Version 3 Available Now
GigaTribe Version 3 file sharing for social networking is now available. Just download the free version of V.3 by clicking the download button at www.gigatribe.com, or if you would like to try out the ultimate version with more features, like faster downloads and Internet access, please e-mail info@dcia.info and request a coupon code (normally priced at $29.95/year).
GigaTribe is a free software community that lets users share entire file folders of photos, videos, music, and other files with their "tribes" of friends, family, and coworkers quickly in a private, secure network.
GigaTribe V. 3's new features include: sharing the same folder with different groups with different access rights; making content visible, but not downloadable; posting the available contact list in a left window; filtering to find users easily (for people with hundreds of contacts); taking shortcuts for the most common actions (share, invite, etc.); offering new fields on the profile page; displaying news from the latest GigaTribe blogs; branding with an online community's logo and colors; displaying the community news page each time GigaTribe is launched; listing community members who are also using the customized version of GigaTribe; offering an add-contact button that provides search features restricted to community members only; and offering discounts for large communities.
Click here to join the GigaTribe Facebook Fan Page.
14-24 Year Olds Own 8,100 Unlicensed Music Tracks Each
Excerpted from Ethio Planet News Report
UK Music is an umbrella organization representing the interests of various elements of the UK music industry, from artists through to record labels, publishers, producers, and collecting societies and counts the BPI among its members.
A new study carried out by the University of Hertfordshire for UK Music reveals some interesting statistics - and some surprising ones.
Of those questioned in the 14-to-24 year-old bracket, on average they have amassed music collections on their computers which exceed 8,100 tracks, an amount that most people could never afford. Little wonder that 68% of respondents said that they use their computers every day to listen to music.
From the 1,808 people surveyed, 61% confirmed that they download music using file-sharing software including BitTorrent with 83% of these doing so on a weekly or daily basis. A significant 86% said that they had copied CDs for their friends.
While many also confirmed uploading by means of file-sharing software, other methods of sharing were also utilized - 75% admitted to sending music by e-mail, instant messaging (IM) services, or Bluetooth.
Of those who affirmed file sharing to obtain music, 85% said they would welcome an "all you can eat" download service for a fixed monthly fee, but just 57% said that access to such a service would stop them from sharing files without authorization.
In recent months, P2P streaming services such as Spotify have been touted as a possible weapon to combat unlicensed sharing. However, of those surveyed for this report, 78% said they had no interest in paying for such a service, while 89% said they would prefer to own music, rather than stream it.
More than half of those surveyed said that companies that manufacture digital music players and mobile phones should pay fees to artists to compensate them from losses due to copies made on their devices.
Interdiction Can't Stop BitTorrent, Study Finds
Excerpted from TorrentFreak Report
For years, RIAA and MPAA members have hired companies to attack popular BitTorrent swarms in an attempt to interfere with their downloads. According to a recently published paper by New York University researchers, these attacks are highly ineffective. At best, they slow downloads for a few minutes, something most users don't even notice.
Record labels and movie studios are willing to pay serious cash to protect their content from being shared on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. They have paid millions of dollars to anti-piracy outfits such as MediaDefender, which in return promises to do all it can to distribute fake and polluted downloads.
According to a recently published paper by Prithula Dhungel, Di Wub, and Keith Ross, these effort are a waste of time and money. In their paper titled Measurement and Mitigation of BitTorrent Leecher Attacks, the researchers show that BitTorrent swarms are hardly influenced by attacks from anti-piracy outfits.
The research looked into the effectiveness of two popular attack methods used by companies such as MediaDefender. The first is a "piece attack" where the hostile leecher attempts to slow down downloads by creating as many hash fails as possible. The second method is the "connection attack" where the hostile leechers try to tie up as many TCP connections as possible in order to make it impossible for downloaders to connect to real peers.
The different methods were tested in a real-life BitTorrent swarm of a popular music album that was targeted by these attacks. "We present measurement results for a torrent for a new album, which was verified to be under attack," the researchers report, adding "This popular album was released a few weeks before our experiments. At the time of the experiment, it held the number 1 position on the UK album chart and iTunes ranking list."
The researchers then downloaded the 'attacked' torrent several times with both Vuze and uTorrent. For each download, they recorded the time it took to complete, both with and without using blocklist software that bans some of the attackers' IP-addresses.
The results were quite remarkable. The researchers found that, on average, downloads with a blocklist were 30 to 35% faster. In other words, the efforts of the anti-piracy outfits do slow down the targeted swarms, but only for a few minutes at most, and not long enough to deter anyone from downloading.
A more detailed look at the peer distribution of the two BitTorrent clients further reveals that without the IP-filters, uTorrent encounters only 2% of malicious peers, who all use the "piece attack" method. Vuze on the other hand encountered no "piece attack" peers at all, but 18% "connection attack" peers.
Not surprisingly, the researchers conclude from their research that the methods used to attack BitTorrent swarms are highly ineffective. "The anti-file-sharing companies are not currently successful at stopping the distribution of targeted assets over BitTorrent. We have also found that blacklist-based IP filtering is insufficient to filter out all the attackers," the researchers write.
What the researchers have overlooked is that both Vuze and uTorrent have implemented various technological measures against these automated attacks. The results may differ for other BitTorrent clients. Vuze has put a lot of work in preventing "piece attacks" and uTorrent has implemented similar anti-pollution measures.
The overall conclusion put forward in the article is most likely the right one, and to most people not even that surprising. The millions of dollars spent by the entertainment industry to protect their works from being shared on BitTorrent are at best only a mild annoyance.
Anti-File-Sharing Propaganda Resorts to Misrepresenting Malware
Excerpted from TechDirt Report
The thing that you sort of need to admire about the copyright maximalist lobby is that they attack the problem from so many different directions on such a constant basis. It's almost impossible to keep up - though, you do begin to notice some patterns. A particularly popular move is to alternate between the moral argument against copyright infringement (stealing bad!) and the idea that file sharing is going to destroy your computer (we're just looking out for your safety!). It looks like the industry is back on that latter kick, as two recent stories indicate.
First, the BSA has its widely debunked infringement numbers - but it's now getting news for focusing instead on how you're going to get malware if you file share. Since it can't actually back up its bogus numbers, instead it's hoping that most people don't know that correlation doesn't mean a causal relationship - but at least we know that most of our readers know better. The report notes that there's a correlation between higher infringement rates and higher malware infections, but seems to totally ignore exceptions to that rule (the US) or delve into other variables that may explain either the infringement rate (already questionable) or the malware rate (education levels? poverty? shared computers? etc.).
Even more amusing, they claim (with no actual evidence) that those who get malware have to spend more to repair their computers than it would have cost to get the legitimate software in the first place. I have no doubt that there are risks for those who file share, but this report does nothing to show the actual risks and is yet another in a long line of weak propaganda from the BSA, that despite being called on it for years, never seems to do anything to back up its reports with facts.
Then, we have the story of the MPAA apparently sending a bunch of anti-piracy comic books to New Zealand, home of one of many different fights on how to change copyright law. The comic book, like the BSA report, involves plenty of ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about how file sharing will unleash nasty malware and viruses all over your computers - but drawn in nice comic book form. Can we send those kids who got the MPAA comic book a copy of the Tales from the Public Domain comic books as well? There are free digital downloads for anyone who wants to hand them out in exchange for the bogus ones.
Coming Events of Interest
P2P & GAMES CONFERENCE - October 22nd in Santa Monica, CA. The DCIA's first-ever event focusing on the use of P2P and cloud computing technologies for the distribution of games and updates. Industry leaders from around the world will participate.
Digital Hollywood Fall - October 19th-22nd in Santa Monica, CA. With many new sessions and feature events, DHF has become the premiere digital entertainment conference and exposition. DCIA Member companies will exhibit and speak on a number of panels.
Cloud Computing Expo - November 2nd-4th in Santa Clara, CA. Fourth international conference on this subject. Cloud computing is a game changer. The cloud is disrupting traditional software and hardware business models by disrupting how IT service gets delivered.
P2P MEDIA SUMMIT at CES - January 6th in Las Vegas, NV. The DCIA's seminal industry event, featuring keynotes from top P2P and cloud computing software companies; tracks on policy, technology, and marketing; panel discussions covering content distribution and solutions development.
2010 International CES - January 6th-10th in Las Vegas, NV. The industry's largest educational forum to help companies expand their businesses and understand new technology. Over 200 conferences and more than 300 expert speakers encompass International CES.
|
