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Content Tagged Pando
Comcast to Create P2P Bill of Rights
Comcast said today it plans to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” in cooperation with P2P companies and other ISPs. The bill is supposed to be a catalog of best-practice recommendations for P2P companies and ISPs alike, but the announcement was more than vague about what those recommendations might look like. NewTeeVee has the full story.
BitTorrent Is Now Streaming Movies (With Ads). But Where’s The Good Stuff?
For anyone who thinks that full-length movies on the Web are for downloading only should check out the Watch Now section on BitTorrent (you will need Flash Player 9 installed). Launched quietly on December 5 using its BitTorrent DNA streaming technology, Watch Now offers a few hundred full-length movies and TV shows that you can watch in full-screen that start a few seconds after clicking play. The quality varies based on the original video, but check out The Ring (original Japanese version) to see what is possible. It is not HD. But it is very watchable.
A clickable pop-up toast ad for Take TV appears at the beginning. The company is experimenting with the frequency of the ads. One pops up between every 5 and 10 minutes. The controls are limited. There is pause/play, restart, volume, and full-screen. No fast-forward or rewind. [Update: I stand corrected. There is a tiny, hard-to-find fast-forward/rewind button that pops up when you hover the mouse over the progress bar].
The technology works. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim. Other than The Ring, there is not much worth watching. They do have Fight Club, but it’s the Bollywood version. (BitTorrent’s such a tease). The TV shows are even more obscure. Wooden Clogs anyone? Deep South Wrestling? I didn’t think so. You are better off sticking to BitTorrent downloads for now.
The Watch Now section is really meant to be a showcase for BitTorrent’s DNA technology. “This is a demonstration for us at this point,” says BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin. He is convinced that ad-supported peer-to-peer streaming is the how video will be delivered in the near future across the Web. ABC or Warner Brothers, for instance, could use it to stream long-form videos from their own sites. (NBC is planning on using P2P software from competitor Pando Networks to stream its video). Navin predicts:
The browser-based video environment is going to get a whole lot better. It makes a closed-off client experience a lot less appealing to the consumer. All of our customers are embracing the browser to deliver videos.
Hmm, a closed-off client experience. Who could that be? Maybe it is time for Joost to finally embrace the browser as well.
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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Forget the SanDisk Deal, NBC Direct Will Soon Have Free Downloads in HD
While NBC Universal is making deals left and right to try to make up for the fact that it is no longer distributing its digital TV shows through iTunes, don’t get distracted by all the small-fry announcements. For instance, today it announced that it would make NBC shows available to SanDisk for its new Sansa TakeTV/Fanfare service. Is anyone going to buy a USB TV device from SanDisk? We’ll see.
In the meantime, NBC has something brewing that could actually make a difference to the digital-download appeal on its own site, NBC Direct. NBC will soon start using peer-to-peer technology from Pando to distribute its downloads, a story StreamingMedia broke a couple weeks ago. Yesterday at the Web Video Summit in New York City, where I was moderating a panel, I was able to confirm that a stripped-down version of Pando’s technology will be incorporated into the NBC Direct video player. I also learned something new. The reason NBC wants to go with P2P technology is because it wants to start distributing high-definition videos. Pando’s P2P system can help NBC not just to lower the cost of distributing large files, but also to differentiate itself with HD video downloads. No special Vudu box or SanDisk USB video device will be necessary.
NBC will be betting big on HD to drive viewership of Web video. It is already playing around with HD streams on Hulu, its joint venture with News Corp. And it is not going to be just NBC. HD video is going to come to the Web a lot faster than most people think. It may even come to many people’s computer screens before it comes to their TV screens. Just think about that for a second. If you can get a better viewing experience off the Web than you can on your TV, that might just be the incentive you need to really start shifting away from TV.
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A Look at Supernova 2007 Connected Innovators
At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with punditry by Kevin Werbach and Michael Arrington and supporting color from Josh Kopelman, Julia Hanna Farris and Paul Kedrosky. Here’s a look at the 13 companies:
 adap.tv |
 AdaptiveBlue |
 Aggregate Knowledge |
 CastTV |
 Critical Metrics |
 Jangl |
 Pando Networks |
 SodaHead |
 Spock |
 Wize |
 ZapMeals |
 ZenZui |
 Zing |
Adap.tv - They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about.
AdaptiveBlue - Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here.
Aggregate Knowledge - One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation.
CastTV - A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ.
Critical Metrics - A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody.
Jangl - They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission to connect to you directly. You can ban a number at any time as well. They just recently launched a service that lets you generate a Jangl number for any email address and leave a voicemail for that user and number for a callback. Calls are served over a VOIP bridge, so it also makes long distance calls cheaper.
Pando Networks - Desktop peer to peer file sharing service Pando speeds up file transfers by torrenting files and buffering them over their higher speed network of servers. At Supernova they’ve announced their Pando Publishing Platform that lets users easily publish to the web with the cost savings of peer to peer. The platform gives publishers the benefits of P2P video streaming amongst their users and CDN peering service. P2P streaming lets users view video incrementally instead of after a lengthy download. Their CDN peering service will let turn a regular CDN server into a supernode that will save on bandwidth by balancing load between users and the main servers. They’ve already lined up content partners NextNewNetworks, Blip.tv, and Rever.
SodaHead - A polling destination site that lets users poll their friends, SodaHead experts, or strangers. Polls are embeddable widgets that can be voted on at the destination site or any page featuring the code. Polls also feature comments so users can express opinions that don’t fit into any of the options.
Spock - A people search engine that automatically aggregates information linked to a person along with support for updating contacts.
Wize - Wize is a site that tracks expert and user product reviews across the Internet and churns them through an algorithm to create a single, 1-100 “WizeRank.” Earlier this year they got a $4 million round. We have a review of other review services here.
ZapMeals - Adding a little levity to the event, Zapmeals is a startup spoof (e.g. the fake) that aims to be a marketplace for meals, hooking up hungry stomachs with nearby home cooked meals or caterers. You choose your cook based on a member rating system and their fleet of couriers would deliver the meals to your home.
ZenZui - A new way of surfing the web on your mobile phone browser, Zenzui economizes on your phone’s screen space by displaying sites and services as icons on a grid display. You can scan the 36 slot grid using your numbered keypad and zoom in for more detail on a specific service. We covered their launch here.
Zing - Zing enables mobile music players to connect to music libraries over WiFi. They’re currently powering the SanDisk devices for Yahoo Music and Pandora.
You can see a Wink powered group for the event here.
The 12 real start-ups were hand-chosen from more than 130 applications. StumbleUpon, one of the 2006 Connected Innovators, has already enjoyed great success as a newly acquired eBay business. We have high hopes for more great success stories from this year’s crop of Connected Innovators.
Disclosure: While these companies were selected from 130+ applications, they were required to pay a fee to participate once selected. As a partner to the conference, TechCrunch received a percentage of that fee.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Swapper, for faster file transfers via caching
Personal peer-to-peer (p2p) and personal file sharing services are dime a dozen. Not a day passes when some new start-up shows up with a new offering, with a slightly different twist.
Wambo (previously known as Perenety), is throwing its hat in the ring, with Swapper, a new software-service that promises to address the biggest pain of file transfers: upload speeds.
Wambo was started by co-founders Arnaud Tellier (CTO), Guillaume Thonier (Chief Architect), and Xavier Casanova (CEO) and company’s first product, Shooter had launched almost a year ago in beta. It tried to do too much, and had a difficult interface.
The trio and their distributed work force (India, Estonia and California) went back to the drawing board and came up with a simpler and easy to use application called Swapper. For now it is a Windows only application. “Shooter was the early prototype and we used it get users and build a small P2P network of a few hundred nodes, for development and testing,” says Casanova.
While the application’s key features - swapping music, photo and videos with trusted friends - are on tap from any of the dozens of start-ups, what is different about Swapper is that it combines a P2P distributed file system with upload caching, which gives application some speed oomph.
Classic caching (reverse proxies, CDNs) saves bandwidth only where downloads of popular content is concerned. This helps boost the download speeds. Swapper is the exact opposite - aka upload caching. Given that most broadband connections are asymmetrical (at least in the US), the upload speeds are the biggest issue with P2P apps.
Here’s how it works: when you are sending a friend a song (legal of course), Swapper checks with its servers to see if that file has already been uploaded by you or someone else. This check is anonymous an fast.
For instance, you upload a photo album and sent it to a cousin. A week later you send it to your cousin - the system checks for a special file signature, and sees if there is something matching that signature on the servers. If there is a match, your uncle gets the photos you already sent to your cousin with Swapper, since they are cached on the servers. No need to upload again.
“The entire process is anonymous and doesn’t ever expose any of your content,” says Casanova. “Most MP3s, personal photos, and mini-videos are less than 20-25MB. We compress, cache, and pre-fetch to make these fly. That’s our market. Not the large gigabyte sized files.”
Wambo hopes to make money two ways: by delivering promotional content delivered in Swapper (similar to email newsletters) for a fee and offering a pro-version of the service for small and medium sized businesses.
There are two big concerns I have about the product - first and foremost, the legal issues could cause major migraines for the company, even though Casanova points out that their EULA makes it pretty clear that illegal uses are prohibited. I am not sure the RIAA and MPAA gun-men who who shoot first, ask questions later, will appreciate the nuance of an EULA.
The overcrowded nature of the market should be a nagging worry for Casanova and his co-founders. Despite have a seemingly good technology, they would have to fight for mind share and grow subscribers. And that’s not easy.
Pando Developers | If you build it, they will share
..:: Gmail File Space Extension (GSPACE) ::.. a FON product
Pando Moves Beyond Email File Sharing
New York based Pando has been breaking away from the P2P file sharing pack, which we reviewed in late August. They claim over 1.5 million downloads of their client software, and move up to 20 TB of data per day between users.
Pando is very easy to use. Once the PC or Mac software is installed, you simply drag a file or a folder (up to 1 GB) into the open window. Pando begins uploading that file to its servers immediately, and opens an email form. Simply type in the email address(es) that you would like to receive the file and hit send. When the recipient opens the email and clicks on the small .pando attachment, Pando begins delivering the file, using Bittorent, from the sender’s computer as well as Pando’s servers and any other people receiving the file. Transfer speeds are unreal - my testing shows minimum speeds of 500 kp/s and top speeds at double that. If the recipient has not installed Pando on their computer, they’ll be prompted to do so before the download begins.
Pando is completely free, and also has useful Outlook and Yahoo IM plugins
Today at 9 AM California time Pando is breaking out of the email paradigm and releasing a free new product that allows people to share files directly from a website. This can be done via an embed or link, and I’ve embedded a message from Pando CEO Robert Levitan below as an example. The same file can be accessed via a simple link as well.
For podcasters and videocasters who don’t have the bandwidth availability to serve files, this is going to be extremely useful. Publishers won’t even need to upload the file to their own server. They can simply drag the file into the Pando desktop software and get a link to add to a website. For others, simply adding a Pando link as an additional option to direct download will be attractive as well. We may add Pando links to our TalkCrunch podcasts as well as offering the file as an enclosure to the post. Listeners can simply choose which option they like, although if they choose Pando the download will be significantly faster and we won’t have to pay the bandwidth charges for their download.
Pando’s new product is so efficient that it will also invite abuse, particularly from users sharing copyrighted materials. Pando says it will passively monitor downloads and comply with any DMCA takedown notices they receive from rightsholders.
Pando has some existing competition in this space, notably silicon valley based RedSwoosh, which we wrote about in July. Both RedSwoosh and Pando have attractive offerings. Pando’s large installed base may give it an advantage in staking out its territory.
Pando has raised a total of $11 million over two rounds of financing. The most recent $7 million round was led by Intel Capital.
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Let’s Share Some Files - Four Services Compared
File sharing has long been a popular use of the Internet. I remember sitting at my laptop and asking a friend to name a song, and then seeing if I could download it off of Napster and play it before he could find the cd on the shelf, put it into the player and play the song himself. I often won those competitions.
The old Napster is long gone, but was of course replaced with many other P2P networks. Today, a significant portion of Internet traffic is comprised of files being moved over bittorent, a popular and completely decentralized way of sharing files.
Bittorent, though, requires some basic technical knowledge and is neither anonymous nor safe. The RIAA and MPAA routinely monitor these networks and attempt to collect IP addresses of computers they believe are involved in the transfer of copyrighted files. And bittorent is notorious for transferring files that (sometimes) contain viruses, spyware and other malware.
Enter private file sharing networks. WASTE was released in 2003 and allowed people to create private networks among trusted friends. Files could be shared without worrying about malware or prying eyes. All that was needed was trust among the members of a particular network. The downside of WASTE was that setting up and participating in a network was not trivial to do. Private networks did not take off and achieve mass use and adoption.
A new crop of services has popped up recently to make it much easier to share files with a private network of friends and other trusted people. Allpeers, Zapr, Pando and Exaroom are all fairly recent entrants.
AllPeers
We’ve followed Prague/UK based AllPeers from the very beginning, and are very familiar with this product.
Allpeers, which is apparently launching imminently (but is not live as of the time of this post), is a Firefox plugin that uses bittorent technology to complete file transfers. You add friends to your AllPeers network and then send and receive files from them. The interface is intuitive, and there are no restrictions on file sizes or amounts transferred. AllPeers is incredibly easy to use, allows transfers of files and/or folders, and works on any machine that you can run Firefox. We also stressed tested the product by transferring very large files and shutting down Firefox and then the computer itself during tranfer. AllPeers picked up where it left off as soon as Firefox was reopened, which is great.
Like the others, AllPeers is free. But, unlike Pando and Zapr, AllPeers completes file transfers without the need to confirm via email first. However, all sides of the transfer must have AllPeers installed on Firefox.
Zapr
Sydney and Singapore based Zapr , which we profiled here, opened up for public beta testing earlier this week - you can sign up here.
Zapr is a downloadable application that looks and feels a lot like an instant messaging client. You can drag files into Zapr and send them to an email address or Zapr username. The recipient(s) receives an email with a link to the file. Clicking on the link initiates a download of the file through the browser. There are no limits on file size.
Zapr is not using bittorent on the backend and does not upload the file to its servers before transfer. The file is transferred directly from one computer to the other, and requires that the sender be online for the file to transfer properly. This also means that if a user shares a file with 100 people, that will trigger 100 distinct downloads from that user’s computer which will hog bandwidth and very likely crush individual transfers. For that reason, Zapr is not really a private sharing network, but really an easy way to initiate a one-to-one transfer. We also had problems restarting a transfer when it was stopped. Also, anyone who gets access to the link can download the file.
Zapr is built on the .NET platform and therefore is only available for use on Windows machines.
All in all, we like the Zapr user interface but its current limitations make it significantly less useful than AllPeers or Pando. Of note is the fact that, of the four services, Zapr is the only one that doesn’t require recipients to have the Zapr software installed on their computer.
Pando
Pando, based in New York, recently reached 1 million downloads of its software. Pando is a desktop application that runs on Windows or Mac machines. Users drag files into the application and tell it the email address of who to send it to. Multiple recipients are fine, and Pando can transfer folders or files.
Pando has an intelligent, bittorent based back end. When you send a file, the first thing Pando does is upload it to its servers. Recipients receive the file directly from the sender as well as the Pando servers, and if there are multiple recipients then the bittorent efficiency effect really kicks in as all recipients also become senders.
Recipients receive an email and initiate a transfer by opening a small attachment (you must have Pando to download the file).
Pando is an efficient and user friendly service. We’d like to see it initiate transfers without the need to click on an email attachment, and the addition of buddy lists would be a good way to ease the annoyance of re-typing the email address of someone you often share with.
Exaroom
San Francisco based exaroom, which launched in late July 2006, is a Windows only service that requires a download. Once installed, a user can share files within their My Documents folder with other exaroom users. New shared files are viewable through the application interface, and downloads are completed via the browser download manager.
Exaroom is a good way to make your My Documents folder permanently sharable with certain friends, but the lack of features compared to the other services make it a less useful product.
Summary
All four of these services are useful tools for sharing large files with a trusted network.
Each is useful for different goals. However, a popular service that we excluded from this review, yousendit (profiled here), also solves the basic need to transfer a large file to another person or group of people. If you are looking to create a long term sharing network, Allpeers is the way to go. It has platform flexibilty (works on Windows, Linux and Mac), allows creation of buddy lists that allow easy multiple transfers over time, and does not require the use of email to confirm file downloads.
Thanks to Nick Gonzalez for research assistance on this post.
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