Most people in the US can't cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.
In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you're way better off helping the perfect improve. You'll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.
Kraft Foods is opening shop on Second Life today.
The company is using the popular virtual-world Web site to showcase 70 new products as part of its sales pitch to retailers at the annual industry convention, the Food Marketing Institute show, which runs May 6 though 8.
Kraft hosts the grand opening today of a new Second Life store, “Phil’s Supermarket,” named for TV’s “Supermarket Guru” Phil Lempert, food editor for the “Today” show. The store will be a permanent feature on Second Life, which has 6 million registered users and counting.
Kraft, which has paid an undisclosed amount of money to sponsor the virtual supermarket, is the only food manufacturer whose brands will appear in the store. In fact, it is the only packaged goods company tied to the store: Lempert’s other partners are IBM and the National Grocers Association.
Part of Kraft’s deal includes links from Second Life to its own Web site for nutrition education and to other sites, such as Second Harvest, as well as online forums for Second Life “residents” to chat with Kraft Kitchen experts.
“This non-traditional effort illustrates how we’re changing the way we market our products to build brand equity and remain relevant to our key consumers,” said Kraft spokesperson Lisa Gibbons.
The supermarket opens with simultaneous online and real-world ribbon cuttings with Kraft North America president Rick Searer at the FMI Show in Chicago. During the ceremony, Kraft will donate $450,000 (in real money) to Second Harvest. It’s the first time a corporate donation is being staged in Second Life, according to Kraft.
Product launches are a top priority for Kraft under the growth plan that CEO Irene Rosenfeld outlined in Febuary. Kraft’s strategy now is to compete in broader categories—for example, pitting DiGiorno pizza against local pizzerias, not just other frozen pizzas. Its launches this week cover four main sectors: health and wellness, premium taste, quick meals and snacking.
"We are looking at our products through a new lens—the eyes of the consumer," Searer said in a statement. "By reframing our categories and focusing on four growing segments … our 2007 product innovations fit the dynamic lifestyles of our consumers."
Thirty of its new items are headed to U.S. supermarkets later this year, under brands including DiGiorno, Jell-O, Oscar Mayer, Philadelphia, Planters and South Beach Diet. Kraft also is launching cheeses with probiotics and prebiotics, the digestive-aid ingredients that have become the newest buzzwords in nutrition. A new sub-brand, called LiveActive, piggybacks flagship Kraft brand cheese for Kraft LiveActive cheese sticks and cheese cubes (with probiotics) as well as the Breakstone's and Knudsen brands for LiveActive cottage cheese (with prebiotic fiber). Other new products include:
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Just last month we witnessed a gigantic skyscraper / solar tower hybrid that generates a whopping 390-kilowatts of energy, but even that looks like child's play compared to the 40-story solar power plant that resides in Spain. The expansive system consists of a towering concrete building, a field of 600 (and growing) sun-tracking mirrors that are each 120-square meters in size, and a receiver that converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam that eventually drives the turbines. Currently, only one field of mirrors is up and running, but even that produces enough power to energize 6,000 homes, and the creators are hoping to see the entire population of Seville (600,000 folks) taken care of solely from sunlight. So if you're eager to see what's likely the greenest solar power plant currently operating, be sure to slip on some shades, tag the read link, and peep the video.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6616651.stm#graphic| By David Shukman
Science correspondent, BBC News, Seville |
There is a scene in one of the Austin Powers films where Dr Evil unleashes a giant "tractor beam" of energy at Earth in order to extract a massive payment. 
A field of 600 mirrors reflects rays from the Sun 
Well, the memory of it kept me chuckling as I toured the extraordinary scene of the new solar thermal power plant outside Seville in southern Spain.
From a distance, as we rounded a bend and first caught sight of it, I couldn't believe the strange structure ahead of me was actually real.
A concrete tower - 40 storeys high - stood bathed in intense white light, a totally bizarre image in the depths of the Andalusian countryside.
The tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas. I had trouble working it out.
In fact, as we found out when we got closer, the rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air.
The effect is to give the whole place a glow - even an aura - and if you're concerned about climate change that may well be deserved.
But ultimately, the entire plant should generate as much power as is used by the 600,000 people of Seville.
It works by focusing the reflected rays on one location, turning water into steam and then blasting it into turbines to generate power.
As I climbed out of the car, I could hardly open my eyes - the scene was far too bright. Gradually, though, shielded by sunglasses, I made out the rows of mirrors (each 120 sq m in size) and the focus of their reflected beams - a collection of water pipes at the top of the tower.
It was probably the heat that did it, but I found myself making the long journey up to the very top - to the heart of the solar inferno.
A lift took me most of the way but cameraman Duncan Stone and I had to climb the last four storeys by ladder. We could soon feel the heat, despite thick insulation around the boiler. 
David had to wear sunglasses to shield his eyes from the glare
It was like being in a sauna and for the last stages the metal rungs of the ladders were scalding.
But our reward was the cool breeze at the top of the tower - and the staggering sight of a blaze of light heading our way from down below.
So far, only one field of mirrors is working. But to one side I could see the bulldozers at work clearing a second, larger field - thousands more mirrors will be installed.
Letting off steam
I met one of the gurus of solar thermal power, Michael Geyer, an international director of the energy giant Abengoa, which owns the plant. He is ready with answers to all the tricky questions.
What happens when the Sun goes down? Enough heat can be stored in the form of steam to allow generation after dark - only for an hour now but maybe longer in future.
Anyway, the solar power is most needed in the heat of summer when air conditioners are working flat out.
Is it true that this power is three times more expensive than power from conventional sources? Yes, but prices will fall, as they have with wind power, as the technologies develop.
Also, a more realistic comparison is with the cost of generating power from coal or gas only at times of peak demand - then this solar system seems more attractive.
The vision is of the sun-blessed lands of the Mediterranean - even the Sahara desert - being carpeted with systems like this with the power cabled to the drizzlier lands of northern Europe. A dazzling idea in a dazzling location.
HOW THE SOLAR TOWER WORKS 
1. The solar tower is 115m (377ft) tall and surrounded by 600 steel reflectors (heliostats). They track the sun and direct its rays to a heat exchanger (receiver) at the top of the tower 2. The receiver converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam 3. Steam is stored in tanks and used to drive turbines that will produce enough electricity for up to 6,000 homes
Two more are coming this week. Tonight Silicon Valley-based Tumri is announcing a new product called Tumri Publisher, and Seattle’s Mpire will announce an advertising widget later this week.
Tumri Publisher, which is described here, allows users to create highly customizable widgets that promote specific products on their websites, in exchange for an affiliate or other fee. Tumri has twenty or so direct relationships with ecommerce sites like Overstock, Walmart, Shop.com and others to promote their products. Most advertising pay on a purchase, although at least one partner pays a on each click to their website.
Tumri splits revenue from the advertising 50/50 with advertising, and they say they’ll pay up to 70% of proceeds to larger publishers.
The widgets are javascript powered; the company says Flash versions are coming soon.
Tumri was founded in 2004 and has raised $6.5 million in a Series A round of financing from Shasta Ventures and Accel. They are currently closing a second round. They have 31 employees (16 in India, 15 in Silicon Valley).
from KillerStartups.com - published startups by rachsig
Copyscape is a site that aims to get rid of a big problem: the ease with which work can be plagiarized on the internet. You can register your content with the site and put their banner on your article, proclaiming to all that your work is protected by Copyscape. Then you enter the url address of your article on the Copyscape site to see if anyone has written something that is similar enough to have been copied. The site uses a Google API to search for similar word content, so that you can see if anyone has cited your work or even copied you.
The service is free, and Copyscape also offers a Premium service which has more accurate and advanced search options as well as unlimited searches. To use the Premium service, you pay by search. Each Premium search costs $0.05. Search credits are purchased in advance and can be bought as and when they are required.
In their own words:
"Copyscape is dedicated to defending your rights online, helping you fight against online plagiarism and content theft. Copyscape finds sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you.
* The free Copyscape service makes it easy to find copies of your content on the Web. Simply type in the address of your original web page, and Copyscape does the rest.
* The powerful Premium service provides professional grade coverage, plus an unlimited number of searches. You may also copy and paste to search for copies of your offline content. Copyscape Premium includes integrated case tracking to manage your responses to multiple instances of online plagiarism.
* The advanced Copysentry service provides ongoing protection for your entire website. Copysentry automatically scans the web every day and alerts you to copies of your content. It also includes integrated case tracking.
• The Global Web Rights campaign provides the tools and information you need to defend yourself against content theft and copyright violations on the web."
Why it might be a killer:
The site is a logical companion to anyone who blogs or posts content on Wikipedia and so on. Even if your content isn't actually copyrighted, it is still good to be able to know when others are using it.
Some questions:
Five whopping cents for a search is not going to add much to the site's revenue (which comes from ads), and it may turn off users who don't want to bother with the time or the small cost
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6616651.stmThe tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas. I had trouble working it out. In fact, as we found out when we got closer, the rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air. The effect is to give the whole place a glow - even an aura - and if you're concerned about climate change that may well be deserved.
I keep a directory of about 30 of my favorite paintings and anytime I need to do color correction, I just scan through them to find the one that gives the photo I'm working on the best look. This technique can be used in other ways. For example, use the color from a scanned-in 1970's Kodachrome snapshot to give a recent photo a vintage look. Need to make a picture more menacing? Use the color from a picture of a storm.Link (Via Lifehacker)
Involve your customer: Spreadshirt and Threadless work because they allow customers to create, design and customize their own T-shirts, instead of buying off-the-shelf stuff.
Your customer is your ultimate salesperson: Moo grew by tapping into and riding on the backs of special interest groups and social networks. Every time a customer hands out a card, Moo gets free marketing.
Serve your customer: If you want to play at cost arbitrage, as CastingWords does, make sure your service is high on convenience as well as low on price. This has been the case for centuries, why should the new millennium be any different.
Richard Moross, a twenty-something Londoner, was bored with the business cards most people were exchanging. He decided to do something about it. He started Moo Prints, a 10-person start-up that takes images from popular websites, like Flickr and Bebo, and prints them on cards that are exactly half the height (28mm x 70mm) of a regular business card.
Size alone makes Moo cards memorable. Moross cleverly dubbed them “mini-cards,” leveraging a marketing trend that’s already been über-successful in selling autos and iPods. Better still, Moo minis are highly personalized. For instance, Moross will take photos from your Flickr account and print it on your cards.
Getting your Moo cards is simple—sign up for the service, fill out your contact details, add your Flickr ID, and 10 days later 100 cards show up. All in, a set of Moo minis sets you back just $5.
Thanks to their size, Moo minis are cheaper to print than typical calling cards. The company prints its cards on an industrial strength laser printer made by Hewlett-Packard. But Moross juices his profits in other ways as well. Because Moo works with existing communities (and social networks) such as Skype, Habbo Hotel, Bebo, Second Life and Flickr, the company has built a sizeable following without spending a dime on marketing.
Which brings me to my point: Moo is among the first wave of young businesses finally putting the so called Web 2.0 technologies to work to make good on the promise that this much-ballyhooed generation of start-ups has been vapidly pledging for far too long: that Web2.0 would reinvent the boring, the old fashioned and the antiquated.
Don’t get me wrong. No stretch of imagination could conjure Moo into a technology business. No, no. Moo is a technology-enabled business. Forget patent-protected code (thank you, Justices of The Supreme Court!) or over-designed hardware. Moo is the epitome of a business that has truly harnessed Web2.0.
Several others companies fit the bill, too. Among them: Germany-based t-shirt maker Spreadshirt; Chicago-based Skinny Corp; and San Francisco-based 8020 Publishing, publishers of the JPG magazine. And CastingWords, which offers a transcription service based entirely on the web. In each case, the basic work product of these companies is no different from that of their traditional predecessors. (A T-shirt is a T-shirt. A business card is still a business card.) These young businesses are not inventing new things that distinguish them. It is the way they are using technology to execute and interface with their customers that makes them special.
I tape an interview with you and upload an MP3 file of our conversation to the CastingWords website. CastingWords puts the job of transcribing our chat to an open auction among its pool of pre-approved transcribers—people who might be dispersed over the world. The low bid wins, and a few days later I receive our transcript in the mail, for a fraction of what it once cost me to have the same chore done by a local service in San Francisco.
Companies like CastingWords are riding the crest of a wave of change that is only going to gather more momentum – and fast. Now any businesses can be reinvented with Web2.0 technologies.
You might be wondering, haven’t we heard this story before? Like ten years ago, when the commercial Internet hit its stride, when many brick-and-mortar businesses set up dot-com shops. But this didn’t trickle down to the little guys, to the small businesses that constitute the bell of the curve of the U.S. economy. This is one of the reasons why most new start-ups from the 1990s, like Amazon, had to spend hundreds of millions to compete with the older, established and large players.
Small and specialized entrepreneurs, such as the printer who specializes in business cards, or the graphic artists who open a T-shirt company, could never have possessed enough scale to make Web-enabling them attractive, or to attract the kind of investment or professional money that might have been necessary to do so. Size mattered.
But no more. Now that Web 2.0 is growing up, scale no longer matters. Even tiny businesses—like transcription services—can go global.
Today the same productivity gains enjoyed by large corporations in the ’90s are available to anyone for a few hundred bucks a year. A couple of hundred for a CRM suite, Google Apps for $50 a year, financial software for less than $10 a month – the cost of running an online business is a few thousand dollars.
The refined service of product customization popularized by Dell Computer no longer has to cost you millions. Today, a few hundred dollars buys you a slick and highly interactive site that is backed up with open source software and cheap hosting. Drive your labor costs with oDesk, which makes it easy to find talented programmers on the cheap.
Web APIs offered by the Google, eBay, or Amazon make once mundane and expensive business processes cheap. Store your customer data on Amazon’s S3 storage service; buy computer [processing] power on demand via Amazon EC2. Don’t want to manage your own inventory (why would you!?), shipping companies like FedEx and UPS or even Amazon, will do it for you.
In other words, today you can work like you are as big as a Fortune 500 company, without incurring 1/500th of the costs. It’s like looking in the rear view mirror: objects may seem bigger than they really are!
But before you decide to chuck your boring day job to start a new Web2.0 business, remember that in this generation—even more than in past business eras—everything about your business, and I mean everything from operations to marketing, must revolve around the customer.
Here are my Three Rules for the new technology enabled company:
Involve your customer: Spreadshirt and Threadless work because they allow customers to create, design and customize their own T-shirts, instead of buying off-the-shelf stuff.
Your customer is your ultimate salesperson: Moo grew by tapping into and riding on the backs of special interest groups and social networks. Every time a customer hands out a card, Moo gets free marketing.
Serve your customer: If you want to play at cost arbitrage, as CastingWords does, make sure your service is high on convenience as well as low on price. This has been the case for centuries, why should the new millennium be any different.
So what are you waiting around for… time to start something new! Or old, for that matter.
The service will be shut down in favor of the newer and more social Flickr, which they acquired in March of 2005. There has long been an issue at Yahoo where newer services have competed with older services, and Yahoo has finally taken some strong action to getting their house in order with a consistent set of product offerings. Garlinghouse has been one of the stronger proponents of this strategy.
Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr - instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Most of these services have built special tools to transition users, Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want happy users.”
Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.
The first graph below shows only U.S. traffic for Flickr and Yahoo. The table below that shows March Comscore numbers for the worldwide audience.
| Site | Unique Visitors(M) |
| Yahoo! Photos | 31.1 |
| Flickr | 28.5 |
| Photobucket | 28.1 |
| Facebook Photos | 23.5 |
Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will “soon” allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.
I was reading this interesting book - How Innovators Connect - coauthored by Techtribe founder Rohit Agarwal and journalist Patricia Brown, where they have interviews and success stories of Silicon Valley veterans like investor Ram Shriram of Google, Ashish Gupta of Junglee, Subrah Iyer of WebEx and many more entrepreneurs.
Here's an excerpt from the same book, using the current example of Flickr, that suggests "timing" can play a crucial role in the success of a company. Makes perfect sense.
Time to market, Be a trend spotter
In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr, a Vancouver, British Columbia based company that lets users upload digital pictures from computers and cameras, and arrange their photos into albums and include them in blogs and other postings. Timing was critical in this acquisition for a number of reasons, says Bradley Horowitz, VP of product strategy at Yahoo, and the primary coordinator of the acquisition.
Yahoo already had the world's most successful online photo site in 2005. But there are something Yahoo saw in a small company of just a dozen people: Their ability to build a community - or ecosystem - around the concept of photography was scalable. Flickr recognized the new keywords - social networking, interaction, and ubiquitous broadband. The Flickr founders simply connected the dots in a timely fashion.
Yahoo's Horowitz says there were four specific factors that drew him to Flickr:
1. User Generated Content - This was not new to Yahoo. Yahoo had been soliciting user generated content through Geocities for years - but it had not generated the mass appeal that was driving the Flickr buzz.
2. User Annotated Content - Although Yahoo had billions of photos up in its section called Yahoo Photos, most of them didn't have "metadata" built around them. In essence, Yahoo created a huge digital shoebox with billions of people's photos, while Flickr offered users the ability to organized their photos in a sophisticated and intuitive manner using tagging technologies. Flickr made it much easier for common people to add metadata to the photos. As a result, roughly 85 percent of the photos in Flickr were tagged or annotated with some human entered metadata.
3. Community Distribution - Following the open-source model, Flickr encourage its members to share photos among its community. Yahoo and other companies at the time went to extraordinary lengths to preclude people from using the photos that lived on its servers outside the context of the Yahoo! environment. The Flickr model turned Yahoo's business model on its head. Instead of positioning Yahoo as the destination site for these images, Flickr allowed Yahoo to pay for the storage and bandwidth, while encourage third-party sites - mainly bloggers - to use that content. Tens of thousands of bloggers began to use Flickr as their imaging backbone, Horowitz says. This drove up awareness and dependency on the Yahoo site after the Flickr acquisition.
4. Platform Distribution - Flickr delivered a great end-user service. But it also delivered the services and facilities that allowed the community of developers to continue enhancing their own services. In effect, they had developers that were not on the payroll building enhancements - like the Flickr Macintosh coupler - at no cost to Yahoo!.
Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield developed an ecosystem that was possible only because of specific trends occurring in the market at the time of their innovative thinking process. Flickr's innovators created an environment in which millions of people contributed and distributed photos while a combination of Flickr's internal team and external collaborators created new offerings.
"That's the leverage you get when take a risk and trust that people are creative, and trust in the idea that many people can do more than just a few," Horowitz says.
What is notably missing from the announcement is the inclusion of pre-rolls, or similar in-video advertising inclusions for the new YouTube partners, who include LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary.
We’ve covered rumors about the introduction of in-video advertising previously, in January Steve Poland noted the BBC reporting that the advertising on YouTube may take the form of 3 second pre-rolls, but some 4 months later, still nothing.That’s where we could leave it, if it weren’t for the fact that not only is YouTube not showing a great ROI for Google financially, but the new Partners Program only goes as far as monetizing the actual YouTube page destination with Adsense units. Whilst not without merit, the new program is limited given the way YouTube content is consumed. The great strength of YouTube from its earliest days has been the use of embedded video on external sites: a large number, if not a majority of viewers will never see the advertising, viewing it only on blogs and forums which if they are running Google Adsense units, do so in a way that does not benefit the content creator.
Red Herring reported in April that YouTube was looking to introduce pre-rolls over Summer, but limited to only premium publisher content. Whilst the premium content is a strong driver of traffic to YouTube, YouTube’s sole focus on it for the introduction of in-video advertising would ignore the long tail of user generated and submitted content that was the real driving force for the site in the days prior to Google and its formal content distribution agreements, and as many would argue still is.
The question naturally is why? Why not roll out the option of in-video/ pre-roll advertising to all YouTube content creators? Whilst advertising may not be welcome by every one, Google knows the advertising market and it can credit much of its financial success to date to its inclusive embrace of content creators: Google Adsense today maintains its clear lead due to the broad expanse of publishers worldwide that have not only embraced the program, but were actually able to participate in it, Yahoo’s YPN remains an invite/ United States publishers only service, and Microsoft AdCenter is…well…there, but doing nothing in terms of embracing the long tail.
If technology is to blame, in that Google still hasn’t sorted out the tech behind the delivery of in-video advertising, you’d then ask why the delay, is this Google’s Panama? Google Video did exist prior to the YouTube acquisition so it’s not like they’ve only had since September to start work on the technology, and given that smaller startups including sites such as Revver can do it…well I guess there’s always the off chance of yet another video oriented acquisition.
from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection by Well, image search is one of the hardest types of search (audio and video aren't so easy either). With text search, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have their proprietary algorithms where they look for text on a page, see who links to a page, etc. etc. words are in contrast to images much easier to figure out. If Mike Arrington is mentioned 40 times in a post by a highly ranked internet site, then the article probably has some authority to be placed in the results for an article about Mike Arrington.
But photos of Mike Arrington are a different matter. It is very difficult for image search engines to get at what's inside a photo and how good a quality photo it is.
Accordingly, image search engines that rely solely on algorithms without any human filtering fall flat compared to results that are filtered through social networks.
from GigaOM by Wagner James Au David Cole of DFC Intelligence, a game industry expert for years, has been a guiding source for me for years, and he just revealed some astonishing numbers about the MMOG market: “I can let you be the first person we tell that we forecast the worldwide MMOG market going from $2.2 billion in 2006 to $5.9 billion in 2012,” he e-mails me. These figures are part of an upcoming DFC report, and they are bullish in the extreme. For proportion’s sake, bear in mind that the entire computer/videogame industry is currently a $7.4 billion business. “In terms of overall growth,” Cole continues, “the market in both North America and Europe is expected to triple.” Furthermore, over $2.3 billion of that revenue is expected to come from advertising and digital distribution of virtual items/characters etc, not subscriptions.” This would be quite a reversal, for most Western MMOs still rely on a monthly subscription model. The DFC forecast, it’s worth noting, is pinned to online games, with some ambiguity on how to count revenue from the numerous virtual worlds on the market or about to be launched; many are social hangouts or user-created collaborative spaces, and not games in the strict sense of having pre-defined goals, levels of success, and so on. “Does MySpace count?” Cole asks rhetorically. “Every free site that has an avatar?” (Many online worlds are free to the user, and depend on external advertising deals for revenue.) DFC’s solution for virtual worlds, he goes on, was to only count user-to-company payments. “If you can get them to pay a subscription fee or get them to buy items in a virtual world… for those consumers that starts to become a game.” With those services, he says, “[W]e would count the subscription and virtual item revenue, but not any ad revenue they generate.”
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.
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.
A tour of the tower 
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