After winning LA Startup Weekend, Zaarly almost immediately raised $1 million from a long list of notable investors (even “Steve jOBS”), and then raised $14 million more before the end of the year in a round led by Kleiner, while adding Meg Whitman to its board.
Fast forward to today and you’ll no longer find Zaarly’s marketplace on the Web. And, with the next update to its mobile app… → Read More
In case you thought Skype may be slowing down while settling into being a part of Microsoft and recently celebrating its ninth birthday, here are some numbers that seem to indicate otherwise: Last week, Skype reached a new peak of 45,469,977 concurrent users online, part of a strong run for the peer-to-peer voice/video/chat service this year. Overall it has seen an increase of 70% so far in… → Read More
Online and mobile digital cash network Dwolla is partnering with mobile banking and payments service provider mFoundry, the companies are announcing today at the BAI conference in Washington, D.C. This is Dwolla’s first publicly announced partnership with a financial service provider, and the deal opens its service up to mFoundry’s 800+ banks and credit unions using its cloud banking platform… → Read More
Parking Panda, the startup that lets individuals rent out their unused parking spaces and allows garages to discount their lots during slow periods, is now available as a mobile application. The app currently supports a parking finder function in 25 cities, plus parking rentals in the service’s early markets of Baltimore and Washington D.C., as well as new additions San Francisco and Oakland. → Read More
The neverending patent wars keep on raging, and Spotify is the latest to get targeted in the social media skirmishes. The music streaming company is getting sued by Nonend Inventions, a Dutch company, which claims Spotify is infringing on five of its U.S. patents covering streaming media, peer-to-peer search, and retrieval and playback techniques. Nonend says altogether it holds more than 40… → Read More
Another hefty payout for the now-defunct file-sharing P2P service LimeWire, and, perhaps more importantly, another nail in the coffin for P2p services: Merlin, a rights agency representing independent labels, says that it has reached an out-of-court settlement with LimeWire over copyright infringement — a settlement its characterizing as its first big win against a P2P company.
Merlin — which… → Read More
Peer-to-peer lending sites are hot again among investors of all stripes. Lending Club today announced a new $25 million Series D financing, led by Union Square Ventures (with existing investors participating). The funding comes on the heels of a $17 million round Eric Schmidt and DFJ put into competitor Prosper in June.
In July, Lending Club generated $20.6 million in new loans, compared to… → Read More
Many years ago, after graduating college, I came home before moving to NYC, wondering how I would scrounge together the money for the first month’s rent and security deposit so my friends and I could all live together in the Big Apple. I had one month to get the cash, and instead of going out for traditional, hourly-wage work, I decided to go through all of my old stuff and throw it on eBay. In… → Read More
You may have heard that the Dutch Government now plans to outlaw music and movie (and whatever else) downloading. That seems pretty prosaic: since when was it legal to infringe on someone’s copyright? Isn’t that the whole point of copyright? No matter, for in the lead up to the Dutch announcement’s announcement a survey was taken. “What about the survey?” you may ask. Well, said survey reveals… → Read More
Pirates may have had a hard time finding illegal streams of UFC on Saturday night, and that’s because UFC has decided to strike at the heart of the beat: Google. Zuffa, the parent company of UFC, sent Google a notice of copyright infringement (under the DMCA) the other day, asking Google to remove links to sites hosting illegal UFC streams. That way, once 10pm rolls around, it’s not as easy as… → Read More
LimeWire, we hardly knew ye. A New York court has ordered the company to turn off the software’s ability to search, upload, and download, which pretty much means that it’s dead. I guess this would have affected me greatly, I don’t know, in the year 2001, but now? Not so much. → Read More
The Digital Economy Act passed in the UK, as you know, and it’s pretty terrible. One of the more spicy sections of the law involved peer-to-peer use, and how it basically makes ISPs responsible for what their customers download. So if HBO finds that you’ve been download “The Pacific,” (really good show, by the way, much to my surprise) it can contact your ISP, who’s then responsible for… → Read More
[Spain] This week has been an exciting one here in Spain, to say the least. The rights of citizens online have been discussed all week in the press. Much as in other European countries, there has been a lot of discussion regarding illegal downloads, intellectual property rights and file sharing on P2P platforms. Our Spanish government, pressured by major music labels, prominent personalities in… → Read More
Apologies for the headline, but it was too appropriate to resist. It seems that there is a feature of uTorrent 2.0 now in beta that automatically detects network congestion and self-limits bandwidth to lessen it. This might provide some much-needed relief to ISPs that feel a disproportionate amount of traffic is P2P. I’m not sure whether to call this self-policing action capitulation or… → Read More
So it looks like the hot, new trend is to buy the name of old peer-to-peer applications, then “resurrect” said application. Such is the case with Kazaa, which was the biggest P2P application in the post-Napster extravaganza of the early 2000s. Anyhow, someone out there plans to bring Kazaa back—legally, of course. → Read More
It’s been about a month since I subscribed to Optimum Online Ultra, the fastest Internet service in the country—sorry, Peter. Consider this a predictable, rubbish explanation of how my Internet habits—nay, my life!—have changed as a result of having a 101 megabits-down/15 megabits-up connection. → Read More
The English Premier League (or Barclays Premier League, as it’s officially named) really hates violation of its intellectual property. That is to say, a lawyer gets its wings every time you watch a Premier League game online, either on one of those live streaming sites like Justin.tv or Ustream, or using one of those P2P applications like TVAnts (which I got running on my MacBook the other day… → Read More
French pirates may want to think twice about downloading that episode Entourage off the Pirate Bay. A new law just passed the Sénat that would cut file-sharers off the Internet. Those caught illegally sharing material, be it music, movies, software, or whatever else, will be warned, both by e-mail and regular mail. After two such warnings your connection is shut off. Under the law, a new… → Read More
How much does it cost to monitor college students’ anti-American P2P activities? A whole lot, and that’s money colleges could be spending on, I don’t know, education. This chart breaks down the cost of complying with, specifically, the new provisions of the Higher Education Act of 2008. That law, which the RIAA and MPAA were able to lobby their way into, requires colleges try to… → Read More
Most people who get threatened by the RIAA with a lawsuit opt to settle out of court. Maybe they should go to trial instead. Jammie Thomas of Minnesota did just that. She was found guilty of sharing 24 music files over the Kazaa network and ordered to pay $222,000 – that’s $9,250 per track. The decision came from a federal jury last year and marked the one and only trial win for the RIAA. → Read More
The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker (and one of the most hated), may be getting into streaming, a tipster told us.
The Pirate Bay, which has 3 million users and is closing in on 15 million peers, first mentioned the possibility of a streaming service back in May, but little was heard about it until a cryptic birthday wish to Brokep was posted on the service’s blog.
It’s now… → Read More
The Senate has passed the Higher Education Act (the House passed it earlier this year), which, among other things, provides for federal monies for student loans. What’s most interesting to us here is a provision in the bill, which it’s expected that President Bush will sign into law, that tells college campuses to rein in wanton P2P downloading. To that end, the MPAA will provide… → Read More
Hackers are now using ASF (Advanced System Format) to trick PC users into installing malicious software. If you’re not familiar with ASF, it’s a Microsoft-defined container format for media streams that contain additional content like links to websites and images. You don’t see it around quite as much these days (most sites use FLV or some such these days) but it’s still… → Read More
An employee at an investment firm exposed clients’ personal data while using LimeWire. One of the clients was Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Much of his personal data was stolen! Who still uses LimeWire? I mean really. It’s a big story, one that you’ll probably hear on your local news today—“How one Supreme Court justice’s personal data was stolen by using… → Read More
That New World Order-sounding anti-copyright infringement treaty that we mentioned a few days ago has been leaked. The proposal, at least. And yes, it looks just as frightening as the original reports made it out to be. How does this grab you? The consequences of such IPR [intellectual property infringement] include (1) depriving legitimate businesses and their workers of income; (2) discouraging… → Read More
So much controversy surrounding Comcast’s “proposed” Bill of Rights and Responsibilities regarding P2P use. The Slashdot reaction was typical: I pay for a service and they’d better damn well deliver said service. That’s hard to argue. Another idea I liked: Comcast is only proposing this Bill in order to prevent government regulation from taking effect. Maybe if it… → Read More
Many have wanted a “bill of rights” for Internet subscribers for awhile, and now the idea has the backing of an unusual group: Comcast. Comcast has been in the news for “traffic shaping“, or favoring certain types of traffic over others, notably putting BitTorrent and other P2P traffic on a second-tier behind what it considered “legitimate” traffic. It has since… → Read More
A rather self-serving ENDORSEMENT for your reading misery today. I don’t know what I was doing last week, but records indicate I didn’t ENDORSE anything! At all! I don’t know how you all survived, or why Drudge didn’t put the siren up announcing my oversight, but here we are. Right. So today I’m ENDORSING applications like TvAnts, TVU Player, PPMate and Sopcast. → Read More
Just when the recording industry is getting comfortable with the idea of digital downloads for music, piracy and all, along comes a new breed of online copyright infringement: that of digital books. Those fantastic eBook readers like the Kindle and that thing Sony wants us to like are a blessing for us bookworms, but it could be a headache for authors. As DRM is circumvented and copies of works… → Read More
Verizon’s getting set to share the results of a recent study it conducted showing that “when an ISP cooperates with a file-sharing software maker they can speed downloads an average of 60 percent.” Oh, and it saves Verizon a bunch of money, too. Verizon created the “P4P Working Group” with file-sharing company Pando Networks and developed a system which more or less… → Read More
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