Reverberations

Gmail provides more than 2GB space, and pseudo hard drive utilities like GMail Drive and Roam Drive have already been developed in the past. Someone has come up with a way to use Gmail account to share files. Its called G2G Exchange.

The site was down yesterday due to bandwidth issues. Its up again as of now with more than 900 users registered and a new version(0.7). The G2G FAQ page is also up.

Google will have something to say about this because of the potential for piracy. But its an interesting idea nevertheless.

I’ve just installed Firefox 1.5. I managed to update most of the extensions from my previous setup (1.0.7). One ‘Alert Link Type‘ and ‘Wiki-Quick-Find‘ are still missing. Tab rearrangement is inbuilt now, something good to have. I got this ‘Colorful Tabs‘ extension and it looks great.

There is a Firefox 1.5 review at NewsForge that mentions faster browsing with new Firefox. I’m yet to be convinced.

Earlier, Firefox window sometimes used to just disappear and re-appear in taskbar, I hope it’s fixed now, as well as some memory usage issues on WinXP.

How does P2P file-sharing affect music sales? I found this interesting paper on relationship of economics of P2P file-sharing by David Blackburn,a Harvard PhD Student, mentioned at “The Long Tail” (and posted it on Slashdot faithfully). I also found this compilation of studies on P2P.

The findings are not surprising as the paper essentially states the obvious. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading.

“Artists who are unknown, and thus most helped by file sharing, are those artists who sell relatively few albums, whereas artists who are harmed by file sharing and thus gain from its removal, the popular ones, are the artists whose sales are relatively high.”

But then some of the conclusions are shocking, e.g.

“File sharing is reducing the probability that any act is able to sell millions of records, and if the success of the mega-star artists is what drives the investment in new acts, it might reduce the incentive to invest in new talent. This is, at its heart, an empirical question which is left to future work.”

Is finding new talent outcome of investments by big labels. Hardly!

With so much ‘noise to signal’ ratio in music industry, big names give headstarts for sure, but they hardly have incentives to find new talents in an economy of abundance. Big companies were relevant at the time when technology wasn’t cheap and cost of producing and marketing music prohibitive- not anymore the case.

P2P notwithstanding, independent music is going to proliferate on its merit. Music needn’t big names to sound good.

From an Engadget post, a Dutch company LamaBox is launching a media player with built-in peer-2-peer functionality. It plugs directly into TV, provides search and download support for all the major P2P services like Bittorrent and Kazaa, has a DVD burner and plays any image/audio/video format.

Will it be bait for more litigations? Probably not. Engadet writes – “The Dutch supreme court ruled long ago in favor of the then Netherlands-based Kazaa and only classifies the upload of copyrighted material as illegal. As the LamaBox FAQ responds to the question of the legality of downloading films and music, “downloading from the Internet is always legal.â€?

So no “affirmative steps to foster infringement.â€? as in US ruling aginst Grokster. Bait for debate it’ll be.

Ray Ozzie, the Microsoft CTO, has proposed Simple Sharing Extensions(SSE)- a new specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.

From the FAQ page on SSE at MSDN

SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing–that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

Essentially, an RSS (and OPML) extension to allow two-way communications over RSS*.

The draft specs for SSE are released under a Creative Commons license – Attribution-ShareAlike. By the way, Creative Commons has made a note of SSE and its CC-license release, saying something to the effect of it’s too good to be true.

For me, SSE is a potential blockbuster. Too early to comment though.

*Is that Really Simple Sharing in OzzieSpeak or Really Simple Syndication?

I got two stories posted on slashdot in last two days. And all that while I was digging deep through Code Obfuscation. I feel great now.

The first story on Apple iTunes security flaw getting discovered and the other one on P2P after seven years from the release of Napster.

There were a few earlier. Update on Standards and CSS in IE7, the one about P2P getting declared a crime by EU, P2P trends and one related to Wikipedia editorial control found a place in slashback.

I believe that peer-to-peer is the future of content distribution over Web. In a progressive step, NBC Universal has agreed to make few movies available for on-demand downloading via peer-to-peer distribution early next year. The P2P technology partner is Wurld Media.

The business model built around P2P might be in a nascent stage as of now. But, with the proliferating bandwidths and aging traditional business models, it is poised to evolve.

From a news item at Reuters, the proposed revenue model goes like this-

Peer Impact users will be able to view the films for a 24-hour period once they hit the “play” button on their computers. The file will remain on a user’s computer for 30 days in an effort to hasten the download speeds of other Peer Impact users who purchase the same titles, because P2P gains speed and efficiency with each additional copy of content on the network.

Consumers log on to the secure network, where they can preview clips of all available content. Payment is due upon checkout…

Anything by Google is either criticized or praised, but never ignored. Nevertheless Google Base had to be the big thing, being speculated for some time now.

First experiences of Google Base Beta, just as inaccessible as many of Google’s recent beta launches have been. Ah, I guess, I derive some sort of sadistic pleasure out of these errors . Its not me alone by the way.

Only once it allowed me to login, and I was able to setup a ftp account. I’m rather disappointed being unable to upload anything though.

Krypton Toolkit Released

“Take your application to the next level with our free library of user interface controls. Designed to work with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 they allow you to create professional looking applications in a fraction of the usual time.

Combine the new MenuStrip and ToolStrip controls with the Krypton Toolkit to create professional Microsoft Office style applications.

Download the free library right now.”

Moreover, Component Factory are offering single developer licence of the latest DotNetMagic library for free for spreading the word.

VistaDB 2.1 database for .NET has been released

VistaDB is a small-footprint, embedded SQL database alternative to Jet/Access, MSDE and SQL Server Express 2005 that enables developers to build .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 applications.

VistaDB features SQL-92 support, 500KB embedded footprint, free 2-User VistaDB Server for remote TCP/IP data access, royalty free distribution for both embedded and server, Copy ‘n Go! deployment, managed ADO.NET Provider, data management and data migration tools.

This 2.1 update includes over 60 improvements, including new support for .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

I’ve used VistaDB in some of my applications earlier, and I must say it works like a charm with its incredibly small footprint, instant cold-connect and warm-connect. Here is a well-written review of VistaDB comparing it with MSDE and Jet/Access.