Disclaimer: this is a raw file of research I conducted for writing articles and white papers. Everything in here is the property of other people. These are just my cut and paste notes. No representation is made regarding the accuracy or veracity of this information. You can go to these Web sites and read this stuff for yourself; In fact, I encourage you to do so.
http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/breakthrough/2000/11/20/22119
This is leading to silliness of the predictable sort–businesses that have nothing in common with Napster, Gnutella, or Freenet are nevertheless reinventing themselves as "peer-to-peer" companies, applying the term like a fresh coat of paint over a tired business model. Meanwhile, newly vigilant interpreters of the revolution are now suggesting that Napster itself is not "truly peer-to-peer," because it relies on a centralized server to host its song list.
It seems obvious, but bears repeating: Definitions are only useful as tools for sharpening one's perception of reality. If Napster isn't peer-to-peer, then "peer-to-peer" is a bad description for what's happening. Napster is the killer app for this revolution, and defining it out of the club after the fact is like saying, "Sure it might work in practice, but it will never fly in theory."
PCs are the dark matter of the Internet. Like the barely detectable stuff that makes up most of the mass of the universe, PCs are connected to the Internet by the hundreds of millions. But they have little discernible effect on the whole, because they are largely unused as anything other than dumb clients (and expensive dumb clients, to boot). From the point of view of most of the Internet industry, a PC is nothing more than a life-support system for a browser and a place to store cookies.
PCs have been restricted to this expensive-but-dumb client mode for many historical reasons–slow CPUs, small disks, slow and intermittent connections, no permanent IP addresses, no DNS entries–but with the steady growth in hardware quality, connectivity, and user base, the PCs at the edges of the network now represent an astonishing and untapped pool of computing power.
At a conservative estimate, the world's Internet-connected PCs host an aggregate 10 billion MHz of processing power and 10,000 terabytes of storage. And this calculation assumes 100 million PCs among the Net's 300 million users, with an average chip speed of only 100MHz and an average hard drive of 100MB. These numbers continue to climb–today, sub-$2,000 PCs have an order of magnitude more processing power and two orders of magnitude more storage than this assumed average.
And since the important connection is often with the network rather than the local user, neither kind of business particularly needs the operating system.
SETI@home users have contributed 526086.52 years of computing power to the task of finding signal among the noise.
Sun is the biggest contributor, with 690 computing years.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2652477,00.html
Last week, as myCIO.com rolled out its peer-to-peer anti-virus updating software, called Rumor, its sibling com pany, McAfee Inc., sent out an anti-virus update file that crashed Windows PCs. Had that corrupted anti-virus file been sent to a Rumor network, the file could have proliferated exponentially faster. The lesson: Architects mapping out a peer-to-peer platform must make sure the security is rock solid. Otherwise, mistakes or hacks will spread faster and with more damage.
As it currently exists, peer-to-peer technology of any sort is "a big ... hole in your network," said Mike Prest, security administrator at Allstate Insurance Co., in Northbrook, Ill. "The more peer-to-peer you see, the more you're inviting hackers to attack this whole new area. It will take a lot to secure it. Any time you turn a client into a server, you're creating a potentially big problem." To help address those concerns, a peer-to-peer upstart, Datasynapse Inc., of New York, will launch its distributed computing software this week that has the kind of security enterprises will demand built-in.
Datasynapse's take on peer-to-peer isn't application or file sharing. Rather, its WebProc product shares processing power. The company's software taps idle clients' CPUs for complex computations, cutting down exponen tially the time it takes to do complex tasks. WebProc clients locate idle peers and instruct them to do some calculations. As soon as a user activates his or her computer, WebProc takes the work that computer was doing and moves to another idle client. Datasynapse is initially targeting financial services, which have large accounting and analysis transactions—and a high demand for security. Company CEO Peter Lee says the com pany will meet that demand through built-in encryption and authentication in WebProc. Datasynapse is also partnering with Zone Labs Inc., maker of the ZoneAlarm firewall, offering every WebProc client a personal firewall as well.
Another peer-to-peer venture that is struggling early with security is Groove Networks Inc. Developers at the Beverly, Mass., company are learning how to control access and document versioning without a central repository for managing keys and documents. Groove ran into a particularly thorny version of this problem during the development of its new platform, which lets users share documents and other data. To address security, Groove plans to roll out a "managed client" early next year that will enable some central administrative functions and the ability to set user policies from a central console.
http://www.mycio.com/content/about_mycio/presscenter/articles/11062000_p2p.asp
myCIO's enhanced VirusScan ASaP service offers a number of features made possible by a new common agent architecture that ships will all current and future myCIO offerings. A persistent software agent resides on each user's desktop system, ensuring that all systems have up-to-date protection. New features include:
Quarantine management: VirusScan ASaP's Quarantine File Viewer allows users to send infected files to the support team at McAfee AVERT (Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team), who then repair and return the file to the customer. Users have the flexibility to receive this document through the Quarantine File Viewer.
Internet Scan & Deliver: VirusScan ASaP offers the ability to submit infected files to AVERT via the Internet using HTTPS, removing the reliance of an email-based submission system and resulting in faster submissions, faster virus response time and increased security. On-Demand Scanner: Local to the individual PC, On-Demand Scanner is now local to the machine, eliminating dependence on Internet connection speed. After each local On-Demand Scan customers can now view the scanned results locally in HTML format. Resumable Downloads/Dial-up Support: VirusScan ASaP now also accommodates telecommuters and low-end Internet connection speeds by allowing for the installer download process to be resumable, and providing service for dial-up connections. If the Internet connection is interrupted during a download, the product automatically resumes the download at the point of interruption, rather than restarting the download from the beginning. Web-based installation support: This allows customers to point their clients at an internal Web server and download the software, thereby eliminating the need to rely on login scripts or third-party distribution tools. Installer/Uninstaller technology: With an altered code base, none of VirusScan ASaP's components share the same local name space as competing products. This eliminates concerns associated with uninstalling competing products prior to installing the enhanced VirusScan ASaP.
http://ecommerce.internet.com/outlook/article/0,1467,7761_486031,00.html
So what does any of this have to do with Business-to-Business e-commerce you ask? Software distribution comes to mind, and seems like a good place to start.
How about online auctions? Rather than maintaining specific auction item details by updating the Ebay or Amazon Auctions databases, why not use those services only for the meta-data on the items, but keep item details locally and under user control. The auction site could then concentrate on the running the auctions and keeping the user feedback areas up-to-date without dealing with terabytes of auction item details and graphics. Under this approach, updates on items offered for sale would be instantaneous, data integrity would improve, and the overall auction shopping and buying experiences can be vastly improved.
Another sticky problem that P2P might help to solve is catalog data for both B2B and B2C sites. Security notwithstanding, using locally stored copies of catalog information that serves as a single source or single point of information would greatly improve information flows throughout the supply chain. Again, data integrity would be improved, and inventory records might actually begin to reflect reality, instead of what happened yesterday (or worse the week or month before!). It seems to me the possibilities here are endless.
http://ecommerce.internet.com/outlook/article/0,1467,7761_516871,00.html
Reader submissions tended to fall into these categories:
Supply chain automation
Collaboration
Message exchange
Knowledge sharing
Advancing P2P
Research
Distributed caching of Web content
Miscellaneous
http://www.thesupplychain.com/tscm/inthenews/scnews/2000_12.asp
After years of monolithic applications consuming a great deal of IT and IS resources, producing long-haul ROI, and seemingly never-ending upgrades and integration requirements, - we are finally beginning to see the next generation solution. ERP II is a new acronym coined by Gartner Group that stresses the outward focus of ERP II vs. the inward (i.e. within a business) focus of ERP. Simply focusing outward is not the most exciting part of this trend. More tantalizing is what happens to the business applications and how they interact when they are built in intense consideration of this new technical business infrastructure.
When one considers an ERP system extended by an intranet, as is common in many businesses, the end-result is primarily improved "visualization". Thus, it is likely (and is happening already) that legacy ERP vendors will claim ERP II compliance by "extending" the ERP outward using extranet technology. However, just like the limitations of simple visualization, extended legacy ERP will struggle with a host of limitations as the simple fact remains - only so much can be added externally to a client-server ERP before wholesale replacement is required.
http://www.thesupplychain.com/tscm/learnmore/architecture.asp
"Peer-to-Peer" Connectivity
A prominent example of theSupplyChain.com’s innovative architecture is what is referred to as “peer-to-peer” connectivity. Essentially, this provides the ability for two instances of our ERP II systems, to “talk” with one another electronically without need for integration or a 3rd party facilitator. A peer-to-peer architecture has no visible middleware (a.k.a. “glue code”, “integration servers”, et. al.) products, and from a fiscal perspective, is a more ideal solution.
If companies can easily connect their business systems together, then it would follow that more aspects of their business process overall could be linked between organizations. Our ERP II systems, by virtue of their inherent connectivity, have a module that governs the inclusion and exclusion of “peers” allowed, or visible within, a given company’s instance of the product. This module’s feature set includes functions for sourcing new suppliers (e.g. reverse auctions), sending multi-level requests to “join” a peer’s private marketplace, contract management, supplier rating, etc.
http://www.peer-to-peerwg.org/members/index.html
|
Peer-to-Peer Working Group |
Member Companies
(Dec. 14, 2000) The following companies are members of the working group.
Alliance Consulting
BIAP Systems Inc.
Bright Station PLC
Entropia, Inc.
Fujitsu PC Corporation
Intel Corporation
J.D. Edwards
NetMount
NextPage, Inc.
OpenDesign, Inc.
Proksim Software, Inc.
Science Communications, Inc.
United Devices
Supportive Companies
The following companies have supported the formation of the working group.
AppleSoup
Applied MetaComputing
CenterSpan
Distributed Science
Dotcast
Enfish Technology
Engenia Software
Groove Networks
HP
IBM
Kalepa
MangoSoft
Static
Structural Analysis Tech, Inc.
Thinkstream, Inc.
Uprizer
Vtel
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/1769.cfm
A Napster clone from Microsoft?
Rumour has it that Microsoft is working on a peer-to-peer sharing project code-named Farsite.
The concept behind Farsite is a serverless file system - files are stored on a distributed network of clients with no centralized server or hierarchy.
"We know that (PC) disks aren't full today and machines are idle most of the time. Disks are getting bigger faster than files are. If you could build a centralized file server, it would be more reliable and it wouldn't require centralized administration," Bolosky explained.
Napster and other peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software are built on a similar premise, but with one key difference, Bolosky said.
"Napster does have a central directory. Only its file store is peer-to-peer," he said.
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2673018,00.html
Peer-To-Peer Monsters On The Way
By Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet News
January 9, 2001 7:24 PM ET
What would Napster on steroids look like?
Maybe like a couple of the futuristic distributed file system projects now in development at various universities and companies.
Microsoft Research is working on one such beast, a project code-named Farsite. The University of California at Berkeley--with backing from the Defense Research Projects Agency, IBM and EMC--is working on another, code-named OceanStore.
This week, in fact, the lead developer of Microsoft's Farsite is attending a research retreat sponsored by Berkeley computer science students working on OceanStore.
'Serverless storage' These research projects are years away from finding their way into commercialized products--if, in fact, they ever do.
Enter the concept of a "serverless file system"--or a kind of network of clients with no hierarchy, in the words Bill Bolosky, lead of Microsoft Research's Farsite project.
The 'serverless storage' era"We know that (PC) disks aren't full today and machines are idle most of the time. Disks are getting bigger faster than files are. If you could build a centralized file server, it would be more reliable and it wouldn't require centralized administration," Bolosky explained.
With Farsite--a concept Bolosky and his five-person team has been dabbling with for the past year--all elements would be distributed.
As such, as Bolosky and his colleagues have conceived of it, Farsite would be based on a true cooperative storage model, rather than a centralized or local one.
Microsoft's target for Farsite, Bolosky said, is a "large company or university, meaning an organization with around 105 machines, storing around 1010 files, containing around 1016 bytes of data."
You read that right: 100,000 computers networked together.
The OceanStore team has set its sights even higher, said Bolosky, talking about serverless networks consisting of 10 billion computers, containing 1023 bytes of data.
OceanStore, as it has been described on various Web sites, is more of a generalized object store than a pure file system.
But as it is being developed by the same Berkeley group that worked on the xFS file system, it has its roots in the distributed file system world.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/0/ns-19941.html
The next generation engines are expected to search the hard drives of members of a Napster-like network of computers for more than just MP3s. The objective: search for everything.
Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen described one such engine, Pointera, as "chang(ing) the Internet in a way that it hasn't changed since the browser."
This is the first of the so-called "distributed search engines." The Pointera sharing engine, which debuted in mid-2000, is the first to let portals and content site users share files through a standard Web browser. Pointera, a division of Spinfrenzybeing, plans to market the search engine as a way to augment existing searches predominantly in a business environment.
Two other peer-to-peer engines are still in development. One is coming from Gonesilent, the new name of the company founded by former Gnutella developer Gene Kan, who is working on a search engine based on the same file-swapping software at Gnutella.
A version of the search engine is already running. It does things most traditional search engines can't: list stock quotes if a company is searched, show photos, and even solve math problems.
Another is from the Gnutella family itself. The team working on a new and improved Gnutella, right now called gPulp, which developer Sebastien Lambla says can be used for searching, among other applications.
Peer-to-peer search doesn't need to find, retrieve, categorise, and package. It finds what's on another hard drive at the moment the search goes out.
O’Reilly sponsored a P2P summit in San Francisco in September, 2000 attended by 20 leaders in the field.
Steve Burbeck, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM
Rael Dornfest, Senior Developer, O'Reilly Network
Dale Dougherty, Publisher, O'Reilly Network
Dan Gillmor, Columnist, San Jose Mercury News
Andy Hertzfeld, Software Wizard, Co-Founder of Eazel
Gene Kan, Founder, GoneSilent.com
Bob Knighten, Peer-to-Peer Evangelist, Intel Corporation
Kevin Lenzo, Systems Scientist/Founder, Carnegie Mellon University/Cepstral, LLC
Jeremie Miller, Founder, Jabber
Scott Miller, Developer/Security Analyst, Freenet
Nelson Minar, CTO, Popular Power
Darren New, Senior Member Technical Staff, Invisible Worlds
Tim O'Reilly, CEO, O'Reilly & Associates
Andy Oram, Editor, O'Reilly & Associates
Ray Ozzie, CEO, Groove Networks
Clay Shirky, Partner, acceleratorgroup
David Stutz, Software Architect, Microsoft
Michael Tiemann, CTO, Red Hat
Bernard Traversat, Senior Staff, Advanced Research & Development, Aspen Lab Sun Microsystems
Jon Udell, Journalist, byte.com
When people collaborate, each has the opportunity -- though not the requirement -- of being a producer as well as a consumer. Those who produce may be relatively few: For instance, a recent study found that only 2% of Gnutella users contribute content, and even on Usenet News the ratio of posters to total readers is only about 7%. But that is enough to keep the system afloat. The important thing is to give everybody the opportunity. Thus our slogans:
Peer-to-peer is the end of the read-only Web.
Peer-to-peer allows you to participate in the Internet again.
Peer-to-peer: steering the Internet away from TV.
There are situations where peer-to-peer is counterindicated.
Peer-to-peer is probably not appropriate when it's important for everybody to know all the current data at the same time. You probably can't run a stock market with peer-to-peer, for instance, because fair pricing fundamentally depends on everybody knowing the asking price and seeing the impact of all bids. An airline reservation system wouldn't be appropriate either, unless each buyer is willing to sit on somebody else's lap. We did not achieve consensus on whether peer-to-peer applications are good for rapidly changing data.
Peer-to-peer systems seem to contain an inherent fuzziness. Gnutella, for instance, doesn't promise you'll find a file that's hosted on its system; it has a "horizon" beyond which you can't see what's there. Knighten said, "There are a lot of things in the peer-to-peer world that we can take advantage of only if we give up certitude." Most computers come and go on the Internet, so that the host for a particular resource may be there one minute and gone the next.
Furthermore, peer-to-peer seems to reward large communities. If very few people ask for a file on Freenet, it might drop off the caches of the various participating systems. Steve Burbeck, a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, pointed out that self-organizing file sharing systems like Napster, Gnutella and Freenet are affected by the popularity of files, and hence may be susceptible to the tyranny of the majority.
Some participants suggested that peer-to-peer is good if you have a strong idea what you're looking for (an author, for instance) but have no idea where it is. A centralized system like Yahoo! is better if you have only a vague idea what you're looking for, but possess some confidence that you can find it at a particular site.
To quote IBM's Burbeck, "When you get up to a billion cellular phones and other devices, you have to be decentralized."
Barriers to peer-to-peer
As with any new technology, peer-to-peer has to grapple with old assumptions, which have been embodied in policies ranging in size from a site administrator's firewall configuration to acts of Congress.
Bandwidth limitations
These have already been mentioned. Low-cost technologies can deliver high bandwidth downstream, but cheat the user who wants to publish as well as read. License restrictions such as bans on running a service out of the home, while justifiable from the viewpoint of maintaining adequate throughput on multiple systems, also amputate the possibilities of peer-to-peer.
Firewalls and address translation
When it comes to IP addresses, IPv6 may eliminate the scarcity but not the scares. Most firewall administrators keep their users from getting fixed IP addresses out of fear that they make intrusion easier. The sense of security may be illusory (because people monitoring their own ports have reported intrusion attempts within a few minutes of bringing up their network software), but the practice makes it much harder for an end user's system to host a service.
Even if each user gets a fixed IP address, the Domain Name System is a barrier to end-to-end addressing. Domain names have become a significant expense over the years, and ICANN is not improving the situation. (For instance, they require anyone who wants a new top level domain to pay $50,000 just for the privilege of having the request considered.) For that reason, new services like AOL Instant Messenger and Napster bypass DNS and use their own addressing.
Unfortunately, such ad-hoc addressing solutions lead to problems of their own. AOL tries to shut out competitors by denying them its addresses. Systems that use proprietary systems of addressing can't interoperate. Most ad-hoc namespaces are flat and crude.
Finally, packet filtering, while it plays an important role in securing a LAN, also leads to "port 80 pollution" as everybody tries to use the Web for services that would be more appropriate with a different protocol. The solution to this problem, unfortunately, will not be in sight until operating systems become more secure and IP security can be set up with a few mouse clicks (or vocal commands).
Regulation
Government restrictions have not yet affected peer-to-peer technologies, but could have a chilling effect in the future. Scott Miller, lead U.S. developer for Freenet, pointed out that early peer-to-peer systems happen to be associated with violations of intellectual property (at least in the minds of the copyright holders) but that such activities were neither the purpose of peer-to-peer nor the most likely types of mature applications to emerge. Nevertheless, a couple of participants reported that peer-to-peer has been branded with a scarlet I for Infringement in the minds of investors, courts, and the general public.
Software patents could also stifle technology. We spent some time discussing ways to use prior art searches of patents defensively.
Barriers to entry
Finally, things that currently make it hard for users to start a peer-to-peer service need to be attacked by the peer-to-peer developers themselves. If every new peer-to-peer service requires the user to download, install, and configure a new program, it will remain a craft shop for tinkerers. Shirky pointed out that Java was supposed to provide the universal client that allowed everything else to run seamlessly, but Java on the client didn't pan out. We need something as easy as the update service offered by Windows and some other products.
Even after users install a client, they may abort their involvement if they are forced to learn a system of metadata and apply a lot of tags. Jon Udell, programming consultant and Byte Magazine columnist, said, "When everybody's a publisher, responsibility goes along with that." Dornfest called for local vocabularies to provide just the right depth of metadata, combined with clients that allow its application with just a mouse click, a keystroke, or automagically.
Napster made the registration of users' MP3 files nearly automatic. Janelle Brown, senior writer at Salon, reminded us of the sad history of Hotline, a service similar to Napster that appeared much earlier but never took off. Among the various diagnoses the group offered in post mortem, it was pointed out that prospective users had to upload material before doing any downloads. That restriction may have turned them off. Nevertheless, another quid-pro-quo system -- where you have to provide a resource in order to use a resource -- is being tried by the new venture MojoNation.
Trust
The ability to trust the system and other users is critical. Balancing the privacy of the individual with the need to authenticate users and kick malicious disrupters off the system is a difficult feat.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/09/22/rt-transcript.html
For example, there was somebody there from Microsoft and from IBM, the UDDI project, because it seems to me that the Web is itself evolving into a new kind of medium that needs to understand the concept of peering between Web servers in a different way. I was also looking to bring in people from device peering. If you look at projects like Jini or Bluetooth, they're really around the concept of devices finding each other, figuring out what they can do, and going from there. One way I like to characterize it is: If you think of instant messaging as a paradigmatic application -- instant message asks the question, "Are you there? Do you want to chat?" Napster asks the question, "Do you have this MP3 file?" Jini asks the question, "Are you a printer and do you know how to do my file?" All these are about people or devices forming in a sense ad hoc networks that are based on capabilities and needs.
Popular Power asking a question, "Do you have compute cycles available for use?"
I think in terms of project contexts, and in each project I have a set of documents. I have a set of preferred communication channels, I have a set of documents, and I expend an awful lot of energy every day trying to assemble those things into a coherent context. I'm desperate for some kind of software system to help me do that more easily. So I think that the reason that this doesn't happen a lot of the time is that it's exactly the case that the artificial centralization has created these terrible IT bottlenecks. It's quite typical, and whether or not you work independently as I do or whether you work in a company, it's almost routinely the case that a project is going to involve people in different situations: people in other companies, people in your company who are working from home today, people in your company who are working in the office on the other coast, etc. This is the norm. So to say that we have to get in line at the IT queue for the administrator to carve out the space in which we can do these ad hoc collaborations -- well, it just isn't happening.
This is actually why so much stuff ends up flowing through e-mail, and why I argue in some sense that e-mail is actually conceptually a peer-to-peer application to the extent that it is perhaps the only thing which empowers users today to form these ad hoc collaborations. And so we use it, but we abuse it, because it really isn't capable of dealing with a lot of the things that we'd like to have handled more seamlessly. One of the key ones -- and this gets to the instant messaging as a platform idea -- is this notion which somebody I guess has called Presence Management, which I think is a great thing -- the idea that it's my presence, my availability, not in voice mail, not in stored and forwarded e-mail, but my actual presence in real time, which is this resource which needs to be understood and transmitted through the network and then woven into applications, so that you might use a presence management technology to determine that I'm really there but then you might choose to contact me through some other preferred channel. That's going to be a really powerful business tool.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2603611.html
The chip giant [Intel] estimates that there is two-and-a-half times the computing power in individual computers at a typical large business than is available from its servers. By harnessing the power of each computer to power the network and distribute computing tasks, Intel executives said companies can save billions of dollars.
Intel knows from whence it speaks, having used peer-to-peer networking to manage the complicated task of designing chips since 1990. Gelsinger said the company has saved half a billion dollars during the past decade by shipping simulations from active computers to faraway systems that had been underused.
Gelsinger said that before Intel started the program, it was "buying mainframes like candy" even though it was only using about 30 percent of the computing power of its workstations and 50 percent of its server power. Now, about 70 percent of its workstations' muscle is being tapped and servers are running at about 80 percent.
To help get other businesses thinking along these lines, Intel today announced the formation of a peer-to-peer working group with 19 initial members, including IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue86/mag-computing-86.html
But despite the evangelism of VCs like Softbank Venture Capital 's Bill Burnham, no company has yet figured out a viable business model based on this architecture. "While the most visible impact of this model has been in consumer environments, peer-to-peer computing has the potential to play a major role in business computing," Mr. Burnham says. "Corporations can tap into existing teraflops of performance, and terabytes of storage, to make today's applications more efficient and enable entirely new applications."
Already, InfraSearch , a startup offering a search engine based on P2P, has raised nearly $5 million in funding and lists Marc Andreessen and Mike Homer among its angel investors.
the power of distributed computing lies in harnessing idle MIPS (or wasted computing power) by tying them together and using the cumulative power to perform supercomputer-caliber tasks. This is called grid computing
http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00520001227gcn01.htm
What are the business applications for P2P?
P2P encompasses two distinct types of technology:
The sharing of different computers' processing and storage capabilities
The sharing of digital files and data between two computers
Based on this distinction, the business P2P market divides into distributed computing, which uses spare processing or storage capability on networked computers, and file sharing, which includes collaborative computing.
Typically, P2P distributed computing aims to beef up computer muscle, speeding up complex computer-intensive tasks. The file-sharing approach seeks to make existing networking functions more efficient and adaptable, with the hope that improved workflow strategies will emerge.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/40/ns-18419.html
Trouble surfaced about an hour into the meeting when Intel attorney Earl Nied explained how the company thought the group should be organised. He got an earful when he opened the microphones for questions.
Nied said the group would be administered by a steering committee of seven companies chaired by Intel. Two of the seven would be elected by "contributors" -- companies or individuals that pay $5,000 (£3,448) to submit ideas to technical committees and get early access to specifications. "Steering committee" members would pay $25,000, and "participant" members could join for $500.
Non-disclosure agreements would be discouraged. Companies would have to prove their own copyrights and prepare to subject their intellectual property to the rules of standards bodies. "This is like an unincorporated trade association," Nied said. "We want something very simple."
Intel also asked the audience to submit ideas to Intel labs for a P2P architecture that was "object-based, extensible, secure, and simple", a combination that some developers said sounded a lot like Java.
"This is an awful start -- this is horrific!" said Tim O'Reilly, whose O'Reilly & Associates is holding conferences and fostering discussions on P2P, to applause. "The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has a good working model [for projects like this], and you propose an organisation where the big players have all the power."
A spokesman from Cisco supported O'Reilly, asking Intel to look at the organisation of the WWW Consortium.
After a break during which companies pelted Intel with complaints, Intel promised to return with a new proposal. After lunch, Intel told the audience to submit ideas for the way the group should be organised, so that its "founding members" -- including IBM and Hewlett-Packard -- could choose one. Developers said they preferred an open discussion like those conducted on the popular Slashdot Web site.
http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2000/12/19/redherring/herring_xdegrees/index.htm
XDegrees taps metadata
Startup builds infrastructure to manage the flow of data about data
By Tom Geck
December 19, 2000: 12:09 p.m. ET
SAN FRANCISCO (www.redherring.com) - When contestants on the popular television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? choose between asking the audience for help or phoning a friend, polling the audience usually produces better results. Peer-to-peer networks are based on roughly the same concept: Data that travels between linked computers is more valuable than that held by any one person. Napster, Freenet and Gnutella have only just begun to tap this idea.
A Mountain View, Calif., startup code-named XDegrees claims to be developing software that will manage the flow of metadata, or data about data, in peer-to-peer networks. In effect, it will provide a P2P platform that will include infrastructure services like traffic routing, naming, security, caching, file-sharing and messaging.
If you find that the same e-mail is being deleted (by many users) within the first minute that people view it, you can make a decision that individually you could not have made.
Michael Tanne
XDegrees CEO
XDegrees was founded in August with an $8 million investment from Redpoint Ventures and a new venture fund, the Cambrian, whose contributions come from former executives from Compaq Computer, Netscape, and Macromedia.
Entrepreneurialism is old hat to XDegrees' founders: CEO Michael Tanne, most recently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures, founded Adforce, which he sold to CMGI (CMGI: Research, Estimates ) for about $500 million. Cofounders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan previously founded the shopping-bot maker Junglee, which they sold to Amazon.com (AMZN: Research, Estimates) for $187 million.
Tanne says XDegrees is betting on the idea that P2P will change computing as we know it. "It's users and the way they communicate that are valuable, more than their files or their hard disks," he says, offering spam as an example. "If you find that the same e-mail is being deleted (by many users) within the first minute that people view it, you can make a decision that individually you could not have made."
In October, Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, announced the debut of Groove, a P2P platform that has been in development since 1997. XDegrees is based on similar underlying concepts but differs in a few key areas. "Groove is Notes 2000. That's not a criticism, because Notes is a great product," Tanne says. "But it's an environment that developers use. Our approach is organic and based on providing some core infrastructure and then letting application developers go where they want to go with it."
Exactly how XDegrees's technology will work is still under wraps, as the 11-person company is only beginning to creep out of stealth mode. However, according to the company's literature, the platform is structured so that standard Web development technologies (CGI scripts, active server pages, HTML) can be used to develop P2P applications. The company will license its software for use on Web sites, in corporate intranets, and for mobile work forces. The platform may finally allow P2P to move beyond simply searching for a free version of your favorite song.
