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March 17, 2006
Variations on BitTorrent from Peerfactor and Tribler
Several European teams are bent on making P2P file sharing more mainstream. Last week we wrote about Allpeers, which is now venture-backed. And this week we hear of Tribler in The Netherlands and Peerfactor in France.
The Tribler Team From TU Delft
Tribler launched a beta version of its P2P file sharing client today. Developed by a team of researchers with government funding at TU Delft, one of the top tech institutions in Europe, it is file sharing without the anonymity.
The theory goes that knowing whose resources your sharing will encourage users to open up their own PC and broadband connections for P2P.
Apparently even in the most popular P2P file sharing networks, only a tiny minority carry most of the traffic and data.
The improvements in store for Tribler users include an Amazon-like recommendations engine, real-time P2P file sharing with P2P video streaming, and a location-based omcpnent that shows the locations of other downloaders of the same content with city-level accuracy on a world map. "We are improving this protocol with over a dozen people with such features which go way beyond the original. We are extending the code from the ABC [Another BitTorrent Client] project."
PeerFactor comes out of France.
The firm says its software is created to enable webmasters to offer a legal downloading service and distribute large content more easily. It uses a client called microbittorent (ubittorrent) which is proprietary and developed by Ludvig Strigeus, a young Swedish programmer who has guru status among P2P experts. The users are anonymous unlike Tribler's concept.
Both Tribler and PeerFactor have to incentivize members of their P2P networks. PeerFactor offers gifts, such as subscriptions to Metaboli subscriptions to encourage people to open up their resources for file sharing. So far its client has been downloaded 7000 times since launching in France (only) this month and almost 4,000 users have signed up (agreeing to share traffic load).
The US web-site for PeerFactor is in still to come mode.
Tribler relies on a community of interest (friends and family) concept. According to Eric-Paul Scholten, the Dutch based founder of OGC Networks, a platform where online gamers bet on their skills, Tribler “has a lot of potential”, but it needs the consumer to support it with home-made video content, like "consumers have done with podcasting".
“It will all depend on the home-made video content and how well the social platform works,” said Scholten.
Read - Allpeers funding (alarm:clock euro)
Read - About microBittorrent
Read - PeerFactor Launch (peerfactor)
Posted on March 17, 2006 08:43 AM | Posted to Online services | Permalink
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