Do It Yourself If No One Can Do It For You

One thing I discovered by being an entrepreneur and creating a start-up, is that it happens very often that something needs to be done and you have no one to do it for you.

I mean at the beginning it is like that everyday. And it's not because you don't know how to delegate or anything. You just have not found the right employee, or the right agency, or service provider, to get the job done. Or you don't have the budget to pay even a reasonable price... so you just end up doing it yourself, for better or worse.

PR is one of the things that are hard to delegate for all ill-funded startups. If that is the case for you, I suggest you read this great post by Glenn Kelman which I found on Guy Kawasaki's blog. According to Glenn, it makes a lot of sense to DIY-PR even if you have the money to hire an agency...

Amazing Uptake of Pictogame

What an adventure!

Pictogame was just launched and we are already seeing an amazing uptake and plenty of articles and great reviews and an appearance on the Digg home page. For instance, check out this very nice review on Mashable. I can tell you that after all their hard work the team is very pleased to read that kind of stuff.

By the way you can find many other articles on del.icio.us, some in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Portuguese etc. but now they are coming in too fast, to find them you will have to search on Technorati or somewhere else.

User-Generated Games Are It Now With Pictogame

I guess you have heard about user-generated content by now. You know, all these cool online communities which invite you to store your photos or your videos. They give you a code snippet to embed the stuff into your blog or your MySpace profile. Then your friends can come and see the cool video you found on YouTube or the slideshow of your latest skiing trip.

After user-generated photos and videos... now discover User-Generated Games!

Create your own   Free games

You might think creating a game is only for programmers? Well not anymore. Pictogame lets you create a game in 3 simple clicks. Try it for yourself!

Disclosure: my partner Bruno Carsenti is at the head of this awesome project, currently developed by the top guns at zSlide. No surprise I love it as if it were my own baby ;-)

Thanks TechCrunch - Now Lets Send Le Meur Flying To Silicon Valley

Thanks Ouriel for your nice review on TechCrunch France!

Here is a little present in return...

Put this game on your blog  Create your own  More games

I hope everyone enjoys that little embedded game. You can put it on your blog too, you know. Thank the pictogame team for that! Bravo Bruno, Bastien, Corentin, Mathieu, Alex, Julien, Romain, Marc, Jordane,  Paul-Emile, Vedad, Roland, Kek & our friendly crowd of beta-testers...

Google to Double Tiny Gmail Attachments Limit

Maybe you have read already about this news: Gmail is doubling its attachment limit size to 20MB.

There are at least 2 good reasons not to be excited about that.

1. 20MB is still very small, compared to the weight of the files and folders that we manipulate every day on our computers. For instance a good (not HD, just good) quality video with a duration of 3 minutes would not fit into 20MB.
2. This only concerns Gmail. And even if Yahoo, MSN and all the e-mail providers followed suit, there would still be thousands of e-mail boxes from ISPs and corporate networks which couldn't and wouldn't support it. So, concretely, most people won't be able to send 20MB to Gmailers and Gmailers won't be able to send 20MB attachments to most people.

So, there you have it: e-mail attachment sizes are a real problem of the Internet today.

It is deeply rooted in the protocols and the existing infrastructure which support our global e-mail system. There is no way that progress can be made in this field by taking tiny steps. What e-mail attachments need now in order to move to the next level is a technological paradigm shift.

Here is what Podmailing proposes:
Classic e-mail + BitTorrent => e-mail attachments of virtually any size

This marriage is very efficient, and knows no barriers to adoption. It is ecological as it leverages Peer-To-Peer transfers. It can be implemented very easily. Actually, here is a very light set of specifications that suffice to make it work:

• Create a ".torrent" metafile following these specs
• Add some fields to it - following these specs and change its extension to ".zed"
• This new file is very small, generally less than 100KB, so it can be attached to any e-mail and it will get through to any inbox in the world
• Any recipient of the .zed file will be able to download the data using a BitTorrent client
  

Is that all that is required to transfer the data to the recipient? Well, if the sender keeps his PC online, and makes it reachable from the Internet with a proper BitTorrent client running on it, yes this is pretty much what it takes.

But remember that e-mail is an asynchronous communication method (unlike phone or chat) which means that the sender expects the recipients to receive the file even if he is offline. This too can be achieved using our system, provided that a server is acting as a relay, to store and serve the file while the sender is not available. Additionally, even if the sender is online, the relay server can contribute to a higher bandwidth, and some additional services, and an overall better quality of service.

So, do I need to setup a BitTorrent client? a server? Is it complicated?

Oh no ! Don't worry about it!

Visit the Podmailing web-site, and sign-up to participate in our beta-test. Podmailing is a service which enables you to send files of any size, based on the method described above. It includes the BitTorrent client and we provide the relay servers for that. So all the nuts and bolts of the system will be totally transparent to you.

The Future Is Predictable - Get Briefed by Ray Kurzweil

I have already mentioned a few times how I respect Ray Kurzweil, his work and his predictions. Let's just say I am a huge fan. You can read about his career and distinctions on Wikipedia. And I strongly recommend reading his latest book: The Singularity is Near (when humans transcend biology).

One of the most amazing things about this guy, beyond his inventions and accomplishments as an engineer and as an entrepreneur, is the success of his predictions of the future. Way back in the 80s he actually predicted the emergence of the Internet in the mid-90s and he predicted that the best chess players in the world would be outsmarted by a computer in 1998 - Kasparov laughed at that prediction in 1993 and he ate his teeth in 1997, one year earlier than expected. Indeed Ray is often a little bit too conservative...

His methods are based not on shamanism or crystal balls, but strongly rooted in science, engineering and the historical study of technologies. He thoroughly analyzes the trends and notes that technology evolves exponentially. That has been true since the dawn of life, it is still true today, and there are many rational reasons to be convinced that it will continue onward on the same exponential trend. The rule behind this trend is called the Law of Accelerating Returns.

What does it imply for our future? How strongly will it impact our every day lives as soon as a few years ahead? We are already used to that, right? With the PC, the Internet and now broadband, wireless and mobile connectivity exploding in such a short lapse of time...

Well, can you just imagine that progress continuing even faster in the next 10 years? 20 years?

Ray Kurzweil has built a strong model which predicts that machines will reach human-level intelligence by 2029. If you want to hear about that, and be convinced by the plethora of exponential graphs he has to show you that corroborate his views, read his books, or you can start by watching above his recent speech at the Killer App Expo. Additionally, HD quality download links and a text transcript can be found here on  technologyevangelist.com.

ThePirateBay Apparently on a Video Streaming Foray

Following the post about TheVideoBay on TechCrunch... let me ask you:

Where can you download all the hot video content in the world?

Obviously, YouTube and the like are not the answer: they are forced to fight against piracy, and left over with the crumbs: user generated content, a few content deals, and a plateful of copyright lawsuits.

The actual answer is, like it or not, piracy. And, now that all the big US-based BitTorrent hubs have been taken down, the flagship of the piracy world is... ThePirateBay, the world's largest BitTorrent tracker.

Unlike many pirate sites that hide behind ridiculous claims of "not for piracy, backup only, infringing material will be erased...", ThePirateBay is explicitly encouraging the exchange of copyrighted content. This attitude makes them the largest and most powerful actor fighting against copyright on the Internet today. They even have a political branch, PiratByrån which, according to Wikipedia, "wishes to give another point of view about spreading information than the current lobby groups do".

And now ThePirateBay is, as it seems, building a new video streaming web-site: TheVideobay. What is it going to be?
It could be, as Michael Arrington suggests, a kind of "YouTube without the DMCA take down notices". Note that ThePirateBay is based in Europe and not directly concerned by the US-specific DMCA, although other similar Swedish and European laws do exist.

The main issue, to my mind, is that of hosting infringing material. In fact, ThePirateBay has successfully fought back all legal attacks as of today on grounds that they don't host any infringing material. They only serve and track torrents, that is P2P download links based on the BitTorrent protocol, which means that the content circulates between peers, without passing through ThePirateBay's servers. Were ThePirateBay to serve infringing video streaming, it would change the rules completely. After the fiasco of the May 2006 police raid, the copyright police is standing watch with a vengeance, so any wrong step and I guess it could be brought down within a day, this time with a strong case against it.

ThePirateBay has always been standing firm on their legal position, which is apparently legitimate in  Swedish law. So I don't think they will launch a YouTube-like site with the same content as their torrent site. My guess is that they will play video streaming on the clean side of copyright, as they seem to be preparing for music with playble.com.

Another plausible scenario is for TheVideoBay to reference - but not host - streaming videos of copyrighted content found on other sites. There are already many sites doing this, and the fact that they work so well clearly shows that the DMCA is not up to the challenge. The pressure they put on classical YouTube-like video streaming sites is not really keeping the copyrighted content away from the browsers of those who know where to look. And mind you that referencing material, legitimate or not, is what Google and the other search engines do all the time, anyway.

How to Prepare a Presentation

In my six years of experience as an entrepreneur, I have already found that anything that can go wrong does go wrong. This is especially true if your task is to give a presentation, a speech or a demo. Especially if it involves showing slides, running software, using a computer, the net, or using electricity. In the early days at zSlide we also experimented giving live online demos involving a PlayStation2 and a PC - how crazy is that?

So, how do you plan for every problem then? The answer lies here. It is the most relevant todo-list for presenters, keynote speakers and VC pitchers that can be found. I will keep it bookmarked and I advise you to do the same.

Thank Pamela Slim and her blog "escape from cubicle nation" for that. I found it via Guy Kawasaki, so thank you Guy too.

P2P vs. CDN vs. Streaming vs. Hybrid

NewTeeVee has a load of questions and a poll going on about the evolution of video distribution on the Internet.

Personally I vote for hybrid networks, i.e. P2P+CDN, when it comes to downloading large files (video or otherwise) across the Internet. For me this applies to publishing large files (one to many) or exchanging large files between individuals (one to few ~ e-mail). That is what we have been implementing for Podmailing.

To my mind there are obvious reasons to avoid a pure-P2P or a pure-CDN system from a business perspective:

• CDN bandwidth costs are fully covered by you while P2P bandwidth doesn't cost you a dime
• You can't have complete control of a P2P network but you do have total control of your CDN - that's a major issue to maintain a high quality of service
• P2P is great to manage peak demand for hot new content but does not guarantee anything when it comes to long tail content
• CDNs are costly when used for peak demands, but they can also guarantee quality for long tail content

Manage a smart hybrid integration between P2P and a CDN and you can get the best of both worlds:

• Reduced bandwidth costs, off-loaded to non-peaks rates which are way lower
• High efficiency during connection peaks
• Guaranteed quality of service both for high-demand and long-tail content

Now, if you really need streaming, it appears that a CDN is the only viable way to go. Joost is trying to challenge that with a hybrid streaming-P2P-CDN system, but the math of scaling up is not helping them at all as noted on NewTeeVee's earlier post.

As I first noted here, and got confirmation here, they are only saving a small part of the bandwidth cost (up to a third), so their advertising dollars need to stack up very high if they want to get any close to profitability. I do salute the effort and the innovation of Joost though. I am just convinced that streaming-P2P volumes will remain insignificant compared to P2P-downloads for very long.

How Many BitTorrent Peers Are Connected?

BTswarm is tracking the activity of many BitTorrent trackers and aggregating these stats to compute a very rough estimate of the number of peers using BitTorrent at a given time.

Result: the order of magnitude is 100 million.

http://www.btswarm.org/statistics