GigaOM

A few days ago Dave Winer talked about next steps for Bit Torrent. Good time to point him to my story on Business 2.0/CNN Money website, about three start-ups that are taking peer-to-peer networking to the next level, making it easy for rest of us.

This new wave of file-sharing startups isn’t aiming to share music or Hollywood movies, however. It’s just using the technology to speed and simplify the problem of moving a large file from computer A to computer B.

The three companies included in the story are Pando, Perenety and Wired Reach. Their P2P apps are called Pando, Shooter and Box Cloud respectively. Pando and Box Cloud are cross platform while Perenety’s Shooter is a windows only application.

While Pando has tried to keep its application close to the email-attachment model, Perenety has modeled its Shooter application after Skype, the voice-over-Internet-protocol outfit which was bought by eBay (Research), says co-founder Xavier Casanova. It may seem like an unlikely comparison, but Perenety, which is now conducting a limited test of Shooter, is emulating Skype’s one-to-one connectivity and buddy-list features. Just as Skype connects two PCs directly for a call and tells you which people are available to talk, Perenety connects PCs directly for speedier file transfers and lets you know when your contacts share new files.

You can read the full story at the CNN Money website Screenshots after the turn!

Programming Note: I am busy finishing up stories for the magazine so posting is going to be sporadic in the near foreseeable future.

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Update: A few things are a constant in life - taxes, death, broken hearts and of course Microsoft waking from some kinda slumber, finding an upstart to hate and then crushing them. The IE7 drama that is currently being played out today should be dubbed The Return of The Beast.

This default thing works well for Microsoft - they did it once before, got into trouble with Justice Department, played humble for a while, and well, they are back for an encore. Not that it easy to find compassion for Google these days. At least not amongst those who are extremely jealous of its money making abilities. Google is complaining that Microsoft is using its market domination and defaulting to Microsoft’s in house search engine. Hello Reality! (I edited out the whole bit about switching search engines and all that - perhaps a different post!)

Meanwhile… you know, what they say market predicts the future… Take a look at these two charts of Microsoft stock from 1996 and 2006. In December 1995 Bill Gates wrote the now famous Internet-or-nothing memo, and rest is history. Similarly late last year Microsofties got a Web 2.0 or nothing memo. History in the making?

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