Comments on: Startup Marries Games to Grid Computing

By: 80legs Cares About Your Bandwidth Cap

80legs Cares About Your Bandwidth Cap — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:54:01 +0000

[...] month when I was in Houston, I met Shion Deysarkar, chief marketing officer of Plura Processing, a company that harnesses the CPU cycles and bandwidth of participating gamers (it pays them up to $2.60 a month for use of 100 percent of [...]

By: Houston’s Tech Scene Is Worth the Trip

Houston’s Tech Scene Is Worth the Trip — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:51:25 +0000

[...] also met with Plura Processing, which is taking the idea of CPU harvesting and building a web-crawling platform on top of the [...]

By: Happy 2009! « Plura Processing

Happy 2009! « Plura Processing — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:41:57 +0000

[...] featured on GigaOm and [...]

By: Brad Wilson

Brad Wilson — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:59:53 +0000

Our affiliates have hundreds or thousands of people that are playing their games (or using their services) at any given time. The affiliate gets paid for the aggregate time for all of their users while their computers are being used to play the game.

By: Oma

Oma — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:16:01 +0000

I can see some scenarios where this could work… if you more or less can make sure in advanced some cpu cycles (lets say 12 hrs), maybe plura can raise your 0.00000014 dollars to something significant…

By: Sheppard

Sheppard — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:30:35 +0000

Does it pay at least the electricity consumed?… Dont think so…

By: Viëlko

Viëlko — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:23:01 +0000

Plura payments in one sentence:

One plura working unit = 15 secs on an “average” pc = 0.000014 USD

Damn!!!!!

By: Brad Wilson

Brad Wilson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:04:56 +0000

We pay the game developer or website operator for the traffic from people that are playing their game. The game developer gets a nice source of revenue that is independent from ads. Large affiliates can earn very substantial monthly income from Plura.

The users get access to better games and better content since the developers are earning more for the time they spend working on their game.

By: Koopthra

Koopthra — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:02:52 +0000

I don’t see how this is going to work. If you devote 100% of your CPU and electricity for an entire day Plura gives you in return 8 freaking cents.

By: T=Machine » Micro-micro-payments via electricity bill

T=Machine » Micro-micro-payments via electricity bill — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:44:41 +0000

[...] of that back to the game developer in whose game the app was embedded. You can see a bit more on it on GigaOM, including a brief response from the company. Their VC backer, Creeris Ventures, appears to have an exec on the board who came up with this in [...]

By: Shion Deysarkar

Shion Deysarkar — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:19:59 +0000

Hey guys – I thought I would just add a little clarification for those interested.

Plura isn’t a downloaded/installed application. Rather, it’s a Java applet (or JAR) that runs in the background. Because our affiliates (i.e., game developers, site owners, etc.) can control when and how Plura is used, it doesn’t need idle PC time to run.

Here’s a potential example for how Plura could be used.. Let’s say someone wants to play a graphically-intensive Flash RPG. When the player starts the game, there’s a loading/menu screen. CPU use by the Flash player is really low, so the game can dynamically set Plura CPU use to be high, maximizing computing power during this time. When the player is engaged in some battle, the Flash player may be using a lot of CPU. Then the game can dynamically minimize Plura CPU use. At the end of the play session, the game sees how much compute time the player provided and rewards him with an in-game item (e.g., +1 longsword).

So what you get is something that the user loves (because he’s being directly rewarded) and a model for computing power that does work (because it’s using the PC as efficiently as possible). Both sides win. :)

One more clarification: Plura payments scale with # of users and length of time on a site. The $2,600 mentioned in the article assumes 1,000 concurrent users at any given time. If there are more users, the potential payment increases (e.g., 10,000 concurrent users => $26,000).

By: Featured on GigaOm! « Plura Processing

Featured on GigaOm! « Plura Processing — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:05:59 +0000

[...] General Tags: games, gigaom We’re very excited to say that GigaOm has featured us in an article! I had been talking with Wagner James Au, one of GigaOm’s contributors, for the past week [...]

By: Alok Kejriwal

Alok Kejriwal — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:38:24 +0000

i think the idea is worthy of a trial. With 200+ million unique consumers playing just flash games each month as per comScore, it means that there are almost 200 million unique PC/Machines to add to the grid. why not add a carrot to the consumer? anyway the players are teen/tween types who would love some extra bucks? we created invisible ads in games that help developers gain extra money when their games get scraped, and the eco-sysytem loves it!

By: ¿Quieres potencia de cálculo? Una empresa vende cuotas de su red 'grid computing'

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:16:12 +0000

[...] ¿Quieres potencia de cálculo? Una empresa vende cuotas de su red ‘grid computing’gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-with-grid… por bedingfieldo hace pocos segundos [...]

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:13:12 +0000

@Wes,

You and I have been too long and have collective scars worth a global scale battle. :-)

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:36:15 +0000

What they’ve really married is a business model that users hate (crapware) and a business model that doesn’t work (idle PCs). All the other companies that have tried this (e.g. United Devices) have failed.