Blog @ Digital Bazaar

Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches

Today, is a big milestone - the release of the Bitmunk 3.0 website. This is a release that has been in the making for 18 months. While much of the functionality facing our customers has not changed, everything behind the scenes has received a huge update. You can still search, browse, and purchase music and video through any web browser. We have kept everything that worked well the same, but have also made big improvements to the behind-the-scenes stuff that will help us start to tightly integrate Bitmunk into a variety of websites, web browsers, and mobile devices.

Read on to find out what has changed, why we’re excited about the changes, and what it means for the future of collaborative content distribution…

The Next Generation of Bitmunk Technology

In the next several months, we will be releasing technology that has been in development in our R&D labs for over a year and a half. This will be version 3.0 of our technology and it is a massive leap in speed, size reduction, and interoperability. What follows is a quick run-down on what we’re working on for Bitmunk 3.0.

Historically, most of our underlying technology has been written in Java. While it helped us prove the concept and get something into our customer’s hands, let’s face it - nobody likes running Java applications. All of our systems have undergone a full re-write to native C++. We have focused on making the next generation technology completely cross-platform, so there will be native versions of the Bitmunk buying, selling and management software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

We have also focused on speed and size reductions to make sure that the Bitmunk software can be put anywhere that there is a computer connected to the Internet. This includes not only palm-tops and laptops, but mobile phones, web browsers, media players, home entertainment systems and a variety of other multi-media devices. Not only is the new Bitmunk software much smaller than the old Java stuff, but it’s fast. For example, the old software could perform about 50 transactions per second. Not bad, until you see what the new stuff can do. The new Bitmunk software can handle close to 4000 transactions per second. That means that at the most basic level, it’s 80 times faster than the old software. While we have made many optimizations, most of the slowness was attributed to the Java Virtual Machine.

Digital Bazaar’s R&D labs have also been working on a really cool new technology with the World Wide Web Consortium called RDFa. This technology will help us create a world-wide standard for expressing media such as songs and film in music blogs, movie sites, and other media-related pages.

We are also working hard to make integrating Bitmunk into next generation browsers such as Firefox, Songbird and Miro an easier task for those developers. Don’t be too surprised if you see our technology in some of those browsers before the end of the year.

While that’s all we can say for now, there will be a number of really cool initiatives that we’ll be announcing on this blog in the coming months. Get ready to see some really cool stuff.

Over One Million Songs Available on Bitmunk

When Bitmunk launched over three years ago, we had 3,280 songs available for sale. Bitmunk was the first peer-to-peer distribution platform out there that was DRM-free and rewarded fans for trading songs by giving them a cut of the sale. It brought the record companies, music fans and music distributors together. We knew we were on to something - creating a community that was fair to everybody just made sense. We also knew that it would be a very long, hard road ahead to convince the artists and record labels to trust their fans to distribute their content.

Three years later…

Bitmunk Launches World’s First Open Music Recommendation Service

Finding independent musicians is hard enough when you’re trawling through music blogs. With the advent of the Internet, the number of indies out there has exploded in the past several years. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just enter the name of an artist that you like and get a list of suggested albums based on that artist?

Bitmunk now has the ability to recommend great indie music to you…

Bitmunk Blazes Path in Film and TV

Bitmunkers around the world have something to celebrate on this 4th of July - the launch of a full line of film and television services via our website and secure file distribution network. High Definition digital distribution of television, film and video shorts have arrived on Bitmunk!

Read on to learn more about the exciting new film and television services that we offer…

Tia Fix Joins Staff at Digital Bazaar

Digital Bazaar is happy to announce the recent addition of Tia “Fix” Rumbaugh to our staff. Ms. Fix will handle media relations and content acquisition for Bitmunk. She joins us after several years in the online advertising industry, most reputably as COO of Adspyre and weekly columnist in the Adbumb where she wrote on emerging technology and media trends.

If you have questions about integrating Bitmunk into your blog, distributing your digital content through Bitmunk, or press requests please send them to trumbaugh {at} digitalbazaar {dot} com !

Bitmunk, Microformats and the Semantic Web

If there is one thing we do well at Digital Bazaar, it is think BIG. One of our desires is to enact globally positive change in the music industry. This blog post is about one of our internal projects that is going to do just that. It is cryptically called the “Semantic Wusic” project - a melding of the “semantic web” and “music” - and it is going to change the very nature of music on the web.

In the next two years, the semantic web is going to change the way you use the Internet… (read more)

Bitmunk acquires over 800,000 songs - 63,000 artists

Bitmunk achieved a very important milestone today, with over 800,000 DRM-free songs on our network, we continue to be the largest legal DRM-free peer-to-peer network in the world. Over 63,000 artists have signed up with Bitmunk so far - we pay each artist almost ten times as much as a typical large record label - can you blame them for showing us some love?

There is much more on the way as well - we are expanding into movies and television in the next couple of months. Our engineers are very busy building out capacity to store hundreds of DRM-free movies and television shows.

Things are going great - more content means that there is a much greater chance that somebody on the Bitmunk network is selling something that you want. Or better yet, somebody out there wants to buy something that you have via Bitmunk. Track us via RSS, much more to come…

The First Open Source P2P Digital Content Transaction Platform in History

To build and launch the first copyright-respecting P2P Digital Content Transaction Platforms in the world is no small feat. We are here because of the extraordinary efforts of volunteers that donate their time to open source software. Linux, Apache, Python, PHP, MySQL, and Lustre are just a few of the open source technologies that we have utilized to build Bitmunk. Each of us believe in open source and its ability to build great technology and community, so it is with great exuberance that we are donating the lions share of our source code and systems into the open source community.

We believe in the democratization of digital content - empowering individuals and corporations to choose the terms that best suit them. Want to watch free Internet-based TV shows with commercials? Want to buy the show directly from the artist without commercials? What about getting your music legally and at a 15% discount from a friend instead of from a large corporation? Maybe negotiating with a music record label - you’ll buy 5 of their albums if they give you 25% off of each one? All these scenarios are possible with the Bitmunk Transaction Platform. This is what we’re open sourcing - the source code and technology to democratize how we buy and sell content. We call it collaborative content distribution.

Read on to learn more about what this means for the world…

or just go directly to our open source community website.

Bitmunk is going Open Source!

In another industry first, we are planning to go open source with several of our software projects. In doing this, we hope to foster a great deal of development in the area of peer-to-peer digital file transactions. Our software helps people run their websites by offering digital content sales as a part of their website experience. The open source software will allow hobbyists, students, universities, and not-for-profits the ability to experiment, evaluate and extend the Bitmunk software.

We plan on providing most everything needed to implement the Bitmunk Download Client and Sales Server aspects of the product. A sandbox website and community website will be available to developers that want to experiment with the software.

We hope to do the release in the next month, stay tuned for updates…