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…

Blacksburg BarCamp 1.0

The very first BarCamp in Blacksburg is going to be happening on June 14th, 2008. Make sure to tell all your technologist friends and direct them towards the following website:

Blacksburg BarCamp 1.0

Here are the sessions so far for the day, but new ones could be added or these ones could be changed slightly on the day of the event based on camper feedback:

• Introduction to BarCamp (Manu Sporny)
• Multicore Environment Programming (Jonathan Turner)
• Blacksburg Technology Wiki (Cory Donovan)
• Exchange vs. Zimbra/Funambol (Joseph K. Goodman)
• Cloud Computing (Matt Pfeil)
• Ninja Audio Effects (Andy Fabian)
• Ruby on Rails (Josh Eckstein)
• Hacking Parallel Filesystems (Manu Sporny)

The event is starting at 10am this Saturday at Mailtrust:

755 University City Boulevard
Blacksburg, VA 24060

The room that we will be in is on the first floor and is about 1000 feet away from the main Mailtrust offices, towards the Kroger supermarket. If you are facing the Mailtrust logo, turn right and walk down about 1000 feet. There will be signs for Blacksburg BarCamp 1.0.

The event is free to attend and participate.

Dynamic Spectrum Auctions and Digital Marketplaces

Chances are that your cell-phone’s data connection is slow compared to most wired connection speeds. This is especially true in the United States. An emerging field, called Software Defined Radio and Cognitive Radio, is starting to make headway in changing the way we use the airwaves.

Two of the leading universities in the world on Software Defined Radio and Cognitive Radio research are Virginia Tech and Trinity College in Dublin. Digital Bazaar’s founder, Manu Sporny, was asked to join both research organizations along with researchers and officials from Supélec in Rennes, France, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the European Commission, and Vanu to take part in a workshop on the future of SDR/CR research.

Digital Bazaar’s part in all of this was to brainstorm business models and methods of auctioning wireless spectrum in real time. The workshop was hosted by the Centre for Telecommunications and Value-chain Research (CTVR) in Dublin, Ireland. It consisted of an intense 2-day workshop where ideas were exchanged as to the current state of SDR/CR research, what’s going right and what’s going wrong, as well as what the future should hold for this quickly maturing field.

Several ideas were generated at the workshop that dealt with using Digital Bazaar’s technology to buy and then re-sell wireless spectrum in real-time. Effectively, this means that you could buy and sell wireless spectrum from your cellphone or laptop on an as-needed basis.

Here’s how it would work: If you only need 100Kbps in bandwidth on average for sending/receiving e-mail then you can sign up for that wireless plan. If, however, you need 2000Kbps every now and then for the occasional large download to your laptop, you can purchase that wireless bandwidth a la carte from those around you. Not only would you buy the bandwidth, but you would lease the wireless spectrum from those around you as well - effectively increasing your overall download speed. One of the big things that was missing until now was a system that could handle the dynamic auctioning and billing issues. Luckily, Digital Bazaar has spent the last three years building such a system.

Using some of the same technology that Bitmunk employs, it is conceivable that a wireless router or laptop could buy and re-sell spectrum from another system without the need to have a plan setup with a wireless or mobile provider. This means that people could buy and sell bandwidth from each other when they need it and without having a permanent Internet service plan with any provider. Cheap, pay as you go wireless Internet.

We’re very excited about the opportunity to work with these leading research institutions in making this technological dream a reality.

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.

DB Launches Medical Record Sales Service with Shepherd Medical

Shepherd Medical, a long-time licensee of Digital Bazaar technology, launched a service for the medical industry today for the purpose of buying and selling medical record data. The site utilizes several second-generation technologies developed by Digital Bazaar for creating and operating digital content marketplaces. The same technology is used in the Bitmunk music service website.

The site, named Health2Trade, focuses on selling blinded patient data for Cardiology, Oncology, Radiology, Pediatrics, Ophthalmology and a variety of other medical-related specialties. The goal is to increase revenue to small practices and patients by allowing independent doctors and their patients to re-sell blinded medical data back to the Center for Disease Control, pharmaceutical companies, or other entities that need field data on drug interactions and use in rural areas.

The aim is to reduce medical bills for patients by creating a symbiotic relationship between the companies that create treatments and the patients that use their treatments.

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 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…

Starfish Distributed Filesystem Launched

As promised last month, we are releasing our clustered storage solution to the general public. Starfish is basically a turbo-charged version of the Google File System, with a focus on data reliability, scalability, very low total cost of ownership and ease of use. Software packages, tutorials and source code are available from the Official Starfish Website.

Read on to find out more…

Starfish: Massive Storage for Everybody

We have always had a very big data storage problem. Our storage facility is eventually going to have to hold every minutely popular song, album, television show, movie, piece of software, video game, book and any other authorized piece of digital content that the world has to offer.

That is hundreds of thousands of terabytes of information by the year 2015. To give you an idea of how big ONE terabyte is, think of a music collection containing 125,000 high quality songs in MP3 format - or, to put things in a different perspective that is around 12,000 CDs. To say we have a storage problem is an understatement. We outsourced the problem for a while, but we saw the dark clouds looming on the horizon. If we didn’t create a truly scalable solution in the next several years, we would be toast.

So, how did we solve our problem and what does it mean to you…

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.