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.

Learn RDFa in 8 minutes

This is a follow-up to the video we released two weeks ago about the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium is working on a standard way to mark up semantics in XHTML called RDFa. We are heavily involved in RDFa development and believe it to be the right technology to express semantics on the web. This talk focuses on explaining the basics of RDFa in 8 minutes. It is meant primarily for people that can write XHTML by hand and is thus fairly technical.

The video covers many new technologies that will go mainstream in XHTML 1 and XHTML 2 in the following years; RDF, CURIEs, N3 Notation, and the basics of RDFa are discussed.

A high resolution version of this video and all source material used to make the video is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.

The Semantic Web in 6 minutes

We’ve been heavily involved with the World Wide Web Consortium over the past several months working with the RDFa task force, chartered by the Semantic Web Deployment group. While the semantic web is many things to many people, it is quite simple at it’s core. Explaining that simplicity in less than 30 minutes, though, is quite a difficult task. We put together a very simple, playful, video that succinctly explains why the Semantic Web is such a big deal:

A high resolution version of this video and all source material used to make the video is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.

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, 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)

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…