Akamai has acquired
Red Swoosh for $15 million in a stock for stock transaction. We covered Red Swoosh last year when they launched a free, ad supported version of its file serving technology. Red Swoosh uses bittorent-like technology to quickly transfer files using peer to peer technology. Some companies are starting to use bittorent directly for file sharing, however, which questions the need for something like Red Swoosh. See this post on the BBC’s useage of Zudeo and bittorent to deliver files to users. Pando, another startup, also overlaps a bit with Red Swoosh.
This brings to a close the long and dramatic Red Swoosh saga. The company was founded back in 2001, but went through some troubled years during the crash. They recapitalized the company in 2005 and raised an additional $1.7 million from Mark Cuban.
Interesting fact about the company: Red Swoosh was in the process of changing offices in 2006 and took the opportunity to “offshore itself” temporarily - they moved the six person company to Krabi, Thailand for a month while they built a new product.
This news tends to prove that even giants like Akamai with strong CDN networks cannot compete against p2p delivery networks. So if you cannot beat them, join (buy…) them !
ReplyDeleteTo another extent, this news is very good and confirm the efforts from my company to evangelize P2P since the very beginning and provide P2P Content Delivery solutions to the top TV channels in France: peer-to-peer is now seriously considered as the main architecture when companies develop their online video distribution portal, while client-servers architecture are deprecated.
And of course it is not limited to video contents: you can use p2p content delivery networks for music, pictures, work documents, zip archives, programs …
Sebastien
http://www.1-click.com