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August 3, 2006

SkyRider aims to monetize P2P

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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Mountain View based stealth P2P company SkyRider formally announced their company’s existence today but was maddeningly vague about what they will actually do when they launch this fall. The company, which is headed by former Cisco CTO Edward Kozel and has received funding from Sequoia Capital and Charles River, says it will enable the commercialization of P2P software through search keyword marketing and the creation of of software on top of P2P.

What does that mean? The company’s site and press release focus entirely on how desirable P2P monetization is. Some possible clues I’ve found are that SkyRider has the same investors, PR company and voice mail as another company, CRight Inc. which has been quietly identified months ago as an anti-piracy system. (Update: I’ve confirmed that CRight changed its name to SkyRider effective today. More when available.) Does this mean that SkyRider will offer software to enable P2P networks to detect and block illegal file sharing on their systems? That certainly would make many businesses more comfortable doing business by P2P. It may also be a means of searching across P2P networks, according to Silicon Beat, presumably for legal content. Om Malik says that though the company is mum about its technology, it will help P2P content get out of it’s current siloed state.

Several weeks ago we profiled a project called “Johny” from Guba that purports to detect copyrighted video on media sharing sites and RedSwoosh, a bittorent-like service for distributing large files. It will be interesting to see if SkyRider ends up offering anything like either of what these two companies are doing.

Update: I’m now told that my guess is wrong, that there is legacy technology from CRight at play in SkyRider but that it’s not fundamentally about blocking anything. Presumably this just means that this is just one of many features on its way. Today’s ambiguous press release certainly has caused a buzz, we’ll see if SkyRider lives up to it all this fall.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 11:31 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Tone

    August 3rd, 2006 at 11:50 am

    here come the network infrastructure boys with their p2p sophistication mumbo jumbo to take a slice of the search marketing dollars, gimmie a break

  2. EP

    August 3rd, 2006 at 11:51 am

    I understand operating in secrecy, but why formally launch then?

  3. Nick Gavronsky

    August 3rd, 2006 at 12:05 pm

    Interesting to see if they will take market share away from other P2P providers. I agree with EP, why formally launch?

  4. Tone

    August 3rd, 2006 at 12:16 pm

    Why secrecy, because they either do not know the right market to go after or it can easily be copied or probably both…

    There is a trend in the VC industry which goes like this, if you can’t invest in a promising biz model that seems to work at least on a small scale then invest in key people that were successful in web 1.0 like this Sequoia / ex-Cisco CTO relationship cause it sounds good to their investors and there is more confidence that they will come up with some biz model that works, the problem is past success does not mean high probability of success today regardless how much funding they got backing them

  5. p2pboy

    August 3rd, 2006 at 2:07 pm

    sniff. . sniff. . . what’s that I smell?

    Smells similar to Mike Homer’s Kontiki decomposing in the P2P landfill

  6. Michael Martine

    August 3rd, 2006 at 3:56 pm

    Does this mean that SkyRider will offer software to enable P2P networks to detect and block illegal file sharing on their systems? That certainly would make many businesses more comfortable doing business by P2P.

    It certainly would make nobody want to use it. Monetize that.

  7. ginchy

    August 3rd, 2006 at 4:21 pm

    From the SkyRider press release:

    “Skyrider is creating smart networking technology to support the creation, location and monetization of content on P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. Skyrider’s focus is to unleash the power of P2P networks for businesses and consumers.”

    What, P2P isn’t powerful enough yet? What’s Skyrider going to do, enable us to download household appliances in addition to music and movies (better yet: downloadable gasoline)?

    Anyway, how does one “create” content on a P2P network? Like does Skyrider create mashups out of the data in random bittorrent packets? Or maybe it will allow Kazaa users to plug instruments into their computers and jam together online?

    But enough technical details, lets get to the important question: what brand of cocktail napkin did this guy draw his business plan up on? LOLOLOL

  8. lemon obrien

    August 3rd, 2006 at 6:13 pm

    they’re a little late.

  9. Ed Kozel

    August 3rd, 2006 at 7:36 pm

    We launched the Skyrider in advance of talking about a specific product because we wanted people to begin thinking about the positive, beneficial uses of P2P technology. The more good minds there are tackling a problem, the faster new breakthroughs emerge. Think “open source” on ideas.

    Marshall correctly identified our roots in anti-piracy as cRight — it’s not a secret — and our earlier technology was quite successfully used by major content providers in several large scale trials. But what we, and they, discovered, was that we were on the wrong side of the issue.
    The issue is not to block controversial use of this new technology, but to find ways for businesses — particularly media and content providers
    – to utilize it effectively to make money and provide new services. By making the full potential of P2P — as a network architecture, distribution medium, and social phenomenon — as available as the World Wide Web is, we can assure that everyone wins.

  10. Idea, Execution, Profit

    August 3rd, 2006 at 10:40 pm

    I’m excited. Just like Google created a way to monitize static content and democratized the whole space, Skyrider could make P2P attractive for the head and the (long) tail.
    A few more bytes based on context derived from the content could add value. I wish Ed Kozel good luck in the uphill task of making the Ad more compelling than the Program(Content).

  11. p2pboy

    August 4th, 2006 at 6:25 am

    thanks for the breakdown Ed. . . yawn. . .

  12. floyd reynolds

    August 4th, 2006 at 7:00 am

    It appears that there is a groundswell of development around P2P networks and the acknowledgement that this a very viable channel for distribution and commerce. I am not surprised to see real money and veteran entrepeneurs entering the market. For the short sighted naysayers that still view this as a RIAA/anti piracy issue, the power of this proposition is not being recognized. I am very curious to see how this plays out over the next 12 months.

  13. Matt

    August 4th, 2006 at 8:43 am

    Peer Impact has already done what Skyrider is attempting to do ,with Music ,software ,TV and Movies avalible .Wurld media have built quite an impresive system that rewards users for uploading with a system credit and licencing content form the Major Record labels and Studios .

    Wurld media’s LX Systems distribution technology can be used for a myriad of p2p based services but they have focused on authorised content distribution from the record labels and major Studios/networks .

    Music distributed via authorised p2p is a lame duck and the future will be distribution of big files like movies and software .

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....to-go-p2p/

  14. Jim

    August 5th, 2006 at 10:36 pm

    Matt, nice self promotion, but this does not appear to be the Skyrider business plan.
    They discussed the idea of incorporating user generated content.

  15. moshe

    December 21st, 2006 at 5:28 pm

    ded

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