I’m not sure I will be as hilarious as many of the people when they first saw the Vudu box, that deliver the movies to the TV without the PC or the cable box. Vudu, aka Marquee, Inc. is getting a lot of buzz when The New York Times has wrote an article that surround the stories, background, industry analysis on this stealth mode company. This company was founded in year 2004 and their senior executives are holding the vast experiences in developing the digital video recorders, and has $21 million funding from Greylock and Benchmark Capital. What caught the eyes of the venture capitalists is their Vudu box; planned to be launched in this summer in the U.S. Their technologies is indeed a breakthrough technology in the sense that it helped the users to download the movies in the peer-to-peer (P2P) manner, but the selling point for this Vudu box is the users could get the instantaneous experiences when watching the movies through Vudu, without the needs of waiting hours in downloading a particular movie. To get the first grasp of what Vudu box is all about, you can click here to read the Vudu story covered by Gizmodo.

I read that this Vudu has patented some of its unique designs in the Vodo box, but until this moment I could only found one of its patents that called, “Method and system for providing instantaneous media-on-demand services by transmitting contents in pieces from client machines,” that they trademarked in year 2005. With respect to this Vudu box, they claimed that this is a method of providing instantaneous media-on-demand services over a network, their first core technology. Since there are more than 105 million TV-watching households in the U.S., I’m interested to know what is their product strategies in order to penetrate the U.S. market? Will this company focus on obtaining the patents as one of their market protection strategies when they officially launch their Vudu box in the summer? In order to empower users, how usefulness it is, will their users claimed with Vudu box, viewing movies, or videos will be a lot more enjoyable. Also, will the users recommend to their friends or relatives? I really interested to know the answers in this summer.

This is a company that I’ve been tracking for some time since I first saw it on the web. A Pittsburgh-based stealth startup, Rinera Networks has raised $9 million funding in a round A financing from existing angel investors that are New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Foundation Capital, according to this press release. The funds secured was known to be used in developing the unique technology that will help people to distribute the videos over the Internet in a less burden manner. What sets Rinera Networks apart is its company co-founders. The President Dr. Hui Zhang is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dr. Ion Stoica assumed a position as Associate Professor at University of California at Berkeley. Both aimed to develop a technology that would help people download videos through peer-to-peer (P2P) in a legal way. Moreover, the software that they’re developing will also help in identify P2P data, let Internet service providers (ISPs) decide how much of the data they are willing to carry, at what volume and price, and then deliver it as reliably as server-based content distribution systems, with the tracking feature that capable for use in accounting purposes, as reported by this article.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this news is the sort of technology that Rinera Networks was developing at this moment. What is peer-to-peer content distribution as perceived by Rinera Networks. We can get a glimpse of it through this article found at the link of Dr. Hui Zhang’s faculty page. If you like to read technology working paper, you can click here for the paper entitled, “Efficient Content Location Using Interest-Based Locality in Peer-to-Peer Systems. (PDF)”

PPStream is making headlines around the China’s Internet industry again by raising $10 million in a round B financing, venture capitalists included Ceyuan Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners, according to an economics newspaper in China. PPStream founded in 2005 (brief overview was covered in my another post) secured few million in round A from Ceyuan Ventures when it officially launched in the market. This round B of financing will thus rapidly visualize their product ideas and dreams in China. Industry pundits had questioned whether the funding on this type of P2P companies such as Xunlei and PPStream is the risky investments by Ceyuan Ventures (Note: Ceyuan Ventures and Google jointly invested $20 million on Xunlei; Read my another post: “Google China Invested in Xunlei“) as the return of Investment (ROI) may deter to a few more years. However, few people can doubt the rising popularity of PPStream and Xunlei in becoming the Internet’s “killer applications.” Until now, PPStream had secured the partnerships with SMG, Phoenix TV, Sina TV, Yahoo! China, ESPN China, and etc.

There are few implications of this financing: it mean that China is not an Internet auxiliary market anymore, and it is a testament for PPStream’s success in China as well. On the other hand, local venture capitalists that set up their offices in China have always gain competitive advantage in spotting good ventures. Also, despite the China’s Internet market is fragmented, the offering of P2P services in China is hot; most of the players selling their services like hot cakes. But I wonder with this round of financing, is PPStream preparing itself to go public in the near future?

Tungle, launched in June 2006 has released a peer-to-peer (P2P) meeting coordinator beta version at the Under the Radar Conference in San Francisco yesterday. According to Tungle, the response for this product is positive. It is their first product and it took them for more than nine months in developing this beta version. Headquartered in Quebec, Canada, they expand their offering geographically in North America and their first and primary market will be in the U.S. Tungle’s P2P meeting coordinator, claimed to the first meeting coordinator in a torrential manner, will enable an user to organize meetings with friends, colleagues, or anybody that use a different groupware and desktop time management systems. Though this P2P client is available for free to the public, Tungle had plans to added some premium features such as Advanced Tungle Synchronization and Advanced Tungle Suggest that priced at $10 each for a year.

“Tungle is powerful and unlike any other online calendar solution available to people today. Before a user sends a meeting request, our solution gives users a snapshot view of the times their friends, co-workers or business associates are free or busy. This makes it much easier to schedule meetings, and why this feature is so popular within corporate workgroup environments. Because Tungle transcends a single corporation or computer system, people can schedule meetings with friends, colleagues or co-workers no matter where they are or what time management or groupware solution they use. As we progress through the beta period, we will continue to add the features that users find effective - and that set us apart from the competition.” Said Marc Gingras, CEO at Tungle Corporation.

Tungle was founded by Marc Gingras, a former venture capitalist. He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Masters degree in Management Sciences from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from INSEAD.

UUSee, a company co-founded by Zhu Li 李竹, an alumni of reputable Tsinghua University of China in year 2003. It went into offering peer-to-peer (P2P) services to the end-user market in year 2005 and also received funding from Sequoia Capital in the same year. UUSee has just secured another $23.5 million from venture capitalists in a new round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) Growth Fund and Highland Capital Partners, with Steamboat Ventures joining as a new investor and additional participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital China and Susquehanna International Group, according to the ShanghaiDaily.com.

“This financing represents further endorsement of our progress to date and the very large market opportunity that has emerged for broadband media in China, DFJ Growth Fund, Highland and Steamboat Ventures are top-tier firms that have relevant expertise, relationships and capital to help us achieve further growth and expand our leadership in the market.” Stated by Zhu Li.

Currently UUSee, a company based in Beijing has 36 million users and had some exclusive partnerships with the leading content providers such as CCTV, i.e. China’s largest TV broadcaster, Beijing TV and CSAT, i.e. China’s leading satellite operator.

You can download UUSee’s latest P2P version, i.e. 2.0.0.1 by clicking here.

It’s a week after BitTorrent launched its BitTorrent Entertainment Network on 26th last month. I’ve been busy tracking and reading what people talked about the newest online services offered by BitTorrent. I believed that most people were still wondering around whether this pay-service will be succeed in the market eventually. From a simple idea originally came up by Bram Cohen, founder of BitTorrent that there should be a better way to distribute contents on the web, and now a new pay-service business model emerged, BitTorrent is on their way to prove the people that legally movie download is a viable business in the future.

BitTorrent claimed the Entertainment Network that they found is a true marketplace for one-stop distribution platform for movies, TV, music or podcasts. Now they charge $3.99 for the newly released movie while older titles are $2.99 to rent. TV shows and music videos are download-to-own at $1.99 each, according to their press release. Besides, rented content can be downloaded within 30 days from the transaction and 24 hours to watch it after the user made the payment, as listed in their terms of service. However, music and some games are offered at charge for the users.

I’ve been reading some news that people are complaining the issues of slow download, bandwidth hurdle, compatibility issues as well as the some other peer-to-peer (P2P) services are on par with BitTorrent, if not better, and etc. It seems that people are not adapt to this pay-service business model, and to some people, P2P mean free at a certain point. When an user decides to buy a service, his/her expectation becomes higher, and higher everyday. There is always an obstacle for companies when they start to monetize their web distributed movies, TV episodes, and etc. and assume, not able to send huge those digital files as mentioned just now in a steady stream to their users.

On the business side, I see BitTorrent as a company that engineers rule and now turn into the marketers rule. Despite the foresee potential of this emerged business model, there is still a shortcoming: I wonder the large percentage of BitTorrent’s current users would buy this idea and willingly to pay for the service render, from the download rates that I observed on their pages. It could be the biggest task for BitTorrent to open a new market for them right now. How they going to persuade their current user base to pay for the movie download is still a big question for months to come. It might leave a big room for new players to establish themselves in the market as a branded distribution medium for the existing BitTorrent’s users. Additionally, many people in the past have attributed the success of BitTorrent is due to the right timing, however, it became apparent that when a P2P become legal, it would definitely under pressure to perform.

I just came across an interesting peer-to-peer site that called Raketu.tv that provided by Raketu Communications Inc.. It is an application that combined the popular features of ipTV and social networking. Currently this application is only available in Windows platform, and they did not mentioned when their beta version will be available to run on Mac or Linux. In matter of fact, Raketu Communications that launched in September last year, has so far released a number of applications that all utilized the peer-to-peer technology. My sense is that this company has growing steadily as you can notice that they’ve included the Russian, and Chinese version to their line of products. Besides, they followed the footstep of Skype closely. On the web page, they have released a product that called RakOut and I’ve been quite surprise when they compared their product with Skype face-to-face and published a press release that entitled, “Skype’s out – RakOut with Raketu” that ended with the skype-release.php.

Raketu.tv has so far closed some content partnership deals with several companies, including Media Global Intertainment, (MGI), NamcheTV and KlikVU.com. It seems that the management of Raketu was favorably to further expansion and had consistently pursued a strategy for growth since its first inception. According to this article, “We are extremely pleased to be partnering with MGI and KlikVU.com,” said Greg Parker, President of Raketu. “Through Raketu.tv, users will be able to watch this popular entertainment content, while interacting with their friends from anywhere in the world.”

Positioned as a one-stop provider for peer-to-peer technology in Internet calling and TV, Raketu is no doubt want to capture a bigger market than the leading and famous player in the market, such as Skype and Joost. Suppose the Internet calling and ipTV market is such big that a new firm should not adopt, develop, and market these two lines of products under one roof, I personally feel it is not a good business strategy. Sometimes I made mistake in my blog writing, I always like to compare a new startup with an established player, or a strong player in that particular field. It seems that Internet calling, peer-to-peer, ipTV, video sharing, social networking, some other web 2.0 ideas, every new start-up want to venture into these fields. I do not want to call this company as a copycat of Skype, still, I believe it is not. But I really like to observe a lot of new startups that prepared to do the greenfield market development in order to build a customer base.

Skype Pro finally launched in Europe. For this product, I have posted a post in last month entitled, “Skype Pro To Be Launched.” In that post, I did talked about how I feel about the product to be launched, and whether it will eventually success in the market or not. In less than a month, it has launched in its first target market, i.e. the selected countries in Europe. It is currently only available in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

I maintained my perspective on the launched of this Skype Pro, why Skype charge for as minimum as €2 per month is for the purpose of market penetration. As the VP & GM of Telecoms at Skype, Stefan Oberg said, “With Skype Pro, we’re making it easier for our 171m registered users to buy our paid for communications products. Skype Pro lets you call landlines and mobiles all over the world for exceptional value. The combination of Skype’s free features with Skype Pro is very compelling. Along with zero per minute calling, Skype Pro includes free voicemail, a generous discount on SkypeIn numbers, attractively priced Skype devices plus five euros of SkypeOut(TM) credit when you sign up for five months. Skype Pro is a simple and cost-effective way for people to keep in touch with one another the world over” According to this press release.

An apparent benefit for Skype Pro launched in the market is about the monopoly power that Skype might achieved with this €2 per month, their pricing model. Another benefit of implementing this pricing model is the knowledge that eBay could gained from launching a paid-service to the users, once an user starting to accept that paying to get a premium service is worthy, eBay will gain their confidence in rolling out a ton of products that label with a price. Some argued that right timing is a decisive factor for a product to be success or fail in the market, but regardless what will be the outcome of this product launched, I think eBay must learn how to use the Skype Pro’s market reports in order to better modify the behavior of their customers.