Last week, online auction giant, eBay, said it would appeal a $63 million ruling against it by a French court, which found the company liable for facilitating the sale of counterfeit luxury goods, including the famed Louis Vuitton signature handbags. The suit was brought by LVMH Group, which owns the...
Not to be confused with file-sharing service Drop.io, similarly named Dropbox lets you back up, sync, and share files. It's an invitation-only beta for the moment, but Business Hacks has scored 250 invitations so you can get started without waiting in line! A...
I got a link to an interview transcript from On the Media, the NPR program about the media industry, and had to pass it on because it's one of the smarter discussions on technology and the Internet I've seen in a while. Jonathan Zittrain was hawking his new book, The...
Music industry is facing the music now. Big stakeholders try very hard to maintain their positions while other players see opportunities in the advent of peer-to-peer networks. Music, as a kind of representative information good, deserves its economic properties to be examined and made explicit. Using the familiar Hotelling (1929)...
To manage the risks associated with illegal file-swapping, this paper recommend the following: Publish a general statement of policy governing use of the corporate network, Centralize software acquisition and control, Consider using software designed to find and delete unauthorized applications, including file-swapping software, Consider using desktop anti-virus protection and Institute...
Blender magazine recently named the killing of Napster by the major labels the Biggest Record Company Screw-Up of All Time. While that's hardly news, it is interesting that the title was bestowed in a time when there is evidence that, seven years after Napster was squashed, big corporations are finally...
Harvard Business Review has just published its top breakthrough business ideas for 2008 Registration required. The list of 22 trends ranges wide, from a public transit agency that uses crowd sourcing to improve service, to hackers who increasingly are outsourcing their nefarious deeds to service providers. Want a real...
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama treat their supporters differently. Clinton considers her backers as "customers" while Obama sees his supporters as "members", says consultant John Sviokla on a new post on Harvard Business. The difference? "When you give money to Clinton's campaign, you get a confirmation. When...
Peer-to-peer embraces the networking capabilities of the Internet. “P2P” as dubbed by advocates enables the sharing and direct publication of resources and also allows the unused processing capability of computers to be shared and used more productively. While the peer-to-peer concept has, in fact, been around for decades, it’s grown...
Last Friday Germany passed a copyright law which bans consumers from copying DVDs and music, even for personal use, thereby criminalizing a huge swath of the computer literate population. We'll see how enforcement goes. In the meantime, Britain's Guardian Unlimited ran a thought provoking column arguing against just these sorts...
Advances in distributed service-oriented computing and internet technology have formed a strong technology push for outsourcing and information sharing. There is an increasing need for organizations to share their data across organization boundaries both within the country and with countries that may have lesser privacy and security standards. Ideally, the...
The e-Policy Best Practices Guide from St. Bernard is an invaluable tool for IT and HR professionals tasked with creating and enforcing an Acceptable Use Policy AUP for their organizations. This clear and thorough document gives you the dos and don'ts of e-policy best practices and covers the electronic activities...
Large attachments tend to wreak havoc with mail servers, many of which balk at anything larger than 5MB. So what happens when you need to send a big file or batch of files to, say, a client or co-worker? Here are three free and easy solutions: Gmail - The beloved Webmail...
Windows Meeting Space, Vista's replacement for NetMeeting, is a peer-to-peer application that enables as many as 10 users to conduct virtual meetings and share desktops, applications, files, and presentations. Here's an overview of what WMS has to offer.
Do you have a file you created on your desktop machie at work, which you want want to access later from your computer or at home, but which is too big to email to yourself? Theres plenty of .zip and FTP software available, but many of them are...
Global site committees are trustees of a company's global online presence. But these committees are ineffective when they concentrate power at headquarters, lack stakeholder representation, and don't encourage peer-to-peer communication. To be effective, global site committees need regional communication structures, distributed decision-making, and accountability in proportion to responsibility.
In the view of the emerging semantic web technologies, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is looking for knowledge-driven domains to better exploit its technological potential. At the same time, driven by economical and social trends, Knowledge Management KM is questioning its centralized nature assumption and is looking for a technological paradigm in order...
The paper describes and gives an economic analysis of a business model for commercial Content Delivery Networks CDN based on the Peer-to-Peer model. The content is stored in the CDN on the hosts of the peers. A user pays for access to the content, and can sell the content to...
