SAN FRANCISCO (www.redherring.com) - When contestants on the popular television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? choose between asking the audience for help or phoning a friend, polling the audience usually produces better results. Peer-to-peer networks are based on roughly the same concept: Data that travels between linked computers is more valuable than that held by any one person. Napster, Freenet and Gnutella have only just begun to tap this idea.
A Mountain View, Calif., startup code-named XDegrees claims to be developing software that will manage the flow of metadata, or data about data, in peer-to-peer networks. In effect, it will provide a P2P platform that will include infrastructure services like traffic routing, naming, security, caching, file-sharing and messaging.
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If you find that the same e-mail is being deleted (by many users) within the first minute that people view it, you can make a decision that individually you could not have made.
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Michael Tanne
XDegrees CEO |
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XDegrees was founded in August with an $8 million investment from Redpoint Ventures and a new venture fund, the Cambrian, whose contributions come from former executives from Compaq Computer, Netscape, and Macromedia.
Entrepreneurialism is old hat to XDegrees' founders: CEO Michael Tanne, most recently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures, founded Adforce, which he sold to CMGI (CMGI: Research, Estimates) for about $500 million. Cofounders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan previously founded the shopping-bot maker Junglee, which they sold to Amazon.com (AMZN: Research, Estimates) for $187 million.
Tanne says XDegrees is betting on the idea that P2P will change computing as we know it. "It's users and the way they communicate that are valuable, more than their files or their hard disks," he says, offering spam as an example. "If you find that the same e-mail is being deleted (by many users) within the first minute that people view it, you can make a decision that individually you could not have made."
In October, Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, announced the debut of Groove, a P2P platform that has been in development since 1997. XDegrees is based on similar underlying concepts but differs in a few key areas. "Groove is Notes 2000. That's not a criticism, because Notes is a great product," Tanne says. "But it's an environment that developers use. Our approach is organic and based on providing some core infrastructure and then letting application developers go where they want to go with it."
Exactly how XDegrees's technology will work is still under wraps, as the 11-person company is only beginning to creep out of stealth mode. However, according to the company's literature, the platform is structured so that standard Web development technologies (CGI scripts, active server pages, HTML) can be used to develop P2P applications. The company will license its software for use on Web sites, in corporate intranets, and for mobile work forces. The platform may finally allow P2P to move beyond simply searching for a free version of your favorite song. 
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