Napster: 10 years of change. In June 1999 a US teenager wrote a computer program that turned the music industry on its head, and created shockwaves that are still being felt by the global entertainment business a decade later.
His name is Shawn Fanning and the program was Napster. As a 19-year-old undergraduate in Boston, Fanning's program let friends connect and share music on their computers. Initially, it seemed innocuous but Napster unleashed a social, technical and commercial revolution. By letting friends swap MP3 tracks, perfect digital copies of music, Napster made the casual copying and exchanging of music among friends into a global, automated and simple process that threatened the music industry, whose business model was in no way geared, or even prepared, for the digital online age. "It feels like such a long time ago," Fanning says. Music explosion Napster allowed connected users to share the MP3 contents of their hard drives, using peer-to-peer technology to move the files from one machine to another.
Twitter Service Spotty as Attacks Continue - Bits Blog - NYTimes. Update | 8/8/09 11:45 a.m.
Here’s a link to the Times story that goes into greater depth on what happened. A massive denial-of-service attack that disabled Twitter for much of Thursday continued on Friday. Twitter said its defenses are keeping the site largely accessible to users, but some third-party applications, such as TwitterBerry for BlackBerry smartphones, are still having problems accessing the service. (Here at The Times, we’re having trouble getting through using apps and the Twitter.com site — tell us about your experience in the comments.) “In the past 24 hours, we’ve been contending with a variety of attacks that continue to change in nature and intensity.
In an e-mail, Jenna Sampson, a Twitter spokeswoman, added, “We are still cleaning up to return to full power. “We are under attack, but we are doing the best to keep the site available,” Mr. The assault is likely being orchestrated by a botnet, or a network of infected personal computers under the control of hackers, Mr. If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas?
There’s a cliché statement about entrepreneurship that says ideas are nothing without execution, rendering the former virtually worthless without the combination of hard work and luck that can transform unmaterialized concepts into viable businesses.
Some have described ideas to be a mere multiplier of execution, which is close to how I personally think about them, and I would add that the process of getting a great product out there is a vital part of what constitutes innovation in the first place. In my view, it’s not that ideas are worthless per se, it’s that they’re never more than a starting point, a launchpad.
I’ve been thinking about this all day after I read this blog post by Marjolein Hoekstra (who I consider to be a friend) about the original idea for Tweetmeme, a service that aggregates the most discussed and retweeted stories on Twitter (we use their retweet button at the bottom of blog posts, and you should use it). Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn. SlideShare Slammed with DDOS Attacks from China. SlideShare, a Mountain View-based startup that lets you upload and embed PowerPoint presentations on the web, appears to have stirred the red dragon last week. About ten days ago the company began receiving anonymous requests to delete slideshows that were deemed “illegal” by the requesters. The SlideShare staff checked out these slideshows and discovered them to be quite innocent. While some described ways to fight corruption in China, none of them violated the company’s terms of service, and so SlideShow did nothing to fulfill the requests.
SlideShare soon began receiving a different type of request from the same people, who could now be identified by their email addresses. This time they were pretending to be users who had lost their passwords. Not long after the first attack subsided, SlideShare was hit a second time on Friday and the site went down again until Saturday morning. SlideShare insists that it will do everything it can to protect its users’ freedom of speech.