Machsend release – P2P file transfers inside the browser
Jul1
After a private beta of Machsend, it’s now being released publicly – check it out.
Machsend lets you send files to people without any size restrictions. Files are sent in a P2P fashion, straight from one client to another – which means transfers are faster, and you don’t have to trust a third party with your data.
If you’re on the same LAN, files are sent directly. Otherwise a type of firewall traversal allows the two clients connect (which works on about 80% of firewalls). There are few good papers that explain more here and here.
Machsend uses Yahoo! BrowserPlus to perform this TCP magic.
Data transfers are unlimited – I’ve sent gigabytes over the system without any trouble.
Machsend works on OSX and Windows. Unfortunately there isn’t a version of BrowserPlus for Linux yet, but one is being developed.
There are a few more details on the ‘about‘ page.
An Entrepreneur’s Top 5 Practical Books
Jul5
I find that a lot of business books I’ve read are far too high level to be useful, and although they might give you some indication of what’s to come ahead, they provide little advice on how to tackle problems or any nuances you should take into account.
There’s a reason why few practical business books have been written, and that’s because it’s a hard balancing keeping the content applicable and useful, without making it too case specific.
However, there are some out there. The following are list of books that fulfill the criteria of being both practical and useful. If you’ve got any favorites of your own, please suggest them in the comments.
1. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law
As an entrepreneur, you have to be pretty clued up on the legal side of things, to try and prevent making any fatal mistakes. In my opinion, this is one of the most valuable books in an entrepreneur’s arsenal and covers topics such as incorporation, intellectual property, venture capital and contract law.
Socialmod moderates Audi’s new site
Jul0
Audi have launched a new site for the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Along with photos and videos, Audi are interacting with their community by embedding a moderated Twitter feed into their site.
Any tweet with the hash tag #audifos is put on a Socialmod queue and, once moderated, is displayed on Audi’s site.
Socialmod moderates BET.com Awards
Jul0
Last weekend was the BET Awards which over 5.8 million people tuned into.
BET ran a coordinated website to the awards, which they updated throughout the ceremony. They also had a ‘Wall of Tweets‘, showing all the Twitter commentary mentioning their awards, and tweets from selected artists and celebrities.
Socialmod did the moderation for all the ‘tweets’, preventing any libelous or objectionable content appearing on their website.
At one stage the top 9 trending topics on Twitter all referred to the BET Awards, so we had many thousands of tweets to process. Their moderators were working throughout the awards to try and get people’s tweets displayed as soon as possible.
We received about 1.3 million hits during the awards, so we had to provision a few more servers. However, our server setup is elastic, which means we easily scaled with the extra demand.
Machsend – P2P file sharing in the browser
Jul5
Recently I’ve been developing a project called Machsend which enables P2P file transfers from inside the browser.
The process goes:
- Bob navigates to the site, and drags files onto it
- Bob then sends his uniquely generated link to Alice
- Alice opens the link, can see Bob’s shared files, and downloads them
The file transfer is direct between users – it isn’t sent to any third party servers. This means it’s fast, and secure.
Files on the same network will transfer locally, greatly speeding up the process.
It also means there are no bandwidth bills to host the application, so it’ll be offered free, for unlimited size transfers (Machsend can transfer gigabytes without a problem).
Machsend is cross platform, and will work with about 85% of routers. It uses Yahoo BrowserPlus, which can be installed from within the browser, without a restart.
I’m looking for Beta Testers – so if you’re interested, please join the Google Group.