Corporate « Digital Bazaar

Bitmunk 3.2.2: Good Relations and Greening

Published May 6th, 2010

We are happy to announce the latest release of the Bitmunk Website and the PaySwarm software. It has been three months since our last release. This launch has a number of new features that are pretty exciting:

Green Computing – We have replaced the standard Apache+PHP+Smarty web server stack with the Monarch Web server stack. This has improved performance by 468% and reduced the number of servers we need by a factor of 4. Reducing our carbon footprint by 4x is not only green, but greatly reduces long-term operating and maintenance costs as well.
Semantic Web – We have published a new set of over 74 million pieces of machine-readable data in our pages, 11 million of which consist of pricing data via the Good Relations Vocabulary. We are using RDFa to publish the data.
The Experience – Finding and buying what you want is now faster, with less annoying screens in the way between you and your music. The PaySwarm software now supports Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit versions).

Read on to find out more…

Bitmunk 3.2.1: Video and Data Sales

Published January 31st, 2010

Bitmunk 3.2.1 was released this weekend, which included several bug fixes and the basis of two new really cool features.

While we were polishing the Bitmunk 3.2 release, we spent the time to make Firefox integration a bit cleaner:

We now support Firefox 3.6.
Only one tab is created for the Bitmunk Personal Edition software. That tab is focused whenever you purchase anything via Bitmunk
Firefox will now auto-discover the page that you use to control your Bitmunk software.
The interface has been made a bit more responsive.

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Monarch: Next Generation REST Web Services

Published December 14th, 2009

Network-centric computing has been gaining significant mind-share over the past decade. We have started to shift our thinking of our computing environment from applications and documents that strictly reside on our personal computers to applications and documents that may reside on a variety of websites on the Internet. From Gmail, to Dropbox, to Facebook, to Twitter – the landscape of how we interact with computers is changing.

The companies that understand this shift to Web Services and build out technology to track this shift in usage will emerge as the leaders of the computing industry in the next several years. Their infrastructure will be a competitive advantage, specifically – how quickly and efficiently their developers will be able to grow their services while keeping costs down.

To help the industry take advantage of this shift, we have released Monarch as an open source project. Monarch is a state-of-the-art Web Services framework. It is used to build the core web services that a company will provide its customers. Scaling up and out while reducing costs will separate the market leaders from the rest of the pack – Monarch provides this competitive advantage…

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Bitmunk 3.2: The Legal P2P Music Network

Published November 30th, 2009

Today, we launched Bitmunk Personal Edition 3.2 – the first piece of software in the world to enable collaborative content distribution. Bitmunk is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser. This release adds the ability to sell DRM-free music from your computer, on behalf of artists, via an open, standards-based, peer-to-peer network.

We will be working toward standardizing this technology for web browsers over the next several years. This work will establish a world-wide, open mechanism for the distribution of digital content via web browsers that not only benefit artists, but fans as well. In short – when a file is traded using Bitmunk 3.2, the artist is paid and the fan is paid. You can legally resell the music you buy via the network and get paid for the bandwidth you contribute to the sale.

This is a bold new approach to music distribution. We certainly think it is inevitable that digital content will eventually be distributed in this way. Here’s how it works…

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An Open Digital Media Commerce Standard

Published September 28th, 2009

This article outlines how Digital Bazaar, since 2007, has been using Semantic Web Technology to establish a set of open mark-up and communication standards for Web-based, peer-to-peer marketplaces. The system that Digital Bazaar has created, called Bitmunk, is used to transact digital media such as music, movies, television and books between independent agents on the Web. The decentralzied nature of the peer-to-peer marketplace requires flexible, open standards for communication and knowledge representation…

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The Pirate Bay and Building an Equitable Culture

Published August 30th, 2009

The latest site to gain the full attention and ire of the RIAA, MPAA, and copyright holders worldwide is The Pirate Bay (TPB). Or rather, it was the Pirate Bay until their owners were raided, sued, tried and sentenced earlier this month. The Pirate Bay is the latest link in a long chain of peer-to-peer companies that have met their end at the hands of international copyright law. It is also the target of a post-litigation buy-out attempt by a company who wants to monetize the over 25 million community members of TPB…

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Bitmunk 3.1: Browser-based P2P Commerce

Published June 29th, 2009

Today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Bitmunk peer-to-peer commerce platform. The software release that went live earlier today is the culmination of over 26 months of development, hundreds of thousands of lines of code writes and re-writes and the dream of a small group of us that are trying to fundamentally change the way people buy and sell digital goods on the Internet.

On the surface, Bitmunk looks much like a web-based digital content store specializing in MP3 music sales. People can come to the site and purchase songs and albums for very competitive prices (cheaper than iTunes and Amazon.com).

There is, however, a deeper history and a grander goal for Bitmunk…

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A Collaborative Distribution Model for Music

Published April 4th, 2009

The music industry, via Choruss, is shopping a new music licensing model around to universities in the United States. Like some before it, this one attempts to address the still rampant music piracy occurring via peer-to-peer networks by enforcing a pseudo-mandatory collective licensing agreement on every student attending a participating university. There were a number of very interesting parts to the proposal that we would like to work on improving with Choruss and any partner universities. There were also a few propositions that we think are harmful to the industry, artists and fans as a whole.

It should be no surprise that we think that any sort of mandatory collective licensing is a very bad idea, as is the “covenant not to sue” approach that Choruss is currently pursuing. Voluntary collective licensing, as proposed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is not a good alternative either…

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Absorbing Costs Considered Harmful

Published February 27th, 2009

Bitmunk was founded on a number of principles that we have, unfortunately, not codified on the website yet. One of those principles is the concept that we will always strive to give a detailed break-down of the costs associated with the purchase of any digital good on our network. While some of our customers may not care about where the money goes, others do want to know exactly how much is going to the artist. The fundamental principle at work here is transparency. We believe that transparency regarding how we run our network, manage our costs and reward artists, buyers and sellers is a fundamental operating principle for Digital Bazaar.

Displaying credit card fees have been a part of this transparency. We list all fees that credit card processors charge so that our customers know where their money is going. Typically, this has been about 4.17% per credit card transaction. That is money that goes directly to the credit card agency and we include it as a line item on our website so that our customers know that we aren’t profiting in any way from that charge.

Credit card processors vary widely in the services that they provide as well as their technical sophistication. We have been appalled at how backwards some of the transaction systems are in the banking industry. Credit card processing is no different. Typically, when you use your credit card, some online stores don’t check your address. In other words, they bypass address verification completely because many people enter their addresses incorrectly.

The seedy under-belly of credit card transaction processing…

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W3C: RDFa 1.0 is Official

Published October 15th, 2008

RDFa became an official World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation today. This means that it has undergone an intense amount of design, feedback, development and scrutiny to become a recognized world-wide standard for the expression of web semantics. Manu Sporny, Digital Bazaar’s Founder, has been directly involved with the RDFa Task Force and the standardization work…

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POSIX Threads Don’t Scale Past 100K Concurrent Web Service Requests (Part 1/2)

Published September 30th, 2008

Hard times are upon our financial sector. The US financial markets are in turmoil. Many companies will be cutting spending as a squeeze is placed on operating budgets over the next couple of months, if not years. This is usually good news to the technology sector as most cost cutting measures depend on technology to…

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Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches

Published July 3rd, 2008

Today, is a big milestone – the release of the Bitmunk 3.0 website. This is a release that has been in the making for 18 months. While much of the functionality facing our customers has not changed, everything behind the scenes has received a huge update. You can still search, browse, and purchase music and…

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Blacksburg BarCamp 1.0

Published May 15th, 2008

The very first BarCamp in Blacksburg is going to be happening on June 14th, 2008. Make sure to tell all your technologist friends and direct them towards the following website: Blacksburg BarCamp 1.0 Here are the sessions so far for the day, but new ones could be added or these ones could be changed slightly…

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Dynamic Spectrum Auctions and Digital Marketplaces

Published April 24th, 2008

Chances are that your cell-phone’s data connection is slow compared to most wired connection speeds. This is especially true in the United States. An emerging field, called Software Defined Radio and Cognitive Radio, is starting to make headway in changing the way we use the airwaves. Two of the leading universities in the world on…

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The Next Generation of Bitmunk Technology

Published March 14th, 2008

In the next several months, we will be releasing technology that has been in development in our R&D labs for over a year and a half. This will be version 3.0 of our technology and it is a massive leap in speed, size reduction, and interoperability. What follows is a quick run-down on what we’re…

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Over One Million Songs Available on Bitmunk

Published October 29th, 2007

When Bitmunk launched over three years ago, we had 3,280 songs available for sale. Bitmunk was the first peer-to-peer distribution platform out there that was DRM-free and rewarded fans for trading songs by giving them a cut of the sale. It brought the record companies, music fans and music distributors together. We knew we were…

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Bitmunk Blazes Path in Film and TV

Published July 4th, 2007

Bitmunkers around the world have something to celebrate on this 4th of July – the launch of a full line of film and television services via our website and secure file distribution network. High Definition digital distribution of television, film and video shorts have arrived on Bitmunk! Read on to learn more about the exciting…

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Starfish Distributed Filesystem Launched

Published March 19th, 2007

As promised last month, we are releasing our clustered storage solution to the general public. Starfish is basically a turbo-charged version of the Google File System, with a focus on data reliability, scalability, very low total cost of ownership and ease of use. Software packages, tutorials and source code are available from the Official Starfish…

Starfish: Massive Storage for Everybody

Published February 26th, 2007

We have always had a very big data storage problem. Our storage facility is eventually going to have to hold every minutely popular song, album, television show, movie, piece of software, video game, book and any other authorized piece of digital content that the world has to offer. That is hundreds of thousands of terabytes…

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The First Open Source P2P Digital Content Transaction Platform in History

Published January 15th, 2007

To build and launch the first copyright-respecting P2P Digital Content Transaction Platforms in the world is no small feat. We are here because of the extraordinary efforts of volunteers that donate their time to open source software. Linux, Apache, Python, PHP, MySQL, and Lustre are just a few of the open source technologies that we…

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