Napster was an American peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.
Streaming media refers to multimedia for playback using an offline or online media player that is delivered through a network. Media is transferred in a "stream" of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains an entire media file before consuming the content. Streaming is presently most prevalent in video-on-demand, streaming television, and music streaming services over the Internet.
Shawn Fanning is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing platforms, in 1999. The popularity of Napster was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine.
Friendster is a social networking service originally based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages, and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networking services.
Sean Parker is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and was the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com, and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement. He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. On the Forbes 2022 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked No. 1,096 with a net worth of US$2.8 billion.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
Scott Snibbe is an interactive media artist, author, entrepreneur, and meditation instructor who hosts the Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment meditation podcast. His first book, How to Train a Happy Mind, was released in 2024. Snibbe has collaborated with other artists and musicians, including Björk on her interactive “app album” Björk: Biophilia that was acquired by New York's MoMA as the first downloadable app in the museum's collection. Between 2000 and 2013 he founded several companies, including Eyegroove, which was acquired by Facebook in 2016. Early in his career, Snibbe was one of the developers of After Effects.
The online service imeem was a social media website where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos. It operated from 2003 until 2009 when it was shut down after being acquired by MySpace.
Ali Aydar is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer of Sporcle.
RockYou was a company that developed widgets for MySpace and implemented applications for various social networks and Facebook. Since 2014, it has engaged primarily in the purchases of rights to classic video games; it incorporates in-game ads and re-distributes the games.
Behance, stylized as Bēhance, is a social media platform owned by Adobe whose main focus is to showcase and discover creative work.
Fatal System Error (2010) is a book by Joseph Menn, an investigative technology reporter at The Washington Post, and previously with Reuters, the Financial Times and Los Angeles Times.
Wayne Chang is an American entrepreneur, angel investor, film producer, and philanthropist. He is best known for founding Crashlytics, a startup acquired by Twitter in 2013. He is also known for creating a filesharing network called i2hub, making various seed investments, and his lawsuit against the Winklevoss brothers.
Music piracy is the copying and distributing of recordings of a piece of music for which the rights owners did not give consent. In the contemporary legal environment, it is a form of copyright infringement, which may be either a civil wrong or a crime depending on jurisdiction. The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw much controversy over the ethics of redistributing media content, how much production and distribution companies in the media were losing, and the very scope of what ought to be considered piracy – and cases involving the piracy of music were among the most frequently discussed in the debate.
Qwiki was a New York City–based startup automated video production company acquired by Yahoo! on July 2, 2013 for a reported $50 million. Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user's camera roll into movies to share. The company's initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best "Search and Reference" application of 2011.
Jordan Ritter is an American serial entrepreneur, software architect and angel investor. He is best known for his work at Napster, the file-sharing service he co-founded along with Shawn Fanning and others. His time at Napster was documented in Joseph Menn's book All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster and Alex Winter's film Downloaded.
The Facebook Effect is a book by David Kirkpatrick and published by Simon & Schuster. It describes the history of Facebook and its social implications.
Votizen is a consumer technology company that is developing an online network of voters in the United States. Based in Mountain View, California, the site allows its members, which it calls "Votizens", to learn about issues and elections, and take collective action with other committed voters through social media. Votizen verifies that each voice belongs to a real voter in the real world. As of 2012, Votizen had mapped out over a million connections between voters on Votizen. It was acquired by activism platform Causes in 2013.
Downloaded is a documentary film directed by Alex Winter about the downloading generation and the impact of filesharing on the Internet. A teaser of the film premiered at SXSW on March 14, 2012. The feature film made its world premiere at SXSW on March 10, 2013, and was shown at other film festivals around the world. VH1 partnered with AOL to distribute the film widely and was broadcast as a VH1 Rock Docs feature in late 2014.
Riovic Capital Group, or simply Riovic, is a financial technology and investment company that specializes in emerging technologies.
