Ali Aydar

Last updated
Ali Aydar
OccupationCEO, Sporcle
Known forEarly Napster employee, SNOCAP executive, imeem executive

Ali Aydar is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer at Sporcle.

Contents

He is best known as an early employee and key technical contributor at the original Napster, the file-sharing service created by Shawn Fanning in 1999, and at SNOCAP, the digital rights and content management startup Fanning founded after Napster. He was also chief operating officer of imeem, which acquired SNOCAP in 2008.

Early life

Ali Aydar was born to a Turkish family in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up in Napoleon, Michigan. In high school, he ran a bulletin board system by the name of Awesome Fred's BBS.[ citation needed ] After high school, he attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he majored in mathematics and computer science. While there, Aydar was a contributor to the Free Internet Chess Server, an open-source project that enabled people to play online chess for free. This experience led to Aydar co-founding online chess startup chess.net with John Fanning, the uncle of Napster creator Shawn Fanning, in 1996.

Career

While working at chess.net, Aydar first met Fanning's then 15-year-old nephew, Shawn. In All the Rave, Joseph Menn notes that Shawn interned for chess.net in the summer of 1997, sleeping on a couch in the living room. That summer, Aydar and the other chess.net employees became close with the younger Fanning, who was just learning computer programming. Aydar bought Fanning his first book on programming in C++, the language he would use two years later to build the Napster file-sharing software. [1]

Napster

After leaving chess.net, Aydar moved to Chicago, where he worked as a banker. [1] In late 1998, Shawn Fanning contacted Aydar via instant messenger to tell him about a software application he was writing that would enable people to share music. Fanning was then a freshman at Northeastern University. [1]

In August 1999, Aydar moved to California's Silicon Valley to work for a startup. Within weeks, he was recruited to join Napster. He joined in September 1999, becoming its first non-founding employee. [2]

Initially, Aydar was an individual contributor to Napster's engineering team. Eventually, he moved into a management role as Napster's senior director of technology, where he was responsible for managing the development of Napster's next-generation legal service. [3] [4] [5]

Aydar authored Napster's search engine software, which supported the millions of search queries Napster users made every day. At that time, Napster was the fastest-growing application in the history of the Internet; [6] [7] at its peak, the service had over 85 million registered users and 2 million simultaneous users around the world. [8] Aydar's server software infrastructure successfully scaled to handle the exponential increase in Napster search queries, helping support Napster's unprecedented growth.

Following Napster's shutdown and subsequent bankruptcy, Aydar served as an advisor to the management team of software company Roxio during its 2003 acquisition of music service Pressplay.

SNOCAP

In June 2003, Aydar joined Shawn Fanning, Jordan Mendelson and Ron Conway at SNOCAP, the digital rights and content management startup Fanning founded after Napster's collapse. A significant number of its employees were people who had worked for Napster; an August 2005 profile in Time magazine noted that "27% of SNOCAP's employees are Napster veterans." [9]

Aydar served as SNOCAP's chief operating officer from the company's inception through its acquisition by imeem in 2008, and for a year also served as its interim CEO. He co-invented SNOCAP's digital registry and MyStore technologies. [10] While at SNOCAP, he also completed an MBA from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, on a part-time basis.

imeem

Aydar joined imeem as part of its acquisition of SNOCAP in April 2008, [11] and served as the company's chief operating officer. He was an early advisor to imeem, serving on its board of directors from 2003 until 2007. imeem was acquired by MySpace in December 2009. [12]

Sporcle

Aydar serves as CEO of Sporcle. [13]

Related Research Articles

Napster is an audio streaming service provider owned by MelodyVR. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, as a pioneering peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software service with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. As the software became popular, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. Its assets were eventually acquired by Roxio, and it re-emerged as an online music store. Best Buy later purchased the service and merged it with its Rhapsody branding on December 1, 2011.

Red Hat Software company providing open-source software products

Red Hat, Inc. is an American IBM subsidiary software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.

Shawn Fanning American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and angel investor

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.

Justin Frankel is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER digital audio workstation, the NINJAM collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor. In 2002, he was named in the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Napster (streaming service) Rhapsody music streaming service post-2016 rebranding

Rhapsody International, Inc., d/b/a Napster since June 2016, is a music streaming service based in Seattle, Washington. Napster started as an audio search engine named Aladdin that was purchased by Listen.com in May 2001 and became the basis for its new streaming service, called Rhapsody, that launched in December of the same year. Based on the Open Music Model principles, Rhapsody was the first streaming on-demand music subscription service to offer unlimited access to a large library of digital music for a flat monthly fee. In August 2003 internet media behemoth RealNetworks, anticipating the launch of Apple's iTunes store, acquired Rhapsody. On April 6, 2010, Rhapsody relaunched as a standalone company, separate from former parent RealNetworks. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version of digital rights management enforced on AAC+ or WMA files.

An Internet chess server (ICS) is an external server that provides the facility to play, discuss, and view the board game of chess over the Internet. The term specifically refers to facilities for connecting players through a variety of graphical chess clients located on each user's computer.

SNOCAP

SNOCAP was founded by Shawn Fanning, Jordan Mendelson, and Ron Conway. Other SNOCAP employees included music lawyer Christian Castle, the company's first General Counsel, and Ali Aydar, the company's Chief Operating Officer, who joined imeem after its acquisition of SNOCAP in April 2008.

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.

Jeffrey Mallett is a Canadian entrepreneur and investor. He is best known for building internet giant Yahoo!. Described as Yahoo's "wizard behind the curtains pulling all the levers," Mallett manages a portfolio of Internet, sports, entertainment and real estate investments in the United States, Canada, England, and China.

Box (company) Cloud content management program

Box, Inc. is a public company based in Redwood City, California. It develops and markets cloud-based content management, collaboration, and file sharing tools for businesses. Box was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith. Initially, it focused on consumers, but around 2009 and 2010 Box pivoted to focus on business users. The company raised about $500 million over numerous funding rounds, before going public in 2015. Its software allows users to store and manage files in an online folder system accessible from any device. Users can then comment on the files, share them, apply workflows, and implement security and governance policies.

William Christopher “Chris” Gorog is an entertainment and technology executive that has served in senior leadership positions in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, including as chairman and chief executive officer of Napster, a top digital music brand, and Roxio.

Folio Corporation was founded in 1987 by Curt Allen and his brother-in-law Brad Pelo with programmers Mark Wolfgramm and Brandt Redd. It quickly gained recognition for helping other companies to publish content on local area networks and on digital CD-ROMs for use on desktop computers. Allen and Pelo were both students at BYU; Allen was in mechanical engineering and Pelo was in public policy. During the 1986 summer break, they began working on a computer program that would index, compress, and continually update text information. In 1988 they were joined by Henry Heilesen who brought a wealth of experience in the publishing industry. Success came that year when Novell agreed to provide a read-only version of Folio's software with every NetWare operating system that Novell shipped.

Dalton Caldwell is an American technologist and digital music entrepreneur. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Mixed Media Labs. He currently works as a partner at Y Combinator.

Kroogi [Russian: Круги, translation: circles] is a social networking service where musicians, painters, writers, videographers, photographers, and other users and organizations that wish to share their projects with the world, showcase their work. Their supporters can follow their activity, download content, and make monetary contributions.

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.

Jordan Ritter

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.

Metallica, et al. v. Napster, Inc. was a 2000 U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California case that focused on copyright infringement, racketeering, and unlawful use of digital audio interface devices. Metallica vs. Napster, Inc. was the first case that involved an artist suing a peer-to-peer file sharing ("P2P") software company.

ServiceNow American technology company

ServiceNow is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. Founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, ServiceNow is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Russell 1000 Index and S&P 500 Index. In 2018, Forbes magazine named it number one on its list of the world's most innovative companies.

<i>Downloaded</i> (film) 2013 film

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.

Adrian Scott is a social networking site founder, technology entrepreneur, investor, and film and TV actor. He is best known as founder of the social networking site Ryze in the summer of 2001, and as a founding investor in Napster.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Napster wounds the giant : Music : The Rocky Mountain News
  2. ↑ Banking on Snocap / After alienating music industry, Napster founder tries to help it – SFGate
  3. ↑ "SNOCAP » About SNOCAP » Management Bios". Archived from the original on 12 August 2007.
  4. ↑ Cohen, Adam (February 26, 2001). "In Search Of Napster II". Time . Archived from the original 14 March 2008.
  5. ↑ Gibney Jr., Frank (November 13, 2000). "Napster Meister". Time. Archived from the original 25 February 2009.
  6. ↑ Napster among fastest-growing Net technologies – CNET News
  7. ↑ Greenfeld, Karl Taro (March 27, 2000). "The Free Juke Box". Time. Archived from the original 9 May 2007.
  8. ↑ "Testimony". Judiciary.senate.gov. 2010-07-08. Archived from the original on 2012-09-02. Retrieved 2013-08-17.
  9. ↑ Dell, Kristina (7 August 2005). "Sharing Music, Legally". Time. Archived from the original 6 March 2008.
  10. ↑ Ali Aydar | LinkedIn
  11. ↑ Imeem Confirms Snocap Acquisition | TechCrunch
  12. ↑ MySpace Music Acquires Shuttered Imeem Music Service | Wired Business | Wired.com
  13. ↑ Matt Ramme of Sporcle offers 'mentally stimulating diversions' – The Tartan Online
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.