Kevin Bermeister

Last updated

Kevin Bermeister
Born1960
South Africa
Occupationentrepreneur
Known for Ozisoft (founder)
Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc. (founder & CEO)
AwardsYeshiva Center Leadership in Philanthropy

Kevin Bermeister (born 1960 in South Africa [1] ) is an entrepreneur that has developed several businesses in the computer, multimedia and Internet industries.

Contents

He is a technology innovator, real estate investor, philanthropist, and the founder, chairman and CEO of Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc. (BDE). [2] Bermeister is a founding investor in a number of successful technology and real estate ventures including Skype. [3]

Career

In 1983, Bermeister established Ozisoft, one of the first interactive multimedia companies. By 1990, Ozisoft was Australia's largest video games distributor. In 1992, Bermeister and Mark Dyne successfully led a management buyout, together with Sega Enterprises, to form Sega Ozisoft Pty Limited representing exclusively the world's largest video game publisher.

In 1994, Bermeister and his property consortium Jacfun [4] negotiated rights to property at Sydney's Darling Harbour and established the interactive Sega World Sydney amusement park, operated through a joint venture including shareholders Sega Enterprises Japan, Mitsubishi Corp. and Mitsui Corp.

Bermeister founded Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc. [5] in 1996, focusing on 3D graphics streaming and compression for which it was granted 8 patents. [6] BDE was the founding member of the Distributed Industry Computing Association. [7] The company developed a number of Internet interests including Altnet, a joint venture with Joltid Ltd., [8] to develop and market secure distributed storage for content using P2P technology to reduce distribution costs and reach new audiences. In 2003 Altnet, using its distributed storage technology, became the largest provider of secure DRM content, having distributed 75 million licensed files to users of various P2P file sharing software applications. [9] Another initiative undertaken by Altnet under Bermeister's stewardship is Global File Registry, [10] which enables governments and copyright owners to police the distribution of illegal or infringing material over distributed systems and the Internet.

In 2006 BDE, Altnet and Kazaa settled major litigation with leading music and motion picture industry plaintiffs. Since then, Bermeister has focused on building and acquiring content, technology and distribution assets for BDE.

During 2006, BDE was acquired by Kinetech Inc., [11] a company with interests in patents and intellectual property licensing relating primarily to certain key distributed technologies that had been licensed by Altnet since 2002 and important to P2P storage and Global File Registry businesses of Altnet. Kinetech's patent and technology portfolio is often referred to as the True Name Patent Portfolio.

In 2008, BDE acquired the Kazaa Trademark and relaunched Kazaa [12] with music licenses from major music labels Universal, Sony, Warner Music Group and EMI, major independent record labels, and leading music publishers.

In 2011, BDE subsidiary Kinetech acquired a majority interest in PersonalWeb LLC PersonalWeb, [13] a Tyler, Texas-based technology company. PersonalWeb develops its software based in part on the 13 pending and issued patents in the Truenames Patent Portfolio. [14]

Activity in Israel

Bermeister is an active investor in Israeli real estate. [15] In his latest real estate endeavours, he teamed with an Israeli retail magnate to bid for Nof Zion, a major residential project in East Jerusalem [16] and he acquired a stake in The Leonardo Inn at the entrance to the city. [17] He is a founder of Jerusalem 5800, a long-term planning and research project for greater Jerusalem. [18]

Charity and sponsorship

Bermeister is a major benefactor and supporter of numerous charitable organisations including The Hunger Project, United Israel Appeal, Jewish Care, UniOne Foundation and Jake's Ladder, a foundation for research into cystic fibrosis, The City of David [ dubious – discuss ] and Binyan Adei Ad. He was recently awarded the Yeshiva Center Leadership in Philanthropy [19] Award.

Related Research Articles

Kazaa Media Desktop. was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequently under license as a legal music subscription service by Atrinsic, Inc., which lasted until August 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer-to-peer</span> Type of decentralized and distributed network architecture

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. This forms a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Akamai Technologies</span> American computer networking company

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. The company operates a network of servers worldwide and rents the capacity of the servers to customers wanting to increase the efficiency of their websites by using Akamai owned servers located near the user. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is directed by Akamai's domain name system to a proximal edge server that can serve the requested content. Akamai's mapping system assigns each user to a proximal edge server using sophisticated algorithms such as stable matching and consistent hashing, enabling more reliable and faster web downloads. Further, Akamai implements DDoS mitigation and other security services in its edge server platform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">On2 Technologies</span> American video technology company

On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly traded company, founded in New York City in 1992 and headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designed video codec technology. It created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion.

This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.

Nikki Hemming is the CEO and part owner of Sharman Networks and President of LEF Interactive, an agency based in Sydney, Australia, responsible for promoting and developing Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file sharing network, since 2002. As such, she has been a figure in the dispute between peer-to-peer networks and the music industry including a legal case between the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Intertrust Technologies Corporation is a software technology company specializing in trusted distributed computing. Intertrust’s product lines consist of a DataOps platform, Application protection and Content protection solutions. Much of Intertrust's digital rights management (DRM) business is based on the Marlin DRM technology, which Intertrust founded along with four consumer electronics companies: Sony, Panasonic, Philips, and Samsung.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer-to-peer file sharing</span> Data distribution using P2P networking technology

Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology. P2P file sharing allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program that searches for other connected computers on a P2P network to locate the desired content. The nodes (peers) of such networks are end-user computers and distribution servers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ashwin Navin</span> American businessman

Ashwin Navin is an American entrepreneur, who is the CEO and co-founder of Samba TV, a data and analytics service that measures television viewership using opt-in data from Internet-connected devices and set-top boxes. The company has been compared to more traditional TV measurement firms like Nielsen which rely on the people meter to gather viewership data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NetObjects</span> Software company

NetObjects, Inc. is a software company founded in 1995 by Samir Arora, David Kleinberg, Clement Mok and Sal Arora. The company is best known for the development of NetObjects Fusion, a web design application for small and medium enterprises with designers who need complete control over page layout and a similar user interface as desktop publishing applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joost</span> Internet TV service

Joost was an Internet TV service, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. During 2007–2008 Joost used peer-to-peer TV (P2PTV) technology to distribute content to their Mozilla-based desktop player; in late 2008 this was migrated to use a Flash-based Web player instead.

Finjan Holdings (Finjan) is a company that focuses on the licensing of intellectual property. Finjan claims to own patented technology used in enterprise web security tools. Formerly a publicly traded company on NASDAQ (FNJN), it was acquired by the Fortress Investment Group in 2020.

File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia, documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include removable media, centralized servers on computer networks, Internet-based hyperlinked documents, and the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking.

Streamwaves was an online music service founded by Jeff Tribble and Daniel Hexter in Dallas, Texas. Founded during file sharing service Napster's legal troubles, Streamwaves was the first company to license major label masters for a subscription service, and the first company to launch a subscription service with major label content in 2002. In 2005 Streamwaves became part of the Rhapsody music service owned by RealNetworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voddler</span> Video-on-demand provider

Voddler was a Stockholm, Sweden-based provider of a video-on-demand (VOD) platform and a streaming technology for over-the-top (OTT) streaming on the public Internet. In Scandinavia, Voddler was primarily known for the commercial VOD-service Voddler, which was launched in 2009. As a company, Voddler was founded in 2005 and developed its own streaming solution, called Vnet. Vnet is based on peer-to-peer (p2p), where all users contribute by streaming movies to each other, but, unlike traditional p2p, Vnet has a central administrator who decides which users that have access to which movies. Due to this exception, Vnet has been referred to as a "hybrid p2p distribution system", "walled garden p2p" or "controlled p2p". In addition to running the consumer service Voddler, the company Voddler also offers, since 2013, Vnet as a stand-alone technology for other streaming platforms. The service Bollyvod, a global VOD-service for Bollywood-content that Voddler built for the Indian movie industry, was released as a pilot in 2014.

Torrent poisoning is intentionally sharing corrupt data or data with misleading file names using the BitTorrent protocol. This practice of uploading fake torrents is sometimes carried out by anti-infringement organisations as an attempt to prevent the peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing of copyrighted content, and to gather the IP addresses of downloaders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecast, Inc.</span>

Ecast, Inc. was a privately held, venture capital–backed place-based interactive media company that offered advertising, digital music, games, entertainment, and information to bars and nightclubs in the United States. The company was founded in 1999 and was headquartered in San Francisco, California. Ecast, Inc. ceased operations when it closed its Jukebox network on March 1, 2012.

Giraffic is a Tel Aviv-based company that had developed "Adaptive Video Acceleration” (AVA) software to improve the performance of streaming video. It sold primarily to OTT Video Apps Providers and to Consumer Electronics Device Manufacturers, such as LG, ZTE and Samsung.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Rose (entrepreneur)</span>

Anthony Rose is a serial tech entrepreneur whose career has spanned across many sectors including the advent of 3D graphics, P2P music, video streaming, social TV, social platforms, and most recently, legal technology.

References

  1. ↑ "Burmeister, Kevin". esearch Person Name Search. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  2. ↑ "Brilliant Digital is the leading online distributor of licensed digital content". www.brilliantdigital.com. Retrieved 9 June 2022.
  3. ↑ Company Sale Took The Fun Out The Daily Telegraph[ dead link ]
  4. ↑ "Sega World says it was deceived over office space". The Sydney Morning Herald. 22 February 2011.
  5. ↑ Public Offering Registration. Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc. 17 September 1996docstoc.com Archived 21 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ↑ "Patent 6538654" . Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  7. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 April 2012. Retrieved 20 December 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  8. ↑ "SEC Info - Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc - '8-K' for 6/6/03 - EX-99". www.secinfo.com. Retrieved 2 May 2023.
  9. ↑ "Altnet To Pay Kazaa Users For Swapping". CNET News. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  10. ↑ "Home". globalfileregistry.com.
  11. ↑ "Kinetech Acquired Brilliant Digital Entertainment, BDE". Businesswire. 16 April 2007.
  12. ↑ Hachman, Mark. "Kazaa Relaunches as Licensed Service". PCMag. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  13. ↑ "PersonalWeb Melds with Brilliant Digital's Kinetech". DigitalMediaWire. 28 September 2011. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  14. ↑ "PersonalWeb". www.personalweb.com. Retrieved 2 May 2023.
  15. ↑ Sanders, Edmund (31 August 2012). "Investor Kevin Bermeister has big plans for Jerusalem, West Bank". Los Angeles Times.
  16. ↑ "Nof Zion Residents Express Relief". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
  17. ↑ Bermeister, Kevin. "Hotel Expansion". Hotel Management. Archived from the original on 9 March 2013. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
  18. ↑ Bermeister, Kevin. "Founder Jerusalem 5800".
  19. ↑ "Welcome to My awesome site | My awesome site".
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