Darknet business space heats up

The darknet business space is heating up.

In addition to the commercial darknet companies I wrote about here, particularly Grouper, ieem and Groove Networks, I've recently come across three more darknet companies.

This is where I think p2p is heading:

Version 1 (Napster, Kazaa) was about trading their media — copyrighted music and Hollywood content.

Version 2 (Blubster, WASTE) was about taking this activity into the Darknet.

Version 3 — which we're seeing in each of these new Darknet applications — is about collaboration among peers, in a secure, private fashion. It's about sharing our media and data — the video, music, audio files, photos and GPS data that we've created ourselves.

SpinXpress

First, a disclaimer: I met Dave Toole, CEO of Outhink, a couple of months back, and we quickly became friends. He's paying for his attorney to help Ourmedia achieve nonprofit status.

Outhink makes SpinXpress, a small app that has been around in corporate settings for a few years and is now being optimized and expanded in hope of reaching both the consumer and business market.

As the site says, SpinXpress is a free software app that lets you webcast (video, audio, or blogs) and collaborate with your friends, family or associates. I've already used it a half-dozen times with friends and business associates to share large files, given that Google Gmail and Yahoo mail cap the size of files you can send at 10 MB or less. You can transfer large files with Skype and most IM apps as well, but those don't always work smoothly. It's much easier to drag and drop, say, a dozen photos into the SpinXpress window and email a message to another party to alert her that she can snag your photos or videos without even having to download the application.

Toole says the application has super-military encryption borne out by tests in corporate environments. I look forward to Outhink building out the app to create a more inviting social space for media creation and collaboration.

WiredReach

WiredReach is both a darknet application and an open source platform that can be extended by anyone, says founder Ashish Maurya, who blogs here. As the site says:

The WiredReach Platform, built on a set of open standards and technologies (Eclipse, JXTA, RSS, RDF, XMPP), allows users to selectively share “content” with others in a completely decentralized and secure manner. We use the term “content” very loosely to include things like presence, blogs, bookmarks, documents, calendars, music, photos… virtually any type of social media.

Traditional content sharing and collaboration applications are typically built using proprietary protocols and/or as closed networks which limit their applicability and scope. Our goal, instead, is to take an open network approach and enable what we call the “User-Centric Web” - one that blurs the boundaries between the desktop and the web and that can be extended by anyone.

Navizon

Mexens Technology co-founder James P.W. Parsons says, "as P2P file sharing networks are to music, Navizon is to GPS data — except we're about a legal as it gets."

Navizon, released this week, is a revolutionary, P2P "wireless positioning system" that successfully blends GPS, cellular and wi-fi technologies -- together into one accurate "mobile geo-location" system and service.

If you have a GPS device, Navizon will map the wireless landscape (wi-fi access points and cell towers) everywhere you go and then this use this data to improve the accuracy and performance of your navigation within dense urban settings, indoors and even underground. GPS users now have accurate coverage in places they never did before and when they don't have their GPS devices with them. Once you sync your location data to the Navizon Network, it's available to all Navizon members worldwide.

If you don't have a GPS device, Navizon lets you accurately navigate cities, streets and neighborhoods using just your Pocket PC's wi-fi and/or cell capabilities — without having to purchase an expensive GPS device or to pay hefty monthly fees to a cell phone carrier network.

Membership in the Navizon Network is free and offers GPS, PDA and wi-fi enthusiasts, as well as the general public, such benefits as:

• the ability to upload and store your Location Data (with option to share or keep private);

• access to wireless positioning data that others around the world have collected and contributed;

• user preferences that let you specify any city, neighborhoods or areas of the world that you'd like to navigate using only Pocket PC wi-fi and/or cellular capabilities (no need for a GPS device).

Says Parsons: "You can check our coverage in New York City, Miami or Toronto — just a few of the cities where users have been contributing."