Since last Tuesday, our software has received at least 20 reviews from websites such as Yahoo Finance, Cool OSX Apps and P2P blog. So we had the pleasure to read sentences like "Podmailing 0.10 is an excellent free application" which make us proud of our baby.

Louis also gave interviews (in French) like the one he granted Business Garden and in which he explains the background story and the advantages of Podmailing.

Anyway, you can check all of these English reviews on our Podmailing's Del.icio.us page.

As presented by FileShareFreak, several home media players (Popcorn Hour...) can nowadays give the opportunity to download Torrents without having to turn your computer on. Indeed the time of the first media players that could only read CDs and DVDs has come to an end. It seems now logical to be able to access Web content from any device and home media players are no exception.

But the real revolution here is in the newly found interactivity of these devices since consumers can play streamed videos and download directly from their boxes.

It is particularly of interest for us because if you have one if these players you can then download your podmails using BitTorrent and watch your personal media (pictures, music and videos...) directly from these devices.

Tomorrow we launch Podmailing, our software which allows users to send large files by email, in the US. It's a special moment for zSlide because we have been preparing this for a long time.

Thanks to the set-up of virtual servers based on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform, we can now officially distribute and promote Podmailing through America.

Even if the competition is very keen in the "send large files" market, we bring something new to the table with Podmailing's BitTorrent compatibility, its open network and the fact that Podmailing doesn't have any size limit.

And now lets spread the word!

Podmailing US Launch - Press Release

With my company, zSlide, we're knee deep in this dilemma because we're focused on digital media and entertainment applications. Our move is to do all we can to please our users with services such as Podmailing. Although we're being careful not to cross the line, we do help media companies with consulting to understand these changes and solve the Pirate dilemma by fusing this dimension into their strategy.

Watch the video and tell me how you stand, regarding the Pirate Dilemma:

What is underlining in this study is that contrary to what people think, young people are not automatically attracted to the illegal aspect of downloading. Indeed they use it only as a result of the lack of compelling legal options available to them.

As rightly stated by the Institute behind this survey, this represents a real opportunity for music companies which should take advantage of this growing request.

As for us, we try to contribute to the rise of these legal P2P networks by developing file sharing software and services such as Podmailing and media player technologies like Omega Media Player that represent the main components of music and video downloading platforms.

On the menu, a few major improvements:

• New hybrid BitTorrent/HTTP protocol enables to bypass BitTorrent throttling from certain ISPs
  
• Option to choose how long podmails are relayed: 24h, 48h, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month or not relayed at all, that is through a pure P2P transfer
• A change log is displayed within the Podmailing software when we announce a new release (starting with the next one)
• Improved server to client error messages with more detailed descriptions

We hope you will enjoy this new version, which will hopefully fix the BitTorrent throttling problems that some of our users might have suffered. If you haven't yet downloaded Podmailing Zer0-10, you will find it here.

The post author likes our stuff, and he helped us by testing the new Podmailing Zer0-10 pre-release. The test seems to be conclusive, according to him.

While I'm at it, I announce that this Podmailing new version is still in test phase and that the results are pretty good. But we're still looking for other "in situ" testers to judge the software's efficiency, in different environments.

So, if you suffer from BitTorrent traffic shaping from your ISP, we need your help to finally validate our solution. All information is here.

I also remind you that you can follow all Podmailing adventures in real time, including "behind the scenes" stories (crashed servers, fixed bugs...) and discussions about your suggestions. That occurs on Twitter under the VIPeers account.

The twitter account is under the name VIPeers because, well, that's the umbrella name I'm using for my blog and my team and hopefully someday it will be the name of a large media-hungry social P2P community.

You don't need to be a twitter user to follow it automatically: for one it is republished here in the right column of this blog. Second, as for any twitter account you can also subscribe to its RSS feed.

(I hope they don't mind me posting this here)

This is amazing: in something like 18 months, Amazon gave birth to a new Internet giant web-service.

As an intense AWS user (S3 in Pictogame, S3 & EC2 in Podmailing), I want to comment on what they did right:

• Pricing: marginal, no upfront, quite cheap from the start.
• API: simple yet powerful. Sometimes it's frustrating, but the learning curve is very steep and implementations in every language are there to kick-start.
• Support: in addition to solving its user's problems, the AWS team is clearly using the forums to get feedback on what to add and how people want to use it and they do listen.

I must stress that using AWS is not only about replacing your server hardware. I feel that even if you start small, AWS relieves you of hiring and managing a team of technicians to manage the hardware. It takes so many issues off the table!

And even before it helps you technically, it helps you to write your business plan. It's like the most solid line in your business model is the infrastructure cost line. And it drives design choices from the start:

For instance, in Podmailing we use EC2 servers in addition to S3. And our EC2 virtual servers push a lot of data between users (using BitTorrent) and towards S3. In just a few minutes on a spreadsheet, and by inputting AWS pricing data, we saw that for our application, EC2 computing cost is negligible compared to the bandwidth cost. It implies that we can feel free to add more instances at will, instead of investing too much in server CPU usage optimization.

One more word, about what they are doing wrong. AWS is too US-centric:

• billing is only available on amazon.com accounts, in USD
• the start-up competition for Amazon funding was restricted to US start-ups
• FPS and DevPay accounts require that you have a US bank account
• the Europe-based S3 buckets seemed like good news but:
  • when using from Europe (Paris at least), they are actually slower than US buckets!
  • they too can only be paid in USD
  • they don't support the BitTorrent seeding feature we have come to love from S3 in the US

Many of us Europeans have been complaining about it in the forum, it is quite painful. I hope they will fix it soon. In the meantime we just have to be happy that AWS is soooo much cheaper thanks to the € supremacy over the $...

Anyway, thanks a lot Amazon, I don't know how we could do without you!

A proof that alternative distribution by BitTorrent protocol is going very well, and that this format is still overwhelmingly supported by the Net surfers.

However, Mininova remains one of the first destination for piracy on the Web, a practice which is largely recognized as illegal and which we cannot encourage you to perform. But Mininova now shows several facets since they opened their section “Featured torrents” which only contains legitimate links sanctioned by Mininova and distributed by the rights holder's initiative. Also note that these links are hosted (seeded) by Mininova's servers, contrary to all the other torrents of the site.

So, they say Joost is doomed because it requires a software install, and the competition offers the same kind of stuff inside the Web browser. The article raises the question in these terms:

If a high-profile startup with rich, famous founders and tens of millions in investment can’t entice users to venture outside the walls of the web browser, what hope is there for other special-purpose browsers like Songbird and Miro?

This view is oversimplistic, however. The real competition for Joost isn’t YouTube, it is BitTorrent. And BitTorrent requires a special client, proving that users aren’t averse to downloading software if they see enough benefit.

For me the issue is very clear. You can't convince people to install software if it's only to do the same thing as in a browser but only a little better. It can only work if the software offers something useful which is not possible at all in the browser. The difference must be disruptive.

So, let's start thinking about compelling use cases that you are not going to get in a simple browser...

First idea that springs to mind is downloading content for synchronization on digital devices. Actually that's the reason why iTunes had so much success, piggybacking on the success of the iPod. Now all mobile phones are becoming very capable portable media players and people need media player software that solves the same need for all the other devices apart from the iPod/iPhone.

That is what we offer, as a white label solution named Omega Media Player. Be sure to bookmark it: we have a beta demo coming very soon.

Other reasons to install a software is to transfer very large files between people, Podmailing does just that. So, sorry for the reckless self-promotion, but this explains why we do downloadable software at zSlide, among other things.

I must admit that I didn't understand the entire article, but it seems to be a very nice one. And it is necessary to say that the prospect to see Podmailing exporting itself to Scandinavia is an idea which sounds good to us. 

So, for the journalists of the whole world, if you plan to write an article in Chinese, Italian or Bulgarian, it would be a great idea : -).

By the way, if you speak Norwegian, you can give us some help using the indications in our Wiki. Louis, (Podmailing creator whose family has Swedish origins, will make the translation in Swedish and Danish. 

We also thought of those who like to use and abuse of Podmailing downloads and we offer them, thanks to an Amazon Widget, to buy some extra hard drives :-). Moreover it helps us to earn money, and to maintain a better free service with more bandwidth.

Another innovation, which should delight our users coming from Spain and Latin America, this delivery page has been partially translated to Spanish and will be entirely translated as soon as possible.

Don't tell me that it doesn't motivate you to send a whole lot of more Podmails?

Therefore, if you speak fluently Figo's and Ronaldinho's language, make a sign to us in our forum or give us some help using the indications in our Wiki. Your assistance is welcome.

Obrigado.

Besides, I want to thank Alex, who gives a lot of his time to help our forum's members when they are confronted to problems with Podmailing.

Comcast, the second largest ISP in the US, has been accused of using traffic shaping techniques to thwart BitTorrent transfers on its network. After denying it they finally admitted to it and after a few weeks of controversy, news came today that BitTorrent Inc. and Comcast have decided to work together to fix all these issues.

Here is the recap from Slyck's article:

So to recap, Comcast will stop targeting BitTorrent directly. Uploads will no longer be reset, however if you're a prolific sharer, expect to be managed. BitTorrent effectively admitted that Comcast's policy was understandable, and the two will cooperate in creating a new network architecture for content delivery. Comcast recognizes that the Internet is changing rapidly, and ISPs must redevelop themselves to accommodate the massive influx of bandwidth consumption. BitTorrent in turn will retool their clients to optimize bandwidth efficiency on the restructured ISP network. What this retooling winds up looking like is anyone's guess, however transparency and documentation has been promised by BitTorrent.

This is obviously a very good news, but there are still many many other ISP's acting against P2P protocols
throughout the world, and most of the time they don't even inform their users of these service limitations, which is a very bad way to do things.

As a P2P service provider, we had to make a move with Podmailing. So we've been doing some research on hybridation between P2P and client/server and the results are promising:

• Since version 0.9.5 of Podmailing we have implemented a hybrid download system which uses BitTorrent AND http protocols concurrently in order to download podmails. This implies that you can download files from Podmailing at full speed, even if your ISP is blocking BitTorrent.
• Now the issue remains with our upload system which is still entirely based on BitTorrent seeding. We are looking into the same kind of solution for uploads and if it works out, Podmailing will become even more powerful and more efficient, unhindered by ISP protocol discrimations.

• AppsMac
• Adictosalared
• Grupogeek
• Elgeek

Apparently our new delivery page is well understood:

• we propose 3 methods to download podmails
  • either thru a direct http download in the browser
  • or as a P2P download optimized in Podmailing
  • or a standard .torrent compatible with any BitTorrent client
• also, they noted the difference between our service and all of our competitors out there: the files and folders sent with Podmailing can be of any size. As in "no limits", "sin limite de Tamaño" as they say in the language of Antonio Banderas.

Bienvenido Spain, Bienvenido South America !

Now you should know that Podmailing can be used in Spanish, just select that language in the Preferences window. The translation available today is not perfect nor complete but don't worry: Kol, a Spanish user who is very active on our forum, has submitted a finalized Spanish translation to us (thanks Kol !). So it will be integrated in the next release pretty soon.

Let me seize the opportunity to invite all our international users to give us a hand. If you can translate Podmailing in your mother tongue we will gladly integrate it too. The translation pack is available from our wiki.

Update: one more article from Visual Beta.

It even got digged, so go and get your shovels my friends, it's time do digg ! Thanks!!

You should read the original article entirely before paying any attention to me. So here are a few humble comments i'd like to make:

"If, on the other hand, you plan to dethrone Facebook by adding state-of-the-art social features to the fabric of the web, transforming the internet experience of billions of people, you’re going to have to execute to perfection and still get really really lucky if your company is to succeed. Of course, if you make it you’ll be assured a very comfortable early retirement."

OK, I agree. You know, I already heard that somewhere... oh yes, that's what they say about Poker. If you wanna make it to the final table in the World Series Main Event, you must execute perfectly AND be really lucky.

"It is comforting to see failure in this way because we certainly wouldn’t have sacrificed our lofty ambitions to increase our chance of moderate success."

Exactly. I know what you mean about that Matt. at zSlide we have also made that decision. For us it means to bet everything on our boldest scenario. For an entrepreneur I think that making that choice often requires a lot of self-confidence, and to be self-demanding and self-disciplined. It's not only to work hard in order to get it right. It's also to never stop, never give up!

"Raise as much as you can

I’m not the first one to say this, but let me express my wholehearted agreement: raise as much as you can, as soon as you can, and not a penny less."

Or don't raise funds at all. This is exactly the sort of question for which you hear both answers just as often.

"But only a company’s founder has a single-minded focus on the company’s success, and this includes acquiring a war chest to deal with unforeseen contingencies."

Sounds fair.

"In retrospect, it seems obvious and absolutely normal that it would take us the better part of two years to build a new peer-to-peer stack from the ground up and deploy it in a scalable way"

2 years? Yeah, that's about it here too.

"Nonetheless, with all the real-world experience of building a P2P network behind me, my opinion as a technologist is that the huge challenges of deploying a consumer P2P app outweigh the advantages."

True, a pure P2P service lacks quality of service.

"The biggest problem with consumer P2P is that other users must be online in order for files to be available. With AllPeers, we frequently heard the complaint that “someone shared something with me but when I went to download it, I got a message saying ‘no sources’.”

I'm sure you also had a lot of users blocked by their routers and firewalls, didn't you? Been there, done that.

"This isn’t to say that P2P doesn’t have compelling uses. A hybrid model that uses P2P where possible and a central server otherwise looks more promising since it solves the “no sources” problem mentioned above while retaining much of the efficiency advantage of a decentralized architecture. We had already started to experiment with this at AllPeers, and this would have become a big part of our technological strategy had we had time to finish implementing it."

Same here! Couldn't agree more. The good news is, scalable centralized architectures are becoming a commodity. We use Amazon Web Services for Podmailing and it is starting to work out really nicely for us. Especially since the BitTorrent protocol is supported natively by Amazon S3!

"For mass distribution of media, I believe that P2P is most effective when it is implemented at a very low-level in the network stack. Application level code shouldn’t have to worry about it,...

I agree that P2P machinery should be as transparent as possible for the end-user. But to my mind, P2P at the Application Level is not a question of network stack: it is the concept of exchanging stuff between users, which includes 100% Web file hosting services as well as YouTube and the like. It's about personal sharing or user-generated content. In that sense it's rather a good thing.

...but wherever possible data should be cached at the edges of the network and delivered from the most efficient location. This is essentially how the web handles distribution of web pages, with caching at the ISP and in the user’s browser."

I hadn't thought much about that, good point. And on a side note this is a motivation for people to have large hard drives, which is not obvious to those who only believe in "Web software" these days. I do believe that the Web browser environment and the Desktop environment are on the way to totally merging, but data caching is a structural requirement that will always need to be optimized in terms of bandwidth and storage space. So we will continue to have large storage in our offices, homes and pockets, and as always, the good news is that storage is growing very fast.

"I am sometimes critical of what I perceive as the excessively ideological bent of many open source advocates. One of the great things about the open source movement, in my view, is that is provides a strong counterweight to proprietary software."

Me too : I hate the integrists, but I love open source - might even release some in the near future.

Ok now I'll go play poker, might even get a little lucky!

;-)

Thanks to Alex, the problem was fixed after a few hours, and everything seems back to normal today. Sorry for the disturbance.
Now we can count on Alex the super-geek to find a long-term solution to avoid this problem happening again.

Have a good Podmailing week-end.

For a few months now we have been making changes essentially on the server side with always the same objective: let you exchange files and folders with your friends and contacts, and always be sure that they can receive them hasslefree, no matter how big they are.

In the end we made some big changes that implied a new client version so here it is: download Podmailing v0.9.5. Everyone upgrade right now!

Here is a summary of the new crispy features:

• Files are now kept for 30 days on our relay servers: so many of you asked for it so here it is!!!
  
• New BitTorrent/http hybrid download system enables to receive podmails at full speed even if your ISP blocks the BitTorrent protocol
• Local network maximal upload speed has been upped to 10MB/s
• Improved display of podmail state
• New help messages in mail composer window

In the next few days, I will post more details on these changes, how they work and what they imply. In the meantime we keep an eye on the service and make sure it the upgrade works smoothly. So please contact me if you have any trouble.

And remember: the place to be for Podmailing fans and users on Facebook is our Podmailing product page.

Does anyone know of a Polish translator to English? Google and Yahoo don't list Polish in their translation utilities.

Or if you can read Polish, please tell me if the review was good or bad ;-)

Update: Systran is the place to get it translated to English. The translation is not perfect as usual but it did look like a good article.

In particular I like that they see Podmailing as a private way to share data using BitTorrent protocol. And apparently they appreciated the simplicity of our user interface.

During the next two weeks we will be progressively rolling out a major upgrade to our servers to enhance some key aspects of the Podmailing service such as increasing the duration for which we keep the files available for late-coming recipients. This will probably entail an upgrade to the Podmailing software which will become mandatory in order to support the new server protocols.

We also have a big surprise building up. All I can say right now is that it's deeply related to the profound meaning of Podmailing - I hope that's mysterious enough. Anyway, our target is to let the cat out of the bag in the first half of February.

Until then, keep tuned, keep sending these podmails to all your friends and contacts. Remember, since we have added Http delivery, anyone can receive a podmail, even if she is blocked by a firewall or can't install software on her PC.

Oh and if you want to know stuff before everyone does and enter into our private beta testing rounds, sign-up on our Podmailing facebook page (it only takes 1 click if you are already on facebook).

And you, which solution do you prefer? and why?

you can answer here or participate in the discussion on our facebook page.

You know, we created Podmailing to enable anyone to share files of any size - and especially illiterates. We made it to solve the problems of our computer illiterate friends actually.

And now that we have added the Http delivery feature, you are absolutely sure that the recipient of your large files will receive them easily with Podmailing. Without knowing a thing about torrents. Even if it's several GBs.

Maybe you know, in fact that Podmailing is based on BitTorrent, which makes it the most efficient BitTorrent client for sharing files among computer illiterates. And still it's a very efficient solution also for geeks, cause we provide tons of bandwidth and it's free. At least that's how I feel. What do you think?

Files sent by Podmailing can now be downloaded using any Web browser, without the need to install any software. It is based on a plain and simple http download, so it works in every browser, everywhere!

Why this is important is another story:

All of you who have followed Podmailing from the beginning know how we try to leverage the power of Peer-to-Peer networking. But it is even more crucial for us to provide a perfect quality of service.

Actually we built Podmailing on top of BitTorrent right from the start because P2P is the most efficient way to transfer data between individual computers on the Internet. But then real life caught on with us and we discovered that P2P works neither everywhere or every time. The 3 most common problems with P2P are:

• home or corporate network setups: P2P communications are hindered by firewalls and routeurs when they are not configured to enable P2P
• dishonest ISPs throttle P2P communications - most of the time without any notice, explanation or compensation for their users
• people often use their company's laptop at home but sometimes they don't have the right or the proper credentials to install any software on it

To make it simple, if you have any of these issues, you probably won't be able to download any torrent or any other form of P2P data on your computer.

Our aim with Podmailing is to make it easy, simple and highly efficient to send large files to absolutely anyone. Hence our decision to host files using the plain client-server http protocol in addition to P2P delivery. Try it and tell us how it works out for you!

To be honest I'll have to wait until next week to try it out myself, but the idea of distributing an open-source blogging/CMS software dedicated to torrent sharing is pretty cool.

The only major feature lacking seems to be torrent seeding - I mean hosting the files to assure bandwidth for the downloaders. But that's understandable given that it's a completely different set of trouble. I am in a good position to know that since we are building it as a service on Podmailing. And maybe we can make our back-end service work with Diferior. At least I don't why we couldn't.

It's called "Pages" and it enables businesses to create their Facebook pages. At first sight it seems much better adapted to businesses than using a profile or creating a group. So I just tried it for Podmailing. Go check out the Podmailing Facebook page.

And don't forget to click on the "add to my products" link, thanks!

This is great news for me as I was getting more and more frustrated with the lag and the P2P bandwidth throttling between the US and Europe. Now we can make our services, Podmailing and Pictogame work even better in Europe!

I can only agree this is a pretty cool feature - sharing torrents and all. Actually I have tried it and at least the torrent download worked pretty well. I used it to download some of our test podmails (HD video and stuff) found here and the collaboration of AllPeer's BitTorrent client with our Podmailing server-seeded torrents works like a charm. If you try it tell me your location and how much download bandwidth you pulled in the comments. Thanks.

And well done Matt and Cédric, keep it up folks!

As Heinz Tschabitscher puts it:

Podmailing combines BitTorrent with email for easy, reliable and fast file transfers, even when the files are very big.

I'm glad that he understands why we chose BitTorrent, and why it's cool that we remain 100% compatible with it. Well, the article is also quite fair and underlines the current shortcomings of Podmailing as well as its advantages:

Pros

• Podmailing lets you send large files and entire folders easily by email
• Files sent with Podmailing can be downloaded with any BitTorrent client

Cons

• Podmailing does not integrate with any email programs or web-based email
• You cannot send files using a web interface but must use the Podmailing app for Windows or Mac OS X
• You cannot track files sent through Podmailing or protect them with passwords

You can read it here.

Obviously this will help startups such as Podmailing and Pictogame, which rely on Amazon S3 to host content, to lower their risk profile in the eyes of VCs. Pretty good news if you ask me. What do you think?

If you were a VC, would that give you more confidence to invest in an S3-powered start-up?

If this sounds interesting to you, then you should join the group, come on!

I really liked this post because it reminds me of the early days when my partner Bruno Carsenti and I thought out the Podmailing concept. You see, Podmailing was going to be a service enabling people to send large files to each other. So we asked ourselves: "how do people send files to each other on the Internet" and the answer is so obvious - they use e-mail.

So we designed Podmailing as a next-generation of e-mail. An upgrade, a boost to the user experience that everyone masters: e-mail.

You know e-mail is the most popular application on the Internet. Adoption rate must be around 100%, don't you think? E-mail is bigger than the Web.

Oh and e-mail is also a social network. In the sense that you have all your friend's e-mail addresses and it is your most common way of reaching them. It is the most viral and comprehensive system. E-mail is THE Web 1.0 social network and it may well never be surpassed by any other social network.

Tell me if you think I'm wrong?

Technorati Tags: Podmailing, Technology

Now BitTorrent is found to dominate, having surpassed eDonkey / eMule. From an industrial point of view this is very good news. You know, the Internet protocol is made to be used in Peer-To-Peer mode in addition to Client-Server. Having a mature technology to leverage that is the only way to move forward and BitTorrent has become this standard. It is an open standard, it works great, there are many open source implementations available in different programming languages. Thus it is a great building block for creating applications, especially services for the mass market.

That is the reason we chose BitTorrent for our P2P e-mail delivery service Podmailing, and we are not alone: think about AllPeers, Pando, and others are showing up. Actually there is a Facebook group for CEOs and CTOs of companies relying on BitTorrent.

Next step: we should get closer and make sure our services based on BitTorrent interoperate efficiently. We are working hard in this direction with Podmailing, so keep tuned.

Technorati Tags: P2P, Peer-To-Peer, Podmailing, Technology

Podmailing, the P2P service enabling to send files of any size by e-mail, is obviously one of these new generation of legitimate services. Download and try it if you haven't done so yet!

Technorati Tags: P2P, Peer-To-Peer, Podmailing

And thanks by the way!

Technorati Tags: Enterpreneurship, Podmailing, Start-up

By the way, more on the subject of BitTorrent and Podmailing can be found here.

Thanks Janko, you understood exactly what we were aiming for with Podmailing. And there is more to come...

So everyone don't hesitate to digg the article ;-) thx

And congratulations to the whole Podmailing team - they worked really hard and did a great job.

New BitTorrent engine on the client, entirely new server, no need to register anymore, BitTorrent-compatible links provided for downloading files etc.

• Download here: http://www.podmailing.com/download.html
• More details about the new features and improvements here: http://www.podmailing.com/podmailing_zer0-9.html

And don't hesitate to comment on it here, or in the Podmailing forum.

A while back I mentioned the team was busy re-building a new better Podmailing, based on the new BitTorrent engine and with an entirely new back-end.

We are putting the final touches on it and it even comes with a new web-site, so that's a ton of work, hence less time to blog about stuff.

The pre-release is really hot. Want to join in? It's happening over at the Podmailers group on FaceBook, or leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

There are at least 2 good reasons not to be excited about that.

1. 20MB is still very small, compared to the weight of the files and folders that we manipulate every day on our computers. For instance a good (not HD, just good) quality video with a duration of 3 minutes would not fit into 20MB.
2. This only concerns Gmail. And even if Yahoo, MSN and all the e-mail providers followed suit, there would still be thousands of e-mail boxes from ISPs and corporate networks which couldn't and wouldn't support it. So, concretely, most people won't be able to send 20MB to Gmailers and Gmailers won't be able to send 20MB attachments to most people.

So, there you have it: e-mail attachment sizes are a real problem of the Internet today.

It is deeply rooted in the protocols and the existing infrastructure which support our global e-mail system. There is no way that progress can be made in this field by taking tiny steps. What e-mail attachments need now in order to move to the next level is a technological paradigm shift.

Here is what Podmailing proposes:
Classic e-mail + BitTorrent => e-mail attachments of virtually any size

This marriage is very efficient, and knows no barriers to adoption. It is ecological as it leverages Peer-To-Peer transfers. It can be implemented very easily. Actually, here is a very light set of specifications that suffice to make it work:

• Create a ".torrent" metafile following these specs
• Add some fields to it - following these specs and change its extension to ".zed"
• This new file is very small, generally less than 100KB, so it can be attached to any e-mail and it will get through to any inbox in the world
• Any recipient of the .zed file will be able to download the data using a BitTorrent client
  

Is that all that is required to transfer the data to the recipient? Well, if the sender keeps his PC online, and makes it reachable from the Internet with a proper BitTorrent client running on it, yes this is pretty much what it takes.

But remember that e-mail is an asynchronous communication method (unlike phone or chat) which means that the sender expects the recipients to receive the file even if he is offline. This too can be achieved using our system, provided that a server is acting as a relay, to store and serve the file while the sender is not available. Additionally, even if the sender is online, the relay server can contribute to a higher bandwidth, and some additional services, and an overall better quality of service.

So, do I need to setup a BitTorrent client? a server? Is it complicated?

Oh no ! Don't worry about it!

Visit the Podmailing web-site, and sign-up to participate in our beta-test. Podmailing is a service which enables you to send files of any size, based on the method described above. It includes the BitTorrent client and we provide the relay servers for that. So all the nuts and bolts of the system will be totally transparent to you.

Some of you may have been frustrated by the lack of new Client releases over the past weeks, as a few nasty bugs have been standing in the way of total jubilation. Well, I've got good news for you, if you can show a little patience.

As you may know, an online service like our Podmailing comprises two parts: the Client-side (the "front-end") and the Server-side (the "back-end"). So, here is the story: after finishing his work on Hot Pixel, Rodolphe joined the Podmailing team almost 4 months ago to build a new back-end from scratch using Ruby on Rails. His great efforts are starting to bear fruit and I can tell you that this new back-end is going to enable us to:

1. solve the most annoying bugs that we have been experiencing, e.g. the Podmails that get stuck at less than 100% when you send them and which never resume uploading
2. propose many great new features such as informing the sender when someone receives his file - you know, a kind of Proof Of Delivery (hence the name PODmailing)

The new back-end is still in alpha and we are the only ones to use it for now. But it will enter beta stage in a few weeks and we will be recruiting testers progressively to challenge the new architecture and solve its last issues before going fully public. You can signal me in the comments if you want an early seat for that ride.

Oh and of course we have been pushing forward on the client side too. Have you ever had the opportunity to upgrade the engine on your car? Well, we just did it for Podmailing: the new BitTorrent engine version 5 is being plugged in replacement of version 4 which had a few bugs and painful limitations. This upgrade will, among other things, totally solve the issue of new Podmails which cannot be sent when you have too many active Podmails being transferred.

What can I add on top of that? I do have a couple more killer features to tout but I have to keep some surprises for D-day. As things are coming along let's just say the team is doing a great a job and the new generation of Podmailing is going to kick ass so stay tuned!

The latest Podmailing software came out a couple of days ago, and it has never been simpler to use.

Here's how it works.

1) First download and install Podmailing application (for your PC, or for your Mac).
2) Register for a free account at http://www.podmailing.com:

• you keep your current email address
• you keep your current email software

3) Open Podmailing and use it to send your big file: it just works!
4) Your recipients then receive a standard email inviting them to download and install Podmailing.
5) From now on, they will be able to instantly and directly transfer your file, faster than ever.

Are you all set? Now you know what to do ;)

If you're fed up with email attachments limits, and want to send everyone your full quality pictures, your videos, or your largest personal documents, you've got to try Podmailing!

Bastien (podmailing.com)

On behalf on the whole podmailing.com team, let me thank all of you.

This translation will be available in a few days from now, as we release our next version.

How about you? If you want to translate Podmailer in your favorite language, it's very easy: just go to our contributor's page and follow the instructions there. Start today! ;)

To celebrate this, we now have a del.icio.us feed dedicated to podmailing.com in spanish:
http://del.icio.us/vipeers/ES
Check it out from time to time.

Hasta la vista

Con la ayuda de varios contribuidores (Shemes, Willy Walker, y Bernard), ahora Podmailer es traducido en español. ¡Viva la internacionalización!

En nombre del equipo entero de podmailing.com, le agradece mucho.

Esta traducción estará disponible desde algunos días, cuando lanzamos nuestra versión siguiente.

¿Y tu? Si deseas traducir Podmailer en tu lengua preferida, es muy fácil: vaya a la página de contribución y sigue las instrucciones. ¡Empieze hoy! ;)

Tenemos un del.icio.us feed que trata de podmailing.com español:
http://del.icio.us/vipeers/ES

Hasta la vista

It is once again a step further towards ease of use, speed, and robustness - and it's always free.

The Podmailing Team would like to thank all the beta-testers for their dedication in using earlier versions of our service. We've received tremendous loads of feedback, and we've made good use of it.

We ensure you that new and upcoming features will make your podmailing experience increasingly enjoyable.

Even more important, it is now based on a brand new server-side architecture, that will soon reveal its potential. Check out podmailing.com developers section once in a while, as we continuously add interesting info on how our service works, and how you can contribute to it.

New in Podmailer v0.8.6:

• Bug fixes
• No more configuration required to send podmails
• Much better reliability for sending folders
• Faster transfer speed
• A real podmail upload progress bar, also used for sending express podmails
• No more "basic" and "advanced" modes
• Improved thumbnails preview

Bastien - podmailing.com

April

• "Le Peer to Peer" is dead, long live "Le Peer to Peer"!

August

• My Mac is a schizo, and I like it
  
• Ray Kurzweil predicts intelligent robots by 2029
• TV, Podcasting and the Future
  
• Podcasting + P2P = Hyper-distribution
  
• P2P vs. Client-Server

September

• slyck.com article: zSlide - From France With Files
• Video streaming is still mostly deceiving

October

• Slow news and steady growth in P2P announce the coming of P2P industrial age
• To stream or not to stream

November

• podmailing buzz takes off following Podmail Express announcement

December

• US universities explain P2P is the way of the Future for Internet video