Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

File-sharing company Box acquired Crocodoc today because your documents are boring and no one wants to read them. Crocodoc’s technology can turn them into interactive experiences using HTML5.

Box announced the acquisition today, but declined to reveal the terms of the deal. Chief executive Aaron Levie did say that the deal was a cash-and-stock transaction and that all of Crocodoc’s employees will be absorbed into Box. Crocodoc founder Ryan Damico will join Box as director of platform.

Crocodoc, once a Y Combinator company, was born in 2007 to make documents are more enjoyable experience. Many people feel that text documents are boring, even if you layer on as many PowerPoint transitions as possible. Using Crocodoc, you can turn your documents into carousels, flip-books, and more.

The company first started working in Flash to take elements of a document and make them more pleasing to the eye and interactive. But it quickly moved on to HTML5 as soon as the technology was available. Indeed, Crocodoc only complete its transition to HTML5 within the last few days.

Source: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Ryan Damico, founder, Crocodoc

“Things like document experiences haven’t really been modernized, they’re still very clunky, very cumbersome,” said Levie at the announcement today. “You think about what viewing videos looked like in 2005 before Youtube videos came around. You had to have all these different plugins and players just to view a video somebody sent you. We see the same sort of experience required for documents today.”

Box assures Crocodoc’s customers that, for the time being, the service will continue to run as normal. This means it will continue to work with Box competitor Dropbox. The technology will also be integrated into Box’s existing products and some form of rebranding will happen in the coming months.

The conversation often turned toward bringing “consumer-grade” products into the enterprise. This type of attitude seems to be flowing throughout Silicon Valley — the idea that consumer-grade apps are more beautiful, usable, well-built than enterprise-grade apps, which are characterized as clunky and outdated.

“It’s very consumer-grade design … I think that’s really the standard that you have to shoot for now,” said Box’s vice president of engineering Sam Schillace at the announcement. “Documents kind of seem boring. … We’ve had them for 20 years, but they are undergoing this interesting evolution.”

Damico told me that he is particularly excited to start building out new use cases for the healthcare industry, which could certainly use some consumer-grade love. This might include turning research papers into more-digestible flipbooks, or turning medical images into HTML5-based interactive documents in some way.

Damico may also tackle electronic health records — a massive market opportunity, given that so many healthcare institutions find them cumbersome, hard to read, and slow. A different presentation of a patient’s medical history might make all the difference. (For more on electronic health records, check out VentureBeat’s upcoming HealthBeat conference, May 20-21 — it’s one of the event’s major themes.)

Security, of course, is at the top of the priorities list when it comes to any health-related documents. Box recently received HIPAA compliance, which opens the doors for Crocodoc, which otherwise wouldn’t have been able to achieve that security itself.

Ryan Damico and Aaron Levie images via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Applications opened today for the BitTorrent Acceleration Program as part of its “ongoing quest” to find new and innovative ways to apply the BitTorrent protocol. The program will give relevant startups the opportunity to test and promote their products on the BitTorrent ecosystem and explore partnership opportunities.

BitTorrent is a web protocol that was first invented in 2001 to improve the way large amounts of data move across the internet. The company now has over 100 people and 170 million users around the world, and is responsible for 3.35 percent of all worldwide bandwidth, and more than half of the total bandwidth dedicated to file sharing.

One of the major applications for BitTorrent’s technology is transferring media content, and as a result BitTorrent is often associated with illegal file-sharing. However Christian Averill, the head of communications, told VentureBeat in an interview that BitTorrent is trying to change this perception by raising awareness about other applications of the technology.

“Our technology is often exploited for piracy but this is not something we promote or encourage,” he said. “There are much broader applications for the technology and over the past year, we have been trying to fix these misconceptions and specifically creating a set of tools that content creators can harness for their own benefit. This accelerator will help us stay on the course of product development and discovering new ways the technology can be applied.”

Unlike other programs that provide seed funding and coworking space, BitTorrent will offer startups the resources at its disposal. Companies working on content discovery, content consumption, file sharing, live streaming, and peer-to-peer technologies are eligible. Those chosen will have their products exposed to 170 million active users who can provide initial traction as well as feedback. Participants will also get in front of potential investors and strategic partners, and will have the opportunity to work with BitTorrent’s team of engineers, designers, and user experience specialists to hone their products.

“We have been focusing on building products that can help our users access good media and move large amounts of data,” said Farid Fadaie, BitTorrent’s Director of Product Development. “We are looking for companies aligned with that vision, that will resonate with our ecosystem and provide a service to BitTorrent users. It is a crowded space and we are an excellent resource for smaller companies trying to solve the same problems.”

Averill said BitTorrent has a slew of products in development right now, and in recent months, the company launched BitTorrent Sync, a Dropbox competitor; BitTorrent Surf, a web extension that helps with content discovery; and SoShare, a free delivery service for large files. The acceleration program will keep innovation moving and hopefully push the boundaries of what the technology can do.

As Averill put it, “We want to help solve problems, instead of being viewed as a problem.” The program has no definitive timeline and no set number of companies. Any entrepreneurs who are interested can apply here.

Photo Credit: BitTorrent

Leading the #Time100 poll with a 93% approval rating. I can die now (or enter politics). Eat this FBI. twitter.com/KimDotcom/stat…

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) April 8, 2013

He’s currently second on the list, with 82,336 positive votes, and first in terms of approval rating, with only 6,326 downvotes. First place for positive votes is Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi (no, I didn’t recognize the name either), but he also has 192,037 downvotes.

To say the list has been hijacked a little by the technorati and social media is to say that water is wet: North Korean dictator and nuclear warmonger Kim Jong Un currently sits in ninth place, and Beyoncé is 11th. South Korean pop star Psy sits in 13th, and Ben Affleck — Ben Affleck — is a few spots further back.

In other words, this is a gong show, and Time probably knows it.

But it’s all good for Dotcom, who has tweeted about the poll multiple times in the past day to his 293,278 Twitter followers. Dotcom, whose MegaUpload file sharing service was shut down by the FBI, and whose New Zealand house was searched illegally, is busy opening a new file-sharing service called Mega.

Naturally, any publicity for Dotcom is publicity for his new venture.

Ever since the U.S. government targeted cyberlocker service Megaupload almost two years ago, file sharing activity has gravitated back to The Pirate Bay, according to a new report from TorrentFreak.

The report bases its assumptions on Alexia, Compete, and  Quantcast rankings, which isn’t the most efficient way to figure out the most popular sites because their method for tracking web behavior can be circumvented. This is especially true for people who know they’re downloading lots of files illegally as well as cyberlocker services that won’t directly benefit from being called out as the most popular (for fear of it acting like a giant bullseye for law enforcement.)

The No. 1 position puts The Pirate Bay ahead of popular cyberlocker services like MediaFire, Putlocker, Uploaded, and 4share. Last March, TorrentFreak noted that Pirate Bay was only No. 6 on its list of most popular file sharing services. Obviously the site is looked at as a “go to” for finding popular files, but with the biggest services being closely watched by authorities for foul play this is even more true despite Pirate Bay’s occasional outages as it continues to elude shut down by major governments.

My guess is that next years top 10 list(s) of file sharing sites will likely include Mega, the new cyberlocker service founded by Megaupload creator Kim Dotcom.

Image via Disney

The Pirate Bay has run out of luck in Sweden, where the Swedish Pirate Party has been providing hosting for the popular file-swapping site. Due to legal threats and general harassment from a local antipiracy group, the site is now being hosted in Norway and Spain.

The antipiracy group in question is the Rights Alliance, which “stated that they intended to bring legal action against The Pirate Party and individual representatives of the party if the party did not cease to provide The Pirate Bay with Internet access on the 26th of February at the latest,” according to a statement from the Swedish Pirate Party.

Party leader Anna Troberg is quoted in the same statement as saying that the specific threats against the party and individuals involved took a heavy emotional toll both on the organization and its commitment to hosting The Pirate Bay.

“It is somewhat odd to realize that your political engagement can come at such a high cost in Sweden in the year 2013,” Troberg said. “I am therefore very happy that the anonymous heroes of The Pirate Bay very early on decided to help The Pirate Party out of the difficult situation.”

The Pirate Bay will now get its connection to the Internet from two newly formed sister organizations to the Swedish group: the Norwegian Pirate Party and the Catalonian Pirate Party (in Spain). The two-headed nature of the hosting situation has even given rise to a new metaphor and moniker for the site: The Hydra Bay.

From the Pirate Bay’s latest blog post:

“A typical Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score. The quicker this is done the higher the final score will be.

Current score: 0″

“This is … the first time we are going to show two [hosting locations] at the same time,” a Pirate Bay rep said to TorrentFreak today.

“It will be interesting to see who is now blamed for hosting TPB. In the end, maybe the anti-Interneterians will understand that they can’t win a fight when they have the people against them.”

And as for the Rights Alliance, Troberg said the Swedish Pirate Party will be filing a police report against the group for “unlawful coercion” regarding its work with and for TPB. TPB, interestingly enough, filed a similar report in Finnland earlier this month.

“The Pirate Party’s mission is not to produce martyrs for the copyright industry,” she said. “Our mission is to create long-term political change that ensures that the copyright industry in the future will not be allowed to threaten companies, organizations and individuals into silence with our common judicial system as a weapon.”

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, the fast growing online file sharing company that aims to go public next year, said he’s in no race to beat competitor Dropbox to an initial public offering.

“That’s a race we’d be fine to lose,” Levie told me.

Moreover, Box is preparing to release a new feature that allows its enterprise partners to “release entirely new products” directly from within Box’s application. The product, to be announced in “about ten days,” is aimed at bolstering Box’s security and enterprise strategy, Levie said in an interview with VentureBeat. He did not provide more details.

Dropbox, a competitor to Box, is talking with bankers about preparing its own IPO, and could plan it for the second half of this year, according to rumors reported yesterday by Quartz. Earlier this week, Dropbox released some enterprise features, to help it compete with Box in the enterprise. Rumors peg Dropbox’s private valuation at about $4 billion, and Box’s at about $2 billion.

Levie said Box’s own soon-to-be-announced features aren’t designed to respond to Dropbox, but said they are “going to create energy in this category.” He continued: “We are only speeding up our velocity in this area. We’re going to see a lot of stuff.”

Box also competes with companies like Microsoft, Google and Egnyte, all targeting the enterprise with online file storage and sharing products.

“You have to focus your energies”

Levie said he’s comfortable with Box’s differentiation from Dropbox, which is the company most often compared with Box. While they are listed as competitors, and their names even sound alike, they are often used simultaneously by employees at big companies, Levie said.

And there are big differences between the two. Dropbox’s strength and focus has been in ease of use, and user interface, in part because of it early traction with consumers. By contrast, Box has chosen to target the enterprise, and therefore has developed richer features in areas such as security (user authentication, for example) and integration (with other enterprise apps).

“You have to focus your energies somewhere, and you tend to put your focus on where your strength is,” Levie said.

Box knows that it needs to keep its user interface simple to keep customers happy, Levie acknowledged. But Box has more settings, because of its enterprise focus, which can pose challenges. Levie said he’s working hard here, and has doubled his design team in the last three months. He did not specify exactly how big the team is, but said it is relatively small — easily below 100 — because even the impact of a few very talented designers is significant. 

Box recently just raised another $150M, at a rumored valuation of $2 billion, as it expands into international markets this year. Levie said he isn’t too concerned yet about profitability, because the goal is to grab market share. The relatively virgin market is vast and growing quickly — and it’s important to grab now, he said. Economies of scale are significant: It’s much more efficient, Levie said, for 500 engineers to build technology for 100,000 customers than for 10,000 customers.

When asked if he can keep up last year’s growth rate at 150 percent, he said he thinks Box “will more than double this year, and we would like to do that again the year after. We’re still in a double compounding growth period.”

After Box expands this year to major international markets, it will expand into emerging markets the following year. Then Box will focus on expanding into “different kinds of verticals” the year after that, Levie said.

It’s been a heady year for the colorful Levie, who loves to wear orange shoes, and is often holding a cup of coffee, even though his high energy levels suggest he doesn’t need any.

He’s making his first appearance on the Charlie Rose show this evening.

Bare-knuckle competition

The gloves have come off recently between Dropbox and Box, as the two companies try to distinguish themselves. Box has raised slightly more money ($284M, compared to Dropbox’s $257M) and has spent considerably more time and money at marketing.

However, Dropbox has recently started speaking up too. In November, the company’s vice president Sujay Jaswa told the audience at our CloudBeat event that Dropox had a bigger clientele, even among enterprise customers, than Box.

Dropbox has customers at 95 percent of the Fortune 500, said Jaswa, and that’s higher than the 92 percent number Box has quoted in recent months. Moreoever, Jaswa said that Dropbox usage is 200 times larger than Box, citing data from Palo Alto Networks, which tracks the actual bandwidth of files being stored behind firewalls at 1,636 corporate networks (see slide).

However, Box’s Levie said such data figures don’t reflect the true distribution and value of their respective services. Dropbox has a lot of customers who share photos, videos and other personal media, and they often do so without explicit permission from their employers, Levie said.

“Dropbox’s model is very consumer focused,” Levie said. “It tends to see consumers using tools at home and at work. The volume and scale is very different.”

Box, by contrast, shows up being used behind a firewall only after it is approved by an IT manager — and data stored by its application is not as data-intensive as the rich media files shared by Dropbox users, he said.

In Box’s case, users are more collaborative, Levie said. Every member of a company’s sales team may use Box to share marketing collateral, for example. By contrast, Dropbox customers often use storage primarily to synchronize their media between all of their devices. Levie said the gap between box and Dropbox in data usage is unlikely to close over time.

Box vs. Dropbox traffic

Palo Alto Networks spokesman Mike Haro agreed that the amount of data being shared by an app doesn’t provide any real gauge of how it is actually being used.

Traffic by DropBox users is now 54 times larger than Box, Haro said, citing a new report to be released by Palo Alto Networks next week. That report is based on patterns from among the company’s 3,000 customers.

Haro said it was important to keep in mind, however, that Box doesn’t have a consumer version, and consumer services tend to drive far more traffic. He used the case of MegaUpload to explain. That company, which was ruled illegal because of copyright infringement by its customers, most of them consumers, was at least 20 times larger than that of the next biggest application that Palo Alto Networks tracked at the time, according to Haro.

Levie said the economics around enterprise are also better. Large companies are willing to pay more for a service with security and other enterprise features than consumers are. “The enterprise market is where the largest and most viable business remains,” he said.

Levie said the release by Dropbox of new enterprise features this week was expected, but nothing surprising.

“It’s baseline functionality you need in order to go in and compete in the business market,” he said. “That said, there’s quite a bit of distance from what we’ve built from what they’re building.

He said Box can handle enterprise companies that have 10,000 to 50,000 employees using Box in the cloud. “This requires a lot of features. You have to build them, manage them, and you need data and visibility of what employees are doing with that content at scale.” He added that you also have to support an ecosystem of other partners that need to tie into your application.

And this is just the beginning. “We’ve only done a blip of what we want to do,” Levie said.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“No one has never said, ‘Boy, I sure do love emailing myself files.’”

Truer words were never spoken. The ones above come from the mouth of Dave Lieb, Bump‘s CEO. His app makes it easy to share contact information, photos, and all kinds of files between devices by “bumping” the two devices together.

Bump started out with just smartphones. Now, you can bump any kind of file — PDFs, documents, photos, executables, you name it — between phones as well as personal computers.

“It’s kind of become a USB drive in your phone,” said Lieb. “Except it’s better, because you can’t lose it, and it’s got unlimited storage in the cloud.”

And as for emailing yourself slide decks and spreadsheets, Lieb said, “We hope people can actually look forward to this experience rather than dreading it.”

The bump-to-keyboard feature first arrived back in May as a way to share photos only between a PC and a smartphone. “It turns out that people really love it, and it’s growing at a really fast rate,” said Lieb. Since Bump users liked the feature so much, the team decided to expand the functionality to all file types — which means the app is likely to be useful to a much wider swath of people in a much broader range of use cases.

But Bump won’t be rocking the boat for all its users with a new or complicated interface, Lieb said. “It really doesn’t change anything about the mobile app, and on the computer, we try to keep everything really simple. … Everything we’re trying to build is along that vein.”

While we had Lieb on the line, we asked about the overall health of his business.

The company launched Flock, a standalone photo-sharing-in-the-background app, last summer. “Flock is doing really well, we’re learning a lot of things,” Lieb told us. “We’re looking at the numbers, and they’re all really positive.”

While Lieb couldn’t get specific on digits, he did say, “Having two products [Bump and Flock] to focus on is definitely more challenging. But there’s still a unifying theme: We’re trying to solve people’s real-world problems and make it easier for them to interact. And they’re really similar from a UX point of view.” In other words, a lot of the work that goes into Bump can be reused and duplicated for Flock and vice versa.

As for the money side, Lieb said, “We’re not monetizing right now. We’re still figuring out how to make the products really good and how to drive value to users. … It’s not a big focus.”

The CEO said his startup’s flagship investors, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, are both supportive of the team’s users-first-money-second approach. “They’re very well aligned with what we’re trying to do here. … We don’t really get that pressure at all from our investors.”

While Bump will have to keep waiting for its dollar-counting days, there’s still plenty of figures to keep track of, Lieb said. “The things to look at when you can’t measure revenue are growth: Are you getting new users each day? And were getting 100,000 new users around the world every day.

“Another thing is whether people who download it are still using it. And we’re doing really well there, too … We estimate that well north of 50 percent of our 125 million install base still have the app on their phones.”

The final metric of prerevenue success, said Lieb, is to ask, “Is the app valuable to the people who use it? And the people who use Bump and Flock really love it.”

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s only been a few weeks since YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse promised to do “more than just send.”

YouSendIt is best known for its software to help users send and receive large files via a desktop PC. But today, it’s launching a suite of mobile apps for iPhone, Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8, so you’ll be able to access documents, videos and presentations on the move.

With the new iPhone app, released today, you can send and sign documents from a smartphone with any changes securely synced. The company promises a faster access and a host of new features — for instance, you can send a document without saving it to the app to conserve memory.

YouSendIt recently launched its revamped Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Samsung S-pen apps. Earlier this month, it acquired a venture-backed startup called “Found.” You can use this tech to discover your files, documents, and data across a variety of devices and cloud services.

As it moves into the file-sharing and delivery space, YouSendIt will compete with well-funded startups like Box and Dropbox, which are also fine-turning their strategy for mobile.

It has chosen its positioning wisely in emphasizing that it will keep sensitive data secure.

Related: Read about Dropbox’s recent string of security breaches.

“Seventy-five percent of businesses allow employees to use their personal mobile devices for work purposes,” said YouSendIt’s product lead Matte Scheinker in a statement. He explained that the mobile apps meet the needs of employees and the “robust security” required by IT.

YouSendIt has raised a total of $49 million in venture funding in the previous seven years. According to Garlinghouse, it is experiencing 50 percent growth year over year and recently exceeded 40 million users. Last year, the company pulled in $57 million in revenue.

Businesswoman with phone image // Shutterstock 

Kim Dotcom, the founder of defunct Megaupload service, has finally fully launched his follow-up service with Mega — a site that offers 50GB of free cloud storage and ultrasecure ways to transmit files to friends.

Mega opened for some users on Friday, but it didn’t open for the public until Saturday. The service gives new users 50GB of storage for storing and sharing music, movies, documents, and other files. If you want even more storage, you can pay a monthly fee — 500GB of storage runs €9.99 ($13), 2TB of storage costs €19.99 ($27), and 4TB of storage runs €29.99 ($40). The service has lots of encryption, so much that Mega will not know what kind of files users are uploading.

Dotcom clearly is trying to use Mega as more powerful and secure version of Megaupload, which the U.S. government shut down in a spectacular fashion. Dotcom was charged with enabling piracy on a massive scale. Prosecutors have been trying to have Dotcom extradited to the U.S., but New Zealand’s legal system has provided him some cover so far.

“The launch of Mega is not about mocking any government or Hollywood — this is about our right to innovate and start a new business.” Dotcom said at his launch event for Mega last night. “What we are offering is a smarter, faster, and more secure way of cloud storage. And we are fully assured by our legal team that we are in compliance with the law.”

Some early users complained the site was loading and behaving slowly. Dotcom addressed that issue on Twitter, saying that demand for the service is massive and should be resolved.

“If you are currently experiencing slow access to #Mega its because of the unbelievable demand,” Dotcom said in a tweet early this morning. “We are working on more capacity.”

50GB of free cloud storage is an immensely nice offer, one that trumps what Dropbox, Google Drive, SugarSync, Microsoft SkyDrive, and other storage players offer for free. Will you use Mega’s service?

Check out some of the offbeat launch event of Mega in the video below:

Sure, he is a massive publicity hound, but he’s an interesting publicity hound. Fresh off rebranding his defunct MegaUpload service as a sparkling new file-sharing service called Me.ga — yes that’s Mega, but it’s also ME dot GA — Dotcom now wants to help build a new fat pipe to online content in the U.S.

Specifically, in fact, to Los Angeles, home of the Hollywood execs who instigated his MegaUpload mega takedown.

One way or another New Zealand needs Pacific Fibre. I think it is important to reboot efforts to make it happen.

—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) November 03, 2012

Pacific Fibre was an attempt to create a second link between Australia, New Zealand, and Los Angeles. However, the consortium failed to attracted the $400 million in investment required to lay the 10,500 kilometer (6500 mile) cable and closed its doors as of August.

Now Dotcom, who lives in New Zealand, is proposing rebooting the project — which would surely be helpful to his new file-sharing business, as it needs high-speed global connectivity.

But while Dotcom’s legal problems may be slowly clearing up as both the American and New Zealand governments have significantly fumbled the copyright infringement proceedings against him, he is almost certainly still persona non grata to officialdom and content czars in both countries.

In other words: Dotcom agitating for a new intercontinental broadband cable may very well be the kiss of death to the project. That is, if it weren’t dead already.

At least one Internet user in New Zealand, however, who dubbed the effort megacable, pointed out the fatal flaw:

While I admire the @KimDotcom #megacable plan, there is a tiny flaw. US permission required to connect to USA m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/articl…

—
Rod Drury (@roddrury) November 03, 2012

Image credit: Pacific Fibre; Hat tip: Ars Technica

A study has found that music fans who use peer-to-peer file sharing services actually purchase more music, on average, than those who stay completely legit.

The study by the American Assembly, a nonpartisan public policy think tank housed at Columbia University, found that file sharers purchase around 30 percent more music than non-file sharers. File sharers also have much larger music collections, naturally, with a big boost to their libraries provided by files they’ve downloaded without buying.

The study is merely the latest to confirm what proponents of P2P file sharing have been claiming all along: People who use P2P technologies are actually the music industry’s biggest fans.

Instead, however, the music industry, led by the RIAA, has spent over a decade hounding P2P sites out of existence and prosecuting its biggest fans for sharing files illegally.

And let’s not mince words: File-sharing is generally considered a violation of copyright law, and the courts have been inclined to pass severe financial penalties on those convicted of filesharing. The RIAA claims that it takes these tactics to help offset piracy, which it claims costs the industry billions of dollars annually.

But it’s not hard to see an alternate universe in these charts: one in which the music industry learned to overlook these petty copyright crimes and found ways to turn its biggest fans into even bigger customers.

Via Torrentfreak

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

According to Salesforce.com, a crowd of 90,000 people will gather in San Francisco tomorrow morning to listen in to the keynote address from the company’s outspoken CEO, Marc Benioff. This number may be a slight exaggeration, but nonetheless it signals the company is not just a customer relationship management (CRM) giant in the eyes of the tech community.

Salesforce made five acquisitions this year as it expands its suite of tools to every corner of the enterprise, fueling an endless stream of rumors. Who will they buy next? No doubt, this will be a major talking point at the conference, alongside discussions about how the company will integrate the startups it recently acquired.

Tech conferences can be overwhelming, so we compiled talking points for you. Whether you’re planning to attend or are simply curious, here’s what to expect at Dreamforce 2012.

“Chatter” and cloud storage — Who will Salesforce.com acquire?

Salesforce‘s CEO Marc Benioff’s knows how to command the attention of a room; he dropped a bomb at Disrupt last week in San Francisco. Immediately following an enterprise panel featuring cloud service providers, Box and Okta, he announced the introduction of two competing products.

“We are not trying to snuff competitors out,” he said, shortly after making the announcement. Benioff also hinted that the company would add file-storage features to Chatter, the social enterprise tool that is similar to Microsoft-owned Yammer. The tool is called ChatterBox — a nod to potential competitor, Box?

As it typically does, Salesforce may be gearing up for an acquisition. Rumors abounded that Box would be the primary target. I hopped on the phone with Box’s CEO Aaron Levie who responded with a firm “absolutely not”. Levie told me that Salesforce might be entering into the cloud storage space, but that few companies truly understand the value of file sharing and collaboration.

Putting the rumors to bed, a spokesperson from Salesforce told me to expect news about Dropbox, Box’s primary competitor. An integration, perhaps? Expect plenty of discussion around Chatter and new file storage capabilities.

What’s next for Buddy Media? 

Salesforce’s most expensive buy was Buddy Media, which it picked up for $689 million in August. Buddy Media is one of the biggest makers of social media tools for the enterprise. The result is Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a social networking platform for marketing. This was integrated with technology gained from both Buddy Media and Radian6, a social media monitoring provider.

Marketing Cloud is expected to be officially announced Wednesday morning by Benioff during his keynote address.

Do.com is hotting up!

Do.com, Salesforce’s productivity tool that competes with Asana, recently upgraded its product with a host of new features. Do also recently graduated from being a free app to a fremium service. Led by Manymoon’s founder (a startup acquired by Salesforce last year), it recently announced its first huge customer: Google.

Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s senior VP told VentureBeat last month that Do.com signed up several hundred thousand users with “zero dollars spent on marketing.” With skyrocketing adoption rates, the company will be looking for ways to monetize the service.

In addition, Benioff mentioned Do.com at Disrupt last week, so I expect to hear more from him on this topic at Dreamforce.

Will they revive Force.com?

Salesforce may have talked it up, but as industry analyst Ray Wang told Computer World, Force.com is not particularly intuitive or easy to use. We may not hear any announcements this year, but it’s a good conversation topic to raise with fellow conference-goers. During panels, ask questions about whether the company will invest in its development.

Marc Benioff photo: Dell/Flickr

U.S. authorities want to give alleged Megaupload kingpin Kim Dotcom access to just a single 40-page document out of 22 million e-mails before his extradition hearing, according to Stuff.co.nz.

Dotcom has become a bit of an Internet folk hero as of late and now is acting as a larger-than-life figure fighting overreaching government charges. His file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against sites that enabled copyright infringement. The two governments had Dotcom arrested, seized his assets (illegally, according to a judge), and filed an extradition request to have him sent to the U.S. from New Zealand. Since that time, he has attracted the support of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who says the case against Dotcom is “weak.”

Now the FBI does not want to give Dotcom access to its large stores of evidence before his Aug. 6 extradition hearing. Instead, it wants to provide him and his team with a 40-page document that summarizes 22 million e-mails that the U.S. is using as evidence. The U.S. argues that Dotcom does not need to see all the evidence against him before he faces trial in U.S. courts.

Dotcom’s legal team said disclosure of all the evidence against Dotcom is necessary to defend him during the extradition hearing. Without all the evidence, his lawyers said, they would have “their hands tied behind their backs.”

Dotcom recently blamed U.S. Vice President Joe Biden for having authorities target Megaupload. He also blames MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) president and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd.

Next up in the case, a U.S. court will hear a motion from Dotcom’s lawyers on July 27 to dismiss all of his charges, according to New Zealand’s Times Live. We don’t expect anything to come of it.

Kim Dotcom photo illustration: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apparently Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is under the impression that when companies go public, it means they are a legitimate business (see Enron, Groupon, etc). Pirate news site TorrentFreak reports that before it was shut down by U.S. authorities, Megaupload was preparing for a billion dollar IPO, and had contacted major accounting firms to have its business audited.

Why is anyone pointing this out? Well, the thinking goes, if Megaupload really was a major criminal enterprise, it never would have invited reputable accounting firms to audit every aspect of its business.

TorrentFreak sources their information to Robert Lim, a Hong Kong-based corporate advisor brought on by Megaupload to advise on the IPO process:

“Objectively speaking, for the criminal case it brings up the question if there really was a so-called ‘Mega-Conspiracy’ among Megaupload management. It is clear Megaupload management was seriously exploring options for taking the company to public listing,” Lim told us.

“They also knew full well that it would require a lot of scrutiny, due diligence and review of the operations, financials and overall business model of Megaupload not only by the auditors / accountants, lawyers for regulatory filings and IPO underwriters, but also the various regulatory agencies which govern the stock exchanges and public markets.”

“This does not fit with the ‘Mega-Conspiracy’ concept that Megaupload management is accused of, including that they knowingly and secretly conspired to do and hide criminal activities in Megaupload,” Lim adds.

Well, yes and no. There was plenty of legitimate business being done on Megaupload. There was also plenty of illegal file sharing being done by users that Megaupload could have claimed protection against under the safe harbor of the DMCA. As to a conspiracy by the founder to upload certain files for profit, it’s not clear at all that this kind of activity, arranged by email, phone or in person, would have come to light during an audit of their financials.

It certainly adds a new wrinkle to the company’s defense for the upcoming case and a blockbuster what if? for all those bankers making beaucoup bucks off the current wave of tech IPOs.

What will happen to file-sharing company Megaupload’s $42 million in seized assets? Founder Kim Dotcom is scraping by on a monthly stipend of $48,500 (taken from the interest on Dotcom’s $10 million in New Zealand government bonds) but the rest of the company’s warchest is a tempting target for companies that can prove copyright infringement.

Enter Florida-based entertainment production company ValCom. ValCom announced Friday it is suing Megaupload for millions in damages for 6,000 of its audio and video titles that were allegedly pirated on Megaupload.com. The public company (VLCO, currently trading at $0.04 a share) is asking for between $750 and $150,000 per title in back-due royalties and damages. If successful, it could rake in anywhere from $4.5 million all the way up to $90 million in the suit.

“These are revenues that belong to ValCom, and we’re securing them for the benefit of the company and to increase value for our shareholders,” ValCom president Vince Vellardita said in a statement.

ValCom mostly rents studios and equipment to entertainment companies such as CBS and Disney, but it also has its own library of titles, including fitness video “In the House with Shari Layne” and 1970s children’s show “The New Zoo Review” (pictured above).

The integration isn’t huge, but it’s perhaps a sign of what Dropbox has been working on since acquiring business-collaboration company Cove and adding its former Facebook execs to the Dropbox staff.

To get started with the new Facebook/Dropbox feature, go to the Dropbox Share page and sign in to your Facebook account. Then pick a folder you want to share, but instead of entering an email address or Dropbox username, start typing a friend’s Facebook name and Dropbox will automatically find it.

Shared folders are usually used to collaborate on projects or share relevant files, but as The Next Web points out, Dropbox’s example in its tweet may reveal that the company is hoping to tap into new sharing situations. Instead of posting a funny picture to Facebook, you could add a bunch of friends to a shared folder and then just drag and drop funny picture after funny picture to the same folder for your friends’ amusement.

Several services have done the opposite, trying to capture Facebook photos and put them into Dropbox. You can use IFTTT, a task-creation service, to pull photos and videos into Dropbox every time you add something new to Facebook. Perhaps one day Dropbox will offer a similar service.

Pirate Bay learned from its first brush with the law. “Those who are aware of the site’s history know that without a few essential keystrokes in May 2006, The Pirate Bay may not have been here today. When Pirate Bay founder TiAMO heard that something was amiss, he decided to make a full backup of the site before heading off to the data center, where he was greeted by dozens of police officers,” reports file sharing news site TorrentFreak.

The service recently switched from torrents to magnet links for sharing files between users, meaning the entire site is now small enough to store on a conventional thumb drive. It has also put in place a number of failsafes like backup domains and different servers across the globe.

The site recently moved from a .ORG domain to prevent American authorities from pursuing legal action. But the switch to a SE. domain seems to have opened  the door to a new confrontation with local authorities in Sweden.

With typical flair, the team behind Pirate Bay left a message for Swedish law enforcement. “We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to Hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

New York-based startup MightyMeeting has its sights on boosting mobile productivity in the enterprise. In keeping with the growing trend of using tablets to do work, MightyMeeting is unveiling a collaboration app called MightyTeams for the iPad and Android tablets.

Several apps have popped up in the last year that have pushed the enterprise into adopting tablets. Apps such as Skype, Dropbox, Yammer, and SalesForce Mobile have paved the way for more enterprise-minded apps to be released.

MightyMeetings seeks to eliminate the need for multiple apps to communicate with your team and share work with its new application MightyTeams. While popular services DropBox, Skype, and Google Docs give companies an easy way to share documents, collaborate on projects, and communicate with entire teams, you still need at least 2-3 apps on your tablet to use these services. MightyTeams rolls several collaboration services into one app, letting you share files, work on documents between teams, message team members, and hold conference calls in one interface.

MightyMeetings previously released an app of the same name which focused on presentations via video and PowerPoint and attracted customers from the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and financial services industries. The new application, available online and for iOS and Android devices, focuses on collaboration between employees includes features such as microblogging, group messaging, voice conferencing, and file sharing. Each service is something you’d find in a stand-alone app. For example, Yammer is a enterprise social network that includes activity streaming and microblogging, and Skype offers group messaging and video calls.

MightyMeetings isn’t the only company to release an app like this. Veeva Systems has released similar software-as-a-service applications to enable companies to work on projects together. Veeva’s Vault service, for example, facilitates file sharing and project cooperation. Veeva’s products are primarily aimed at the pharmaceutical sales industry.

MightyTeams will be available Tuesday, Feb. 21 in the Apple App Store and the Android Market. It can also be accessed with any browser. The app will cost you a subscription fee of $4.99 per month, but current MightyMeetings members can get it for free.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud file management startup FileTrek has exited stealth mode with good news: it has raised $10 million in second-round funding and is ready to show businesses that it’s the best option for securely sharing and tracking files in the cloud.

FileTrek will compete heavily with Box and Egnyte, two other file sharing and hosting solutions strongly targeting business users. But FileTrek stresses that it adds something to the mix of cloud storage that no one else is: detailed file tracking so you always know where a file is located and who made modifications. (When the company demoed the service to me, I told them it looked like Microsoft Office track changes on steroids.)

“We’re not saying we’re better than Box, but we do offer more,” FileTrek CEO Dale Quayle told VentureBeat. “There is nothing currently available from Box that we don’t provide and there’s a ton available from us that Box doesn’t provide.”

On top of always letting you know where cloud-based files are, the company also offers solutions for project collaboration and a way for managers to track data with audit reporting. Thankfully, the solution is also easy to scale across desktops and mobile devices so every employee can take part.

FileTrek’s new funding was led by Anthem Venture Partners, Telesystem, and Ontario Emerging Technologies Funds.

“We believe FileTrek will define a new category by delivering an innovative solution that combines file sharing and tracking of critical data,” said William Woodward, Managing Director of Anthem Venture Partners, in a statement. “FileTrek gives accessibility to the content that is currently scattered throughout an organization and elsewhere, bringing a new sense of security to companies both large and small.”

Ottawa, Canada-based FileTrek previously raised $5 million in funding, so its total raised is now at $15 million. The company also has a regional office in Los Angeles. The company will use the new funding to hire new engineering talent and to beef up its sales and delivery capabilities, Quayle said.

You can see more screenshots from FileTrek’s service below:

For the scope of this article, I am leaving all of the commentary on SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and such aside for others much more well-versed than I to discuss.

A lot of people have been asking me the same question lately: Just how do file-sharing sites like MegaUpload — recently taken down by an international collection of law enforcement — make hundreds of millions of dollars a year and fund lottery-winner style lifestyles that include mansions and private jets?

It’s actually pretty straightforward. These sites use the same techniques as legitimate Web sites: search, social media, ad networks, and online payment processors.

Sites that feature links to illegal videos optimize for the keyword “links,” and users that seek such videos have learned to search for “links.” Generally, providers of legal content are not trying to land in searches for links; they are trying to land in searches for the word “videos.” So searching Google for a popular TV show such as NCIS followed by the words “free links” returns sites that feature links to pirated copies of the TV show.
Clicking on one of these Google links, such as TV-Links.com, returns a well-designed Web page featuring advertising from the likes of American Express and Hertz via retargeting ad networks such as Chango.

The page also features links to the latest NCIS episodes that are illegally hosted on download sites. Each link has a rating so that visitors will know when a file is no longer available due to a DCMA takedown. As there are numerous links available on numerous download sites, there is generally always an illegal copy available for viewing. It’s technically legal to link to illegally hosted copyrighted content, so these types of sites are seemingly doing nothing wrong.

Like many profit-oriented Web sites, clicking on one of these links actually takes you to a secondary page so that the site can generate an additional page view.
Clicking on a link sends the user to file-sharing sites such as VideoWeed.com that allow streaming video of hosted files, including retargeted ad networks ads from advertisers such as Virgin America.

After watching a set amount of video, users are incentivized to pay to watch more using their credit cards, processed by payment networks such as Skrill. You’re also offered the option to earn points towards viewing videos by accepting “offers,” such as a Netflix trial subscription.

If this all looks familiar and resembles so many media sites you come across, they’ve succeeded. That’s the intention.

Peter Yared is the CTO of CBS Interactive and has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. You can follow him at@peteryared.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Worried your legal files stored on Megaupload are about to be deleted? The non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has offered to help with retrieving legitimate content and returning it to Megaupload users.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, here’s a quick recap: Megaupload was a cloud-based storage company that encouraged users to upload personal files and share them using its service. But the company and some of its employees were fingered in a 72-page indictment issued two weeks ago by the Department of Justice. The indictment against Megaupload alleges it is connected to a vast criminal enterprise that has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright holders.

But the immensely popular site for file-hosting didn’t just allow users to share copyrighted movie and music files — many customers of the site used it to store and send personal files, just like you can on many other file-sharing sites on the web. When the site was taken down, Megaupload fans complained bitterly that the government had taken away access to legal files used for work, as documented by TorrentFreak. Some users are even banding together to sue the government.

Those users who lost legal files and want a chance at getting them back can now visit a site called MegaRetrieval, which has been put together by the EFF and Carpathia Hosting. The site requests that Megaupload users provide details about what data was lost and promises to try to resolve their issues through all means at its disposal. While it doesn’t guarantee getting your files back, it’s better than doing nothing.

“EFF is troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them,” said Julie Samuels, attorney at EFF, in a statement. “We think it’s important that these users have their voices heard as this process moves forward.”

Kanye West photo via Megaupload Mega Song

“SocialFolders was basically created to help people manage their content on social networks and cloud services and allow everyone to actually own that content,” said Social Folders chief operator and co-founder Martin Pannier in an interview with VentureBeat, “We set out to build this place where you can manage and transfer files, bring all your social and cloud data to your hard drive. We want to bridge the gap between social sites and your hard drive.”

SocialFolders is an app for Windows and Mac that syncs with Twitter, Facebook, Google Docs, Instagram, and as of Tuesday, Evernote. With SocialFolders, you choose which services you want to connect with, and a corresponding folder for each service will appear in your file system, Dropbox-style. When you upload a new picture to Facebook or create a new Google Doc, the new file will automatically sync with the SocialFolders app on your hard drive.

Starting Tuesday, you can add documents, images, and other files to Evernote with SocialFolders; all you have to do is add Evernote as a new service and an Evernote folder will appear on your computer. By dragging and dropping any file into the folder, you can upload it to your notebooks. In addition, any attachments you have saved in Evernote can be backed up to your computer.

While cloud computing has been great at keeping files safe and secure away from fragile hard drives, sometimes people want those files for themselves. On many websites, the terms of service allow the website to use your files however they see fit. But users should have that right too. Backing up your files also enables offline use, and with SocialFolders you can make changes to documents and images, and then sync the changes when you have an Internet connection again.

Currently, SocialFolders supports Facebook, Twitter, Box, Flickr, Instagram, Google Docs, Photobucket, Picasa, SmugMug, and YouTube. Its free service will manage up to 2,000 files for you, and you can get more storage space by inviting friends or by upgrading to the premium service.

SocialFolders was founded in August 2011 and emerged from private beta in December 2011. The company is based in San Francisco, California and has a team of six employees.

“Download for free” is something of a taboo in the entertainment industry as bootleg content continues to take chunks out of studios’ revenue. But one record label is branching out and giving the people what they want: free music.

“At DigSin, we believe in the amazing talent of our artists, and we want to share their music with you,” DigSin says on its Facebook page. “We are committed to delivering the best new music to fans, for free.”

DigSin, a new record label company, is offering all of its songs for free download on its site, according to The Next Web. It will still offer its music through traditional channels such as iTunes and streaming through Spotify, but DigSin owner Jay Frank says he wants to glean information about the type of person coming for his music, their interests, etc. than make sure everyone is paying up front for his label’s songs. He’s still supplementing the free downloads for ad revenue from the site, but doesn’t see that money being any bread and butter.

The word “copyright” has been in people’s mouths for the past few months give then SOPA protests as well as the shut down of file sharing website Megaupload. Websites such as BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay and even Dropbox have changed the way content is distributed. Not too long ago, content was handed out by the record labels and production studios after weeks and weeks of anticipated debuts. With the digitization of just about everything, and faster connection speeds, pirated content is the way many people watch or listen to entertainment.

But could the freemium model really reach the entertainment industry? iTunes brought down the price of music significantly when it instituted the .99 cents per song model. Now, that model is an expected price for legitimate copies of music. Streaming services such as Spotify and Rdio bring the price further down, depending on your consumption of music. But to force an industry into finding a new way of making money still seems a bit far off. Megaupload’s case — a file sharing site charged with copyright infringement and money laundering — shows music labels and production studios are still fighting back hard against copyright infringement. It also shows the government’s willingness to help.

DigSin’s first single comes out tomorrow, check out its website here and tell us if you think this is a big step for music distribution in the future.

via The Next Web, Musical image via Shutterstock

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several other Megaupload employees were named in a 72-page indictment issued last week by the Department of Justice. The indictment against Megaupload alleges it is connected to a vast criminal enterprise that has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company and its executives could serve many years in prison. Next up, Dotcom will face an extradition hearing on Feb. 22.

But the immensely popular site for file-hosting didn’t just allow users to share copyrighted movie and music files — many customers of the site used it to store and send personal files, just like you can on many other file-sharing sites on the web. When the site was taken down, Megaupload fans complained bitterly that the government had taken away access to legal files used for work, as noted by TorrentFreak.

In a response, the site Pirates of Catalonia, in collaboration with Pirate Parties International, is rallying former Megaupload users to sue the U.S. government. Pirates of Catalonia writes:

The FBI has caused incalculable damage, far in excess of the losses claimed by the content lobbies, in a fruitless attempt to prevent access to the media content hosted on Megaupload, some of which they claim to have been infringing copyright under US law. However, as much of the unlawful content will still be available via other services on the web, this action not only shows us the futility of these measures but also serves as a reminder that these files are not necessarily, nor have been shown to be, illegal in any country, including the US.

In contrast, by closing the service they have impeded the access to millions of archives of both private individuals and organisations, potentially causing huge personal, economic and image damages to a vast number of people. In addition, the Pirate Party understands they may have violated Articles 197 and 198 of the Spanish Penal Code by misappropiating personal data.

Users who have been affected by the Megaupload shutdown can sign the petition at Pirates of Catalonia’s Megaupload site.

Dotcom (pictured) and several other Megaupload employees were named in a 72-page indictment issued last Thursday by the Department of Justice. The indictment against Megaupload alleges it is connected to a vast criminal enterprise that has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company and its executives could serve many years in prison and forfeit $175 million in assets, including 15 Mercedes, a Maserati, a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce.

New Zealand Judge David McNaughton denied bail to Dotcom, saying he is flight risk. “With sufficient determination and financial resources, flight risk remains a real and significant possibility which I cannot discount and bail is declined,” Judge David McNaughton said, according to Reuters.

Dotcom has said he is innocent of charges and is not a flight risk because the government has seized his assets and because his wife is pregnant with twins. Dotcom will remain in custody until Feb. 22, when he will face an extadition hearing that could bring him to the United States for trial.

Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken told VentureBeat this past Friday that the company would “be assembling a worldwide team of top-notch lawyers, intellectual property lawyers and tech lawyers to defend this. There’s a good chance Megaupload will prevail in this case.” Since then however, one of MegaUpload’s high-profile lawyers, Robert Bennett, has withdrawn, citing conflict of interest.

As more details come to light in the much-publicized Megaupload case, other file-sharing sites around the web are shutting their doors in fear that they could be targeted next by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Over the weekend, popular Megaupload alternatives FileSonic and FileServe completely turned off the ability to share files with other people. And another well-trafficked site, Uploaded.to, has blocked all U.S.-based IP addresses in fear of getting in serious trouble with the U.S. government.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several other Megaupload employees were arrested after being named in a 72-page indictment issued Thursday by the DOJ. The indictment alleges Megaupload is connected to a vast criminal enterprise and has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company’s executives could serve many years in prison.

Even with trouble brewing, many sites that emulate Megaupload’s basic capabilities still work just fine. The CEO of popular file-sharing site MediaFire told me Sunday the company isn’t too concerned about government scrutiny because it is a legitimate business and doesn’t incentivize piracy like Megaupload did. That said, just because a company is confident about its legitimacy and employees don’t absurdly flaunt their wealth, doesn’t guarantee the government won’t investigate it.

“At this point, it’s hard to tell how far you can extrapolate, but I don’t think anyone should rest easy,” said Felix Wu, assistant law professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The Megaupload case will set precedent for these types of businesses and how liable they are.”

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of 15 file-sharing sites still up and running that the government could potentially target next (in alphabetical order). Take a look:

1. BayFiles

Hong Kong-based BayFiles may be one of the file-sharing sites that attracts government scrutiny based on pedigree alone. The site was created by two of the founders of notorious torrent website The Pirate Bay, which said two weeks ago it would gradually stop serving torrent files because of sustained heat. BayFiles’ terms of service say content that “violates third-party copyrights” is not permitted to be uploaded, but the site still makes it effortless to share copyrighted material with others.

2. DepositFiles

Cyprus-based DepositFiles has a bare bones design, but the site has pretty incredible sharing capabilities available for free. You can upload and share files up to 300MB in size without registration, and if you do register, you can upload up to 2GB files for free. The site also offers a Gold membership that allows you download with multiple connections, no waiting time for downloads and no advertising. Having people pay for higher quality download connections to large files is one of the things that got Megaupload in trouble.

3. Divx Stage

Divx Stage is one of the shadiest looking sites on this list, without question. The site blatantly advertises it will pay $10 for each 1000 full-movie streams for movies uploaded on the site. The site lets you upload up to 1GB files and features tons of TV shows and movies to watch for free. As of Monday, some shows on the first page of the site include the Mark Wahlberg film “Contraband” and the latest episode of ABC’s “Once Upon a Time.”

4. HulkShare

HulkShare is a strange beast of a file-sharing service that walks the line between promoting artists and enabling those to spread copyrighted music illegally. The site makes it extremely easy to upload song files and let other people listen to those files using its embeddable HulkShare Player. The site’s terms of service states copyrighted material is “strictly prohibited,” but in line with DMCA, artists must let the site know if a file is there without authorization to get it taken down.

5. MediaFire

Texas-based MediaFire lets you upload and easily share up to 200MB files without registration. While I believe MediaFire makes a convincing case that it is a legitimate company targeting professionals, the site has a huge amount of users who use the service for spreading copyrighted files, especially music. If you do a Google search for a song name, an artist name, and “MediaFire,” for example, it will likely bring you to a copy of the file which can easily be downloaded from a MediaFire page. CEO Derek Labian told us the fault belongs to Google for indexing shared MediaFire pages, and that Google should look into the problem.

6. MegaShares

It probably won’t help MegaShares that the word “Mega” is in its name, but it might have other things to worry about. The site lets users upload up to 10GB files and it pays users for the amount of downloads they bring to the site. Every “unique premium download with a minimum 5MB file size” earns you a “1 cache point” and when you reach certain numbers of points, you get cash.

7. NovaMov

NovaMov is quite similar to the Divx Stage site, and it’s just as shady. It rewards people for uploading movies up to 2GB in size and keeps a searchable directory of streaming movies infringing on copyrights. Users who upload files are paid $10 for each 1000 full video streams.

8. OvFile

On the surface, OvFile is a lot less nefarious looking than Divx Stage and NovaMov. But because it allows you to easily upload up to 1GB movies and it’s plenty easy to find OvFile links through Google searches, it’s still just as capable of infringement as those other sites.

9. PutLocker

MediaFire CEO Labian told me PutLocker was one of the biggest sites on the web giving file-sharing sites a bad name. On the site, you can upload and share files up to 1GB for free and there’s no time limit on streaming shared videos. In a move likely inspired by Megaupload’s troubles, PutLocker will be ending its affiliate program, which gives users cash for streams, on Feb. 1. That’s at least a start, but the site will still almost certainly still be a place for sharing and watching copyrighted movies without authorization.

10. RapidShare

Switzerland-based RapidShare is one of the oldest file-sharing sites and currently has a global traffic rank of 211 on Alexa. The site has had numerous legal issues, but it still operates and serves millions of users daily who share files. RapidShare has no limits on upload or download sizes, but it does make you wait to download files if you are not a premium user. If you are premium user, you can download simultaneous large files with a waiting period.

11. SockShare

SockShare is one of many sites where you can share streaming videos links. There is a 1GB cap on what unpaid users can upload and a 5GB cap on what premium users can upload. It is troublingly easy to Google a video name and “SockShare” to find a watchable stream on the site. However, just like PutLocker, SockShare will be ending its affiliate program, which gives users cash for video streams, on Feb 1.

12. UploadHere

On UploadHere, you can upload files up to 2GB but you must be a premium member on the site to download files over 1GB in size. That sort of business model clearly leads to the site profiting on the downloads of large, mostly copyrighted files. The site charges $8 a month for premium memberships and slightly less per month if you pay for multiple months in bulk.

13. UploadKing

UploadKing offers people almost exactly the same service as UploadHere, except it costs a bit less for premium downloading status. Free users are encouraged to upgrade to premium because it limits free users to download files under 1GB in size and does not let you download several files simultaneously.

14. WUpload

Hong Kong-based WUpload will likely be one of the most-used file-sharing sites now that Megaupload has been taken down. The site allows users to upload and download files up to 2GB for free. It encourages users to sign up for premium accounts, which enable simulatenous large downloads, no delays on downloads, and downloads that do not time out.

15. ZShare

Hong Kong-based ZShare is another bare bones sharing site, but unlike many others it is completely free and ad-supported. It allows uploads and downloads up to 100MB. ZShare does not allow users to search directly on the site for files but it is easy to Google a file name and “ZShare” to find shared pages.

Cover photo via Shutterstock

After being arrested and charged with running a huge online piracy ring, larger-than-life founder of file-sharing site Megaupload Kim Dotcom said Monday in a bail hearing that he was innocent of all charges.

Dotcom (pictured) and several other Megaupload employees were named in a 72-page indictment issued Thursday by the Department of Justice. The indictment against Megaupload alleges that it is connected to a vast criminal enterprise has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company and its executives could serve many years in prison and forfeit $175 million in assets, including 15 Mercedes, a Maserati, a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce.

Dotcom faces extradition to the U.S., but for now he is being set up for trial in a New Zealand court, as documented by Reuters. The judge on the case, David McNaughton, listened to arguments today on whether Dotcom should be allowed to post bail. Lawyer Anne Toohey argued on behalf of the United States and told the court that Dotcom was a flight risk and could re-start Megaupload if freed.

Megaupload defense lawyer Paul Davison argued that Dotcom isn’t a flight risk because the government has seized his assets and because his wife is pregnant with twins. He also said Dotcom was innocent and denied the existence of a “mega conspiracy.”

“He is not the sort of person who will pass unnoticed through our customs and immigration lines and controls,” said Davison of the 6-foot-6-inch, 285-pound Dotcom.

The judge decided the case was too complex for an immediate ruling on bail, but said he would issue a decision no later than Wednesday.

One setback from Megaupload appears to be that U.S.-based lawyer Robert Bennett, who planned to defend Megaupload, has withdrawn from the case because his law firm, Hogan Lovells, had a conflict of interest.

Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken told VentureBeat on Friday that the company would “be assembling a worldwide team of top-notch lawyers, intellectual property lawyers and tech lawyers to defend this. There’s a good chance Megaupload will prevail in this case.”

Messages left with Rothken on Monday were not immediately returned.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As the strange case of file-sharing site Megaupload continues to unfold, many wonder if the federal government will begin to clamp down on similar sites that function like Megaupload, with easy sharing and hosting of copyrighted files.

Already, two well-known file-sharing services, Uploaded.to and Filesonic have disabled several features of their sites this weekend because of the Megaupload scandal. Others are sure to follow.

But Derek Labian, CEO of popular cloud-based file-hosting site MediaFire, told VentureBeat in an interview today that he isn’t too concerned about the government going after his company because, unlike Megaupload, MediaFire doesn’t incentivize piracy.

“We don’t have a business built on copyright infringement.” Labain said. “Like many other cloud-based sharing services like Box.net and Dropbox, we’re a legitimate business targeting professionals.”

When it comes to Megaupload, Labian described Kim Dotcom and his organization as “shady” and said the $175 million in revenues the company made should give people pause. He noted that Megaupload’s structure gave users monetary rewards for uploading pirated content. Users of the service could upload without a cap but users who want to download a large file (or download it faster) would have to pay for it. Those who uploaded the best files would be given free account upgrades or even cash.

“Megaupload was making a ridiculous amount of money with a ridiculously bad service,” Labian said. “We frankly don’t see ourselves in the same space.”

A little more background on MediaFire: The privately funded company out of Woodlands, Tex. was founded in 2006 and has steadily offered better ways to host and share large files. Because it offers an incredibly easy to way to share 200MB files for free with other people, the company has attracted employees at 86 percent of the Fortune 500 for sending files that are too large for e-mail. It offers unlimited downloads and file storage, and if you want to upload larger files with long-term storage, you can pay $9 a month for a Pro account or $49 a month for a Business account.

But the company’s free file-sharing solution can also be used easily for sharing copyrighted files, especially music, with friends, relatives or anyone on the web. A Google search for a song name, an artist name and “MediaFire,” for example, will likely bring you to a copy of that file that can easily be downloaded from a MediaFire page.

When asked about the Googling issue, Labian said that MediaFire is a “private service” and the only reason Google indexes a MediaFire page is when it has been shared by a user on a third-party site. He said MediaFire isn’t at fault for this and said Google should look into the issue.

“We try to steer clear of things that would attract scrutiny,” Labian said. “If people are pirating on our service, we don’t want those people to use it.”

Another reason Labian said he wasn’t worried about the government stepping in is because the company maintains a “good relationship” with various government bodies, including “Homeland Security, ICE, and the FBI.” Following DMCA protocols, whenever MediaFire is notified of a copyrighted file being shared inappropriately, the company immediately takes it down.

As for the future, MediaFire is optimistic about what’s to come. Labian said the company has been working for a year on its next set of products, which will emphasize collaboration and focus on business users. He teased what was coming by saying that cloud storage providers Box.net and Dropbox significantly disrupted the cloud storage space, but MediaFire would do it next.

“This is a tough market to be in, but we’re constantly looking to innovate,” Labian said. “Sharing will always be important, but it’s not the only important aspect for our customers.”

The Church of Kopimism (Get it? “Copy”-mism?) was recognized by the state just before Christmas.

Laugh if you like, but the “free-as-in-freedom” and copyleft crowds have long had a quasi-religious fervor about their activities. Regard, if you will, public figures such as Cory Doctorow or Richard Stallman; are they not prophets and priests in a manner of speaking? Do they not proselytize and preach?

The Church of Kopimism just makes it all formal.

The church’s site, which is temporarily down as of this writing due to a glut of traffic from Slashdot, says that in its religion, “Information is holy, and copying is a sacrament. Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains, and the value multiplies through copying.”

The movement started in 2010 with Isak Gerson, a 19-year-old philosophy student. The church’s application made the rounds within the Swedish government three times before the organization was successfully recognized as an honest-to-goodness religion.

“Being recognized by the state of Sweden is a large step for all of kopimi,” said Gerson on the church’s site. “Hopefully, this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution.”

If file-sharing is your jam, you can still call yourself a member of the church. The organization states it doesn’t have any formal initiation process or membership requirements; “you just have to feel a calling to worship what is the holiest of the holiest, information and copy,” reads the church’s website.

The Church of Kopimism’s services are called kopyactings. In these going-on, celebrants share files and remix to their hearts’ content.

Now if only BitTorrent clients could be recognized as a holy sacrament, we’d all have a bit less to worry about.

Many thanks to our own, dear Heather Kelly for Photoshopping the Swedish Pope up there, and apologies for any blasphemy or heresy we may be committing in the name of immature humor.

via torrentfreak

CD Projekt has spoken to Eurogamer, saying “we could introduce advanced copy protection systems which, unfortunately, punish legal customers as well. Instead, we decided to give gamers some additional content with each game release, to make their experience complete.”

“However,” CD Projekt added, “that shouldn’t be confused with us giving a green light to piracy. We will never approve of it, since it doesn’t only affect us but has a negative impact on the whole game industry.”

The Torrentfreak website claims that thousands of alleged Bittorent users in Germany have been contacted by lawyers acting on behalf of CD Projekt, over the past few months. They have been asked to hand over €911.80 ($1230) to pay off their apparent debt to the company.

This is not the first time that such mass settlements schemes have been used in the fight against piracy. Speaking of a similar scheme earlier this year, Virginia District Court Judge,  John Gibney wrote “the plaintiffs seemingly have no interest in actually litigating the cases, but rather simply have used the Court and its subpoena powers to obtain sufficient information to shake down the John Does”.

As Torrentfreak points out, such blanket initiatives are in danger of affecting innocent members of the public, and “aside from targeting many people who indeed downloaded and shared the game without paying, CD Projekt’s lawyers are also wrongfully accusing people who have never even heard of the game.”

CD Projekt has a track record of being involved in such mass settlement schemes. In 2008, UK based file-sharing lawyers Davenport Lyons demanded cash settlements from individuals who were said to have illegally downloaded the original Witcher game.

In response to concerns over its actions, CD Projekt has insisted that “we only take legal actions against users who we are 100 per cent sure have downloaded our game illegally.”