Distributed computing
A second flavour of P2P involves what has long been called "distributed computing," a technique in which hundreds or thousands of computers work together to solve a big problem, such as cracking an encryption scheme. That can be a useful setup, but is a different job than a Napster-like scheme of passing music or other files from consumer to consumer.
Intel, ever eager to put millions of its microprocessors to good use, has been using P2P in the distributed computing sense since last summer. Tuesday, the company announced plans to employ millions of PCs in a philanthropic cancer-research effort with partners that include the American Cancer Society, the National Foundation for Cancer Research and Oxford University. The effort involves having PCs in homes and offices use their idle moments to research the cancer-fighting properties of millions of molecules.
A number of companies have also been started in this part of the P2P market. But they are finding it can be slow going. Popular Power, for instance, folded. United Devices has been around for a year but so far has just three customers--though co-founder Ed Hubbard promises that many more are on the way, saying many companies are interested in it for biotechnology research as well as Web development work.
The final P2P category involves companies that want to use P2P to solve problems besides sharing music files, such as InfraSearch's Web searching. Most of these companies, though, aren't purely peer-to-peer; instead, they use P2P ideas combined with traditional approaches. A number of start-ups, for instance, are working on software to let people collaborate on office projects, or run programs over the Web as well as on local PCs. These companies include Groove Networks, as well as Jung's company, OpenDesign.
But many of these have been labeled "P2P" for the scarcely remarkable fact that their programs will occasionally direct two computers to talk directly with each other. Executives of the companies admit they went along for the P2P ride for public relations reasons.
"P2P is going to be used very broadly, but by itself, it's not going to create new companies," says Michael Tanne, chief executive of Xdegrees, a start-up using P2P ideas as part of a way to more easily locate files on the Web. "It's a technology. But the companies that will become successful are those that solve a problem."
