Monday, April 22, 2019

Web Entrepreneurs: Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis



Web Entrepreneurs: Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis 
 (What Ever Happened to JOOST?)

by Sabrina Beram

CONQUEST  

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are new wave imperialists, using peer-to-peer technology to invade the turf of the established music, telephone, and television industries by bringing these services under internet rule.  Not much is known about the personal lives of these Da Vincis of technology, but the strides they are making in repainting the landscape of the net are soon sure to be as well recognized and celebrated by our global collective consciousness as the strokes comprising the Mona Lisa.  


NIKLAS ZENNSTROM AND JANUS FRIIS  

Niklas Zennstrom is a Swedish entrepreneur who, after graduating from Sweden’s Uppsala University, entered into the work world as a telecom operator at Tele2, a substantial alternative European telecommunications company, where he met Janus Friis, a Danish entrepreneur with similar interests.  Friis' job at Tele2 followed work as a help desk attendant at CyberCity, one of Denmark’s first Internet service providers.  During their time at Tele2, the two soon-to-be moguls joined forces to launch get2net, an internet service provider which created terminals for internet connectivity at airports and other public places, and everyday.com, a site that functions as a point of access to information on the World Wide Web.  In 1998, they left Tele2 and started Kazaa, which became “the most downloaded software on the brief time line of the Internet: 390 million total downloads, with three billion files traded per month” (#10).  After selling Kazaa, Zennstrom and Friis co-founded Joltid, with the mission to “develop and provide peer-to-peer based solutions which deliver value and cost savings to a variety of applications. Joltid's products are used to publish content to millions of users across the Internet, helping our customers significantly reduce distribution costs and explore new business opportunities not viable with traditional client-server distribution methods” (#21).  Attempting to make some serious money off of Kazaa, the two innovators founded the ill-received Altnet, through which commercial music is sold to Kazaa users. They teamed up again to create two groundbreaking applications; Skype, which took telephone communications to the net, and Joost, which simulates television over the internet.  Along with Mattias Ljungman, Zennstrom and Friis founded Atomico, which allows them to give back while perpetuating the success of “game-changing business models,” like those they have created.  Their site reads “Atomico is a risk capital group. We are entrepreneurs with a global perspective who invest our own capital in passionate entrepreneurs with powerful ideas” (#14). 

In stark contrast to Zennstrom’s dual degree in Business Administration and Engineering Physics, Friis has had no formal education since dropping out of high school at the age of 16 (#25, #26).  Zennstrom was raised by two teachers.  Friis lived it up in Bombay, unsupervised.  Zennstrom: 39 and married.  Friis: 29 and single.  Both of them are well over 6 feet tall.  For formal events, Zennstrom will opt for a suit; Friis prefers “a paisley cowboy shirt of pink and purple, along with a belt buckle in the shape of a cougar's head” (#10). Zennstrom is committed and confidant, asserting, “Maybe (the naysayers) are right, maybe we're wrong…Well, actually, I know they're wrong,” and making inspiring statements such as "It's a personal thing for me with Skype… It's the realization of our vision" (#10).  Friis brings the humor, I gather from his joking attitude in brief blips of conversation in a Vanity Fair article which quotes him saying  "It's great on the way up… We get more attention from fat C.E.O.'s," as an expression for the “[lack of] hotel-room keys arcing their way” at the 3GSM World Congress, a massive event at which trends in the mobile industry, including latest technology and services (#10).  The same article describes them as having “boyish energy and one lazy eye each,” probably from all the time spent hunched over computers (#10).  Jo Mosaku, a key business adviser to the two after they launched Skype two years ago, provided some insight to the pair’s elusiveness regarding popular media: "They are technology freaks and not the kind of guys who seek publicity” (#27).  While you won’t come across them profiled in People Magazine or referenced on Best Week Ever, their names shine on the glossy pages of Time Magazine, which popped them on it’s 2006 list of 100 most influential people, and Fortune, which voted them into the No. 1 spot on the magazine’s list of the most powerful people in business in a sub-group labeled "The Disrupters," mavericks with ideas that "give corporate titans the cold sweats" (#27).  Additionally, Zennstrom is one of the Young Global Leaders at the World Economic Forum, Friis was awarded “IT-prisen…given by the Danish IT industry and IDG for his work and innovation,” and the two of them are co-recipients of the 2006 Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award, “given to business and individuals who have used information technology in a way that changed an industry or society as a whole” (#25, #26).  Impressive. 


FAST TRACK PROTOCOL  

In March 2001 the Dutch company Consumer Empowerment, founded by Zennstrom and Friis, introduced Fast Track Protocol shortly before Napster’s demise the following July.  This set of standards, actually co-designed by Friis, defined an updated common procedure by which computers could connect, communicate, and transfer data to one another.  Fast Track Protocol differs from first generation peer-to-peer protocols in that it acts as a Controlled Decentralization Peer-to-Peer network, which combines the best attributes of Centralized Peer to Peer Networks and Decentralized Peer to Peer Networks.  Centralized P2P Networks, like Napster, employ a lead server, to which each individual computer in the network is required to register.  The lead server functions as a catalog for shared files stored on each node, and because it updates automatically when an individual computer signs on or off the network, it can keep track of which nodes are active at any point in time, which allows for an individual client computer requesting a file to be quickly directed to the most efficient peer computer available sharing the requested file (#3, 8).  Conversely, Decentralized P2P Networks, like Gnutella, lacks a central server, opting instead to use a many-to-many system in which each node acts as both a client and a server to the network.  Each individual computer is connected to 4-8 other users’ computers, and queries are forwarded to those 4-8 connected computers which each forward the query to the 4-8 additional computers to which they are connected, and so on until a result is located and sent back (#3, 8).   Decentralized Networks cannot be shut down as easily as a Centralized network, but search times are much longer since a query will often need to travel through thousands of users before a result is found.  The Controlled Decentralized P2P Framework inherent in Fast Track labels those computers with the highest bandwidth at a given time as ‘super-nodes.’  A single super-node acts as a temporary indexing server for a batch of slower clients, and communicates directly with other elected super-nodes which hold information pertaining to the shared files available through the collective of slower clients they represent and have the power to connect the computer capable of sharing the searched file with the inquiring computer (#3, 9).  Thus, the Controlled Decentralized P2P Framework is able to locate files with the high performance of the Centralized P2P Network and, like a Decentralized P2P Network, its system as a whole will compensate for a disabled server and operations will continue uninterrupted. With an estimated 2.4 million users, Fast Track was the most popular file sharing network in 2003, according to Wikipedia, due to its ability to “resume interrupted downloads” and  “simultaneously download segments of one file from multiple peers” (#2).  


KAZAA 

Zennstrom and Friis applied the Fast Track Protocol to Kazaa, their peer-to-peer file sharing application characterized by a user-friendly interface.  With Napster cornering the music file-sharing market at the time of Kazaa’s release, Zennstrom and Friis thought their new P2P program would be adopted for alternative purposes (#4, 1).  Interestingly, Kazaa came to be most commonly associated with the exchange of mp3 music files over the internet, although it supported the transfer of video, application, and document files as well.  Kazaa stood out among the competition because it “avoided having lists of what people were swapping” (#4, 1).   The legal strategy in claiming to be a decentralized network was that monitoring and control over the files that users upload and download was impossible, so the responsibility for the copyright infringements inherent in the dissemination of copied copyrighted files could not fall on the owners of the P2P application (# 5).  This echoes the landmark 1984 Supreme court case that “protected VCRs from copyright infringement lawsuits since manufacturers couldn’t control how people used the technology” (6).  When questioned about illegal file sharing that have been made possible by networks like Kazaa and thus threaten the traditional music industry, Zennstrom insisted, “Ultimately these are great things…When radio stations started playing music, the record companies started suing radio stations.  They thought now that people could listen to music for free, who would want to buy a record in a record shop?  But now I think we all agree that radio stations are good stuff” (#4, 2).  

Nonetheless, when faced with a lawsuit from Dutch music publishing body, Buma/Stemra, in November 2001, Consumer Empowerment sold Kazaa to Sharman Networks, an Australian company which, curiously, was created days before it acquired Kazaa.  Sharman’s CEO, Nikki Hemming revealed in the February 2003 edition of Wired Magazine that Kevin Bermeister, owner of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, had signed an agreement with Zennstom to bundle an early version of Altnet, a spyware program that “would display "related" songs and videos upon a user's search that were actually advertised songs that usually cost money to play. … the downloads would come not from fellow Kazaa users' client computers, but rather from a localized server purchased by the advertising companies” (#8).  In 2001, when Zennstrom dodged legal pressure from music companies by selling Kazaa, Bermeister, in the form of Sharman, provided a safe way for Zennstrom to take his name and reputation out of the public eye and oversee Kazaa from a far, while continuing to take advantage of the 60 million Kazaa users by partaking in about half of the “millions Sharman [was to collect] from US advertisers like Netflix and DirecTV, without spending a penny on content” (#7).  Hemming, who a was responsible for assembling the anonymous investors backing Sharman, criticized media companies registering lawsuits against Kazaa and Altnet, asking, “What does it take for an industry to wake up to an amazing opportunity? They have this misconceived idea that we're in 2003 when  the Digital Millennium Copyright Act served notices for all the server owners that hosted the software (#9).   As per its Wikipedia entry, Kazaa’s contact links are currently broken, its audience has dropped to mere hundreds of users, and nothing has been updated on the site for one year as of July 2007 (#1). 


SKYPE 

Inspired by the growing broadband connections, more powerful computers, and streaming multimedia that had been developing during their work with Kazaa, the tech duo took the next logical step in P2P application development when they founded Sype on August 29th, 2003.  “We saw the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense,” Zennstrom explained in a 2004 interview with the popular tech blog Engadget, “If you could utilize the resources of the end users’ computers, you could do things much more efficiently” (#11).  Michael Gough, a writer featured on Skypetips.com projects that the service “will become as common as E-mail and Instant Messaging in the next few years” (#12).  In the article “Why Skype Versus Other Solutions?” he cites three basic reasons for the Skype’s success in the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market, which focuses on breaking a voice into segments, transmitting it over a computer, and assembling it again.  First, Skype is “portable,” meaning it “does not need any custom configuration when it comes to networks and firewalls,” so it can easily be loaded onto and allow open voice communication between Windows, Linux, Mac OS 10, Pocket PC and other mobile platforms (#12).  Second, Skype’s low operation cost. With establishing a billing account and sending a technician to install a phone line now out of the picture, has allowed it to upstage traditional cell and telephone companies.  Initially, Skype attracted attention due to the fact that it could be downloaded for free.  This led consumers to take a chance on the new product, and spurred users to virally spread news of the service to their friends by word of mouth.  Skype offers free computer-to-computer calls, deemed Skype to Skype, and Skype-to-telephone calls, known as Skype Out, which lets users call “anywhere in the world at cheap local rates, often two or three cents a minute” (#11).  Furthermore, Skype Out’s “cost per minute” charges, versus cell and telephone “flat rate calling plans [which are] not cost effective for most of us,” ensures that “unless you live on the phone, Skype will save you money” (#12).  Third, Skype is simple to use.  With over 59 million users in more than 225 countries, it is vital that the application be accessible not only for the tech-savvy, but also for “young children using it to keep in touch with a parent who may be traveling on business to great grandparents using it to keep in touch with family living all over the world” (#13, 11).  As Zennstrom himself succinctly put it; “If you can use a web browser, you can use Skype” (#11).  

The lightning speed at which Skype has grown, despite minimal advertising, has caught the attention of wireless hardware vendors interested in offering Skype in their products, permitting Skype to be used independent of personal computers, as well as third-party developers looking to integrate their applications with Skype.  “We started with pocket PC, and now we’re looking at other mobile platforms like Windows SmartPhone, Symbian, and Palm…It’s going to be wonderful to be able to make a Skype call from cell phones or  PDAs…The more broadband wireless connections there are, the more you’ll see Skype proliferate,” gloats Zennstrom when questioned about Skype WiFi and the upcoming WiMax, which can transmit a signal as far away as 30 miles (#11, #10).    In addition to it’s involvement in accessory creation, Skype is evolving in the direction of product add-ons, offering instant messaging which works simultaneously with voice communication, a video conference call feature that allows up to five people to communicate within one call, and Word document of digital picture file sharing- all of which appeal to businesses (#11).  

In attempt to “remove the barriers in modern communications,” Zennstrom and Friis have created what they refer to as “a disruptive technology that shifts the industry,” (#11, #4).  “This technology enables people to communicate directly, [andl] obviously,” Zennstrom points out, “it undercuts a lot of the revenues of the big phone companies, who have been using outdated technology” (#4).   The intention to revolutionize telecommunications with their Skype software mirrors the attempt to overturn traditional music transactions with Kazaa’s file-sharing.  This time around, things are looking more legit.  On October 14th, 2005, Ebay, an established corporation largely accountable for building community commerce on the internet, acquired the formerly privately-held Skype for $2.5 billion (#13).   To compete with widely successful web platform companies, like Google and Yahoo, Ebay intends to “continue to run Skype as a standalone Internet Telephony business, but it will also use Skype’s telephony and IM product line as a platform to extend its own e-commerce business [to global markets since]…Skype is used worldwide, whereas Ebay has limited worldwide presence” (#15).   Case in point; one New Zealander provided an analysis of how the fusion might change his behavior, stating, “Ebay doesn’t operate in my country- yet I rely on Skype as one of my main communications channels. I could see myself starting to use Ebay if it was relatively easy to register for and utilize a buyer/seller account via my Skype account.  I don’t think I’d use telephony, but I may use IM to sort out transaction details or look for good deals” (#15).  Two new Skype features that will help Ebay build community, which is ever-important in the age of Web 2.0, are Skypecasts and “public chats, which are conference calls and text chat in which people with a common interest can gather to communicate with each other” (#16).  Along with addressing the initiative to allow users to send money through Skype, the company is also exploring the possibility of adding software that can “automatically detect phone numbers in Web pages and initiate calls,” which could fortify the semantic web (#16). 


JOOST 

With the healthy monetary payoff obtained from the Ebay acquisition, Zennstrom and Friis had more than enough to fund their next project, Joost, stealthily code-named The Venice Project in 2006.  Why the secrecy?  “The reason is mainly because it makaes operating much easier.  You don’t have to explain what you are doing…[which ultimately] keeps you from your work to be done: getting out the piece of software,” clarifies chief technology officer Dirk-Willem van Gulik, who met Niklas and Janus at Tele2 and has been discussing the project, which has been touted as the world’s first online global TV distribution platform, with them for eight years #17).  While Zennstrom dominated most of the conversation around Kazaa and Skype, a giddy Friis has stepped up to the microphone to promote the Joost initiative, exclaiming, “People love to watch TV.  They love professional storytelling by people who know what they are doing.  And people love the internet, because of the choice and social qualities.  We are trying to bring the best of both worlds together” (#19).  

Wikipedia expands on this, defining both the basic Joost concept; “It turns a PC into an instant on-demand TV without any need for additional set top box,” and elaborating on internet plug-ins such as “news updates, discussion forums, show ratings, and multi-user chat sessions (often linked through the active stream/ channel) [which] are made possible thought the use of semi-transparent widget overlays” (#18).   These trimmings are secondary to an interface which “by default runs in fullscreen mode” with main controls which “remain hidden until you mouse over them” (#20).  A Businessweek article emphasizes that, while your PC looks like a TV, “the capabilities go far beyond anything you’ll experience in your den…At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop pause and fast forward, as well as a search window to find new videos.  An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels.  And on the right, there’s a set of interactive tools that let you share video playlists with friends or family.  An image at the top of the screen identifies the channel and the name of the clip you are watching.”  Notably, the user experience, in which a viewer chooses a channel and then the show on that channel that he/she wants to watch and has the flexibility to skip ahead or backwards within a show, mirrors the “Tivo-like control of the content and access to any show offered regardless of what time of day,” allowing viewers to schedule watching their favorite shows around their life, instead of the vice-versa of days gone by (#22).  

Although anyone will be able to post a video on the network, Joost is after the big fish in the entertainment pond, and, luckily, they are biting. Setting the scene, Viacom, showed a preference for the Joost platform over YouTube when they announced they would be “teaming up with Joost to provide TV shows…just weeks after [laying] into YouTube requesting it remove [over] 1000,000 videos [and accusing the site] of sending ‘bullshit’ takedown notices” (#24).  Last100.com reports that “with the initial release of Joost’s Beta, the available content was sparse to say the least.  But ramping up to their public release, there doesn’t seem to have been a month gone by without the company announcing yet another new content partner” (#20).   It’s easy to see why the big players in the industry are taking an interest.  Joost will share revenue from the money it makes using a traditional commercial advertising model (the advertisements themselves are infused with new interactive features), and with peer-to-peer technology, Joost is able to lower the cost of distribution for content owners by taking advantage of, as estimated by The Pew Internet & American Life Project, the “47% of American households [which] have broadband connections that make streaming possible because it transmits data faster” (#23).  More importantly, Joost has “successfully positioned itself as the copyright friendly Internet TV service where content is locked down so that it can’t easily be pirated” (#20).  

Furthermore, Joost is not out to replace broadcasting companies by working solely with producers.  Willem van-Gulik enforced this point, declaring, “Previous projects [Kazaa, Skype] were a bit disruptive in the music industry and telephony market, but I think this is a project which at its core brings very little disruption for the visible parts of the industry…[TV stations] reach an audience with their packages.  We can give them a global audience with channels on Joost.  They’ll send down signals to the satellite, to cable companies, and the third signal will go to peer-to-peer operators.  They get something extra” (#17).  This outlook combined with the committed effort to tediously “go through each and every item and verify where the rights really are and how they are settled,” sets Joost apart from other online video sources which work illegally by posting content and “wait[ing] until partial license holders raise their hands and have to prove their rights” (#17). Aiding the company is also the fact that they “are able to be a neutral party, not connected to one of the five big media conglomerates [so] you do not need to worry that we may be controlled by one of your worst competitors.  This makes it easy to talk with advertisers and content providers” (#17).  Currently, Joost is working with content producers 
(Boom Chicago), production companies (Endemol), independent media (Indie Flix), a multitude of television networds (MTV, Comedy Central, CNN, Sony Pictures television, CBS, and National Geographic), and over 40 advertisers (including Sony Pictures, BMW, and Sprite).  It plans to eventually have some ten thousand channels. 


CONCLUSION  

While the programs created by Zennstrom and Friis run over the internet, not actually the web, they do embrace many of the Web 2.0 patterns proposed by Tom O’Reilly in his effort to define “2.0”.  In keeping with his observation “the service automatically gets better the more people who use it,” Zennstrom and Friis created the Kazaa network which harnessed a collective participation as it rose in popularity and saw wild success due to the access it provided to the music and movie files being shared amongst users (#28).  Then it promptly fell out of existence as more users signed off due to less content being allowed due to copyright infringement issues.  With the success of Skype in light of virtually no promotion, Zennstrom and Friis make good on the truism that “the greatest internet success stories don’t advertise their products.  Their adoption is driven by ‘viral marketing’ --that is recommendations propagating directly from one user to another” (#28). Adapting O’Reilly’s suggestion to “leverage customer self-service and alogorithmic data to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center,” Zennstrom and Friis applied his idea to television channeling, attempting, with Joost, to incorporate small independent niche programming as well as mainstream media in order to offer an amazing variety of shows, and the duo is unleashing Skype and Joost globally because they understand that greater reach means greater branding power (#28).  The extent to which Zennstrom and Friis value providing a rich user experience and fostering community is evident in the article “Viacom: ‘Goodbye Youtube, Hello Joost!’” which concludes: “Joost Offers viewers a unique, TV-like experience enhanced with the choice, control and flexibility of web 2.0…bringing together advertisers, content owners, and viewers in an interactive, community-driven environment” (#24).  Zennstrom and Friis engage with open-source software to take advantage of peer-production methods and the Web 2.0 lesson “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (#28).  The CTO of Joost has openly stated “90 per cent, or even more of our code, is not written by us.  We use large building blocks from the open-source community” (#17).  Also, Joost soft launched a Widget API on August 29, 2007 “under a BSD-like open source license and encouraged third party developers to create tools for its TV 2.0 platform” (#18).  Perhaps we can classify Kazaa, Skype, and Joost as Net2.0 programs.  The success of such ventures certainly reflects the success of Web 2.0 sites which operate on the same principles. 

Zennstrom and Friis creations affect the web—ebay, a web 2.0 site bought Skype.  Using linking and click through, known as “telescoping” to learn more about advertising etc. works on multiple devices. May become as powerful as the web application in their own rights. Web communicates through text, Skype through voice, Joost through video. 

What the rise of such globally-scaled programs teaches not only that the world wants to become more connected, but that people will continue to feel entitled (remember, Skype is free) to seamless interaction with others, regardless of geographical location.  Programs that allow us to multitask, say by watching a television channel and simultaneously IM-ing with a friend demonstrates our desire for efficiency.  The enhancements to the telephone and television experience which have allowed Skype and Joost to triumph over traditional industries show that consumers want more choice, more integration.  This may be a testament to human laziness and the dependency on machines to do the thinking for us.  An evening of entertainment used to mean scheduling a date in advance, dressing up, leaving home, and driving to a theatre.  Now that the work involved constitutes a finger movement which opens a program like Joost. we no longer have to work to remember what a friend studying abroad looks like; we can simply video chat with them on Skype. 

                                                                                                                                                                   

SOURCES:

#1: Kazaa 
Wikipedia.com 
Last modified: December 10, 2007. 
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa > 

#2: Fast Track (protocol) 
Wikipedia.com 
Last modified: November 8, 2007. 
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTrack_%28protocol%29 > 

#3: Regional Characteristics of P2P 
A Broadband Industry White Paper 
By: Sandvine Incorporated 
Copyright: October 2003 

#4: How Skype and Kazaa Changed the Net 
An Interview with Niklas Zennstrom 
By: BBC News 
Last updated: 17 June, 2005 
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4102692.stm> 

#5: IAAL: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law 
An Interview with Niklas Zennstrom 
By: Fred von Lohmann 
Published: January 2006 
< http://www.eff.org/wp/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-need-know-about-copyright-law > 

#6: Morpheus’ File-Trading Fiasco 
Wired.com 
By: Brad King 
Published: February 28, 2007 
< http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2002/02/50725 > 

#7: The Race to Kill Kazaa 
Wired Magazine (issue 11.02) 
By: Todd Woody 
Published: February 2003 
< http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/kazaa.html > 

#8: Altnet 
Wikipedia.com 
Last Modified: December 2, 2007 
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnet > 

#9: Kazaa Lite: No Spyware Aftertaste 
Wired.com 
By: Peter Rojas 
Published: April 18, 2002 
< http://www.wired.com/gadgets/portablemusic/news/2002/04/51916 > 

#10: Two Wild and Crazy Moguls 
Vanity Fair (No. 541) 
By: Brett Forrest 
Published: September 2005 
< http://brettforrest.com/articles/two-wild-and-crazy-moguls/ > 

#11: Interview: Niklas Zennstrom 
Endgadget.com 
By: Peter Rojas 
Published: November 8, 2004 
< http://www.engadget.com/2004/11/08/the-engadget-interview-niklas-zennstrom / > 

#12: Why Skype? 
SkypeTips.com 
By: Michael Gough 
Published: February 11, 2005 
< http://skypetips.internetvisitation.org/articles/why_skype.html > 

#13: Ebay Completes Acquisition of Skype 
BusinessWire 
Published: February 11, 2005 
< http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2005_Oct_14/ai_n15690202 > 

#14: Atomico 
Copyright: 2007 
< http://atomicoinvestments.com/ > 

#15: Ebay Buys Skype- Web as Platform Implications 
blogs.zdnet.com 
By: Richard MacManus 
Published: September 13, 2005 
< http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=8 > 

#16: Web 2.0; Skype Upgrade to Get Smart New Features 
networkworld.com 
By: Juan Carlos Perez 
Published: November 8, 2006 
< http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/110806-web-20-skype-upgrade-to.html > 

#17: Joost Doesn’t Want to be Disruptive Now 
netkwesties.com 
Published: April 2, 2007 
< http://www.netkwesties.nl/editie149/artikel2.html > 

#18: Joost 
wikipedia.com 
Last modified: December 12, 2007 
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost > 

#19: Skype Founders’ Venice Project Revealed 
Businessweek 
By: Steve Rosenbush 
Published: October 5, 2006 
< http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2006/tc20061005_609149.htm?campaign_ id=rss_daily >

#20: Joost Opens to the Public- full review 
last100.com 
By: Steve O’Hear 
Published: May 20, 2007 
< http://www.last100.com/2007/05/20/joost-opens-to-the-public-full-review/ > 

#20: Joost Opens to the Public- full review 
last100.com 
By: Steve O’Hear 
Published: May 20, 2007 
< http://www.last100.com/2007/05/20/joost-opens-to-the-public-full-review/ > 

#21: What is Joltid About? 
Jolted.com 
Copyright: 2002-2005 
< http://www.joltid.com/index.php/company/ > 

#22: Skype Founders Name New Video Start-Up Joost 
CNETnews.com 
By: Greg Sandoval 
Published: January 15, 2007 
< http://www.news.com/2100-1026_3-6150225.html/ > 

#23: Nothing to Watch on TV? Streaming Video Appeals to Niche Audiences
New York Times 
By: Michel Marriott 
Published: August 6, 2007 
< http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/business/media/06stream.html?_r=1&oref=slogin/ > 

#24: Viacom: “Goodbye Youtube, Hello Joost!” 
WebTVWire.com 
By: Chris Tew 
Published: February 20, 2007 
< http://www.webtvwire.com/viacom-good-bye-youtube-hello-joost/ > 

#25: Niklas Zennstrom 
Wikipedia.com 
Last Updated: November 17, 2007 
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Zennstr%C3%B6m/ > 

#26: Janus Friis 
Wikipedia.com 
Last Updated: December 9, 2007 
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_Friis/ > 

#27: Skype's Moguls Show it's Chic to be a Geek 
The Observer, London (page 12) 
Published: August 19, 2005 
< http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2005/08/19/2003268364 > 

#28: What is Web 2.0? 
O’Reilly.com 
By: Tim O’Reilly 
Published: September 30, 2005 
< http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html >