Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent, created a file-sharing tool that rankles organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America. Cohen, 30, has Asperger's Syndrome--a form of autism that
affects social skill, which means he has to practice making eye contact or detecting sarcasm, things that come easily to most people. But he's also a software genius, reports
The San Francisco
Chronicle, who is trying to turn his file-sharing software into a legitimate business. BitTorrent software sends and receives pieces of large files across a vast network of users, so it takes far
less time to download big files. According to research firm BigChampagne, the software is more popular as a file-sharing tool than Napster in its heyday. In fact, it's almost as big as MySpace, with
70 million worldwide users--and can take up as much as 30 percent to 40 percent of the world's Internet traffic, according to bandwidth-measurement firm CacheLogic. Yikes. The major problem for Cohen
is that his tool is mostly used for illegal purposes. To transform BitTorrent, Cohen got $9 million in venture-capital funding and a new deal with Warner Bros. to introduce a paid service that lets
users download the studio's TV shows and films. Cohen wants to take BitTorrent down the online video route, which means his company would be competing with Google, Yahoo, AOL and startups like Guba
and Veoh. Online video startups (not necessarily viral video sites like YouTube) are banking on the inevitable: Cable TV will soon be distributed over the Internet. The potential for revenue is
huge. BitTorrent's advantage is its massive, established user base. One venture capitalist tells the
Chronicle that with its millions of users, "BitTorrent is almost the de facto
standard for sending and receiving large files on the Web today."
Read the whole story at The San Francisco Chronicle »
