CES Roundup: BitTorrent’s new Taiwanese partner and more

Here’s a selection of stuff that caught our correspondent, Greg Weinstein’s, eye at last weeks’ CES in Las Vegas. More to come.

BitTorrent partners with Taiwanese institute on new tech

We talked to Simon Morris, the VP of Marketing and Product of video-sharing service BitTorrent Inc., who announced a development partnership with the Communications Research Laboratories at Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI)  to define and deploy new standards for consumer electronics device manufacturers.

It appears BitTorrent is moving from merely facilitating individuals sharing videos to a new position as the creator of innovative
technologies to transfer large files efficiently through the internet using its “BitTorrent Certified technology ecosystem.”

According to Morris, there are now over 100 million users of the service.  In addition, BitTorrrent claims:
- Average daily active users: Over 20 million
- Average daily client downloads: Over 400,000
- Number of languages: 52 (including English)
- Clients checking in from over 220 countries every day

Device convergence for the connected home

The Vulkano Blast is the successor to the Vulkano originally announced last July. It’s an embedded appliance that allows content from a consumer’s digital devices to be viewed throughout the connected home, plus (with accessory apps) on mobile devices such as Blackberry, Apple, and Android-based. As the Blast features a 160GB hard drive, flexible Digital Video Recording options are available across devices.

This new product will be available this month at http://www.myvulkano.com and various online and physical retailers in the US. The makers of the device, Monsoon Multimedia, has operations in India, Singapore, Russia, and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. It sells for USD199 while iOS, Android and other applications go for USD9.99 on the respective app stores. More information is at www.myvulkano.com.

We talked to Colin Stiles, EVP Sales and Marketing, describing the capabilities of the system.

SugarSync demos its Dropbox fighter, now with 5GB of storage

SugarSync’s VP of Product Management, Drew Garcia, demos its cloud-based storage to permit multiple devices, including desktop, laptop, and mobile/smartphone computers, to automatically share designated files and folders. The service has been recently enhanced to permit up to 5GB of content to be shared between multiple devices, including Android, Apple iOS, and
Blackberry-based.

Available immediately at no cost, a larger 20GB storage capacity is USD4.99 a month. Users of either the free or paid service can receive additional storage at no cost by referring friends to the service.

Greg Weinstein has published two books and numerous other feature and news reports in the field, currently serving as News Editor and Producer on Future Talk. He can be reached at greg@futuretalk.net. He has degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering and worked on the design of four embedded systems. He has contributed to National Computer Tectonics, Web Developers’ Journal, and was editor-in-chief of PC Register.

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