Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Peer to Peer Computing in Travel?

First they brought us Kazza and then Skype. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are now working on a new peer to peer (P2P) application that is taking on TV. Their Venus project, expected to be called Joost changes the playing field again by allowing users to view video content though on demand P2P network

Is there any value of a P2P network in the travel space? Absolutely! The current trend to create a site for online travelogues is a common Travel 2.0 business model. What if the content did not need to be uploaded to a single site, but rather accessed pictures and video content housed on an individual's hard drive. Unlike the Kazza implementation, Friis and Zennstrom are working with content owners to launch Joop with targeted advertising as part of the delivery. Behavioral targeting is a major trend in Web advertising. A P2P network could deliver targeted ads based on information extracted from multiple computers. The new Joost network is based on this type of targeted advertising and a similar application could be developed for online travel.

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