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Content delivery network Akamai has bought Santa Monica-based P2P tech provider RedSwoosh, it's being announced today. The price was around $15 million in an all stock merger.
Redswoosh is P2P with a difference: it aims to help the publisher of the original file to distribute it more efficiently. You publish a link to your file on your website, and users with the RedSwoosh software installed can download it. This feels like a normal download through your browser, but it's actually using P2P to download the file, saving bandwidth for the site itself.
We've occasionally heard allegations that RedSwoosh verges on being spyware (extremely hard to remove), but those stories tend to be less prevalent these days.