Mobile Peer to Peer File Sharing with PDAs

Simedia, a small software publisher in Bucharest, has ported a clone of Apple’s Rendezvous application to PocketPC and teamed it with a web server. The result? A mobile P2P file sharing program.

The application discovers other devices on the same WiFi network and allows people to share files and documents. And of course, music.

Simedia themselves give various uses for the application, including using it to “share your music collection with passers-by or listen to their collections whilst sharing a ride on the bus”. Features like these will no doubt have music execs jumping out of windows, whilst RIAA lawyers will be lighting cigars with $100 bills.

The software will be available from 16 June in two versions: a free version, and a paid version with corporate functionality.

Simedia already have a history for off-beat PDA products – they are well known for their SounderCover application which plays background noises (trains, the dentist, a errr, circus parade) over phone calls for those wishing to deceive spouses and employers that they somewhere different to their real location.

Simedia

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?