Napster founder scales new peaks
Published: 27 Jan 2004 11:55 GMT
After the flood
A filing with the California Secretary of State states that Snocap was incorporated in Delaware on 28 October, 2002, with Conway listed as the sole officer. The filing also notes that the company changed its name to Snocap from Open Copyright Database on 25 June, 2003.
The company, at least in its early stages, looks much like Fanning's old one.
According to sources familiar with the company, Ali Aydar, who worked with Fanning on pre-Napster projects and ultimately became a key engineer at the file-swapping company, is chief operating officer. Jordan Mendelson, who helped develop Napster's search technology in its early days, is also a co-founder. Mendelson registered the Snocap.com domain name.
Mendelson has chronicled a few moments in the company's development on his Web log, including a recent flood caused by an errant sprinkler that temporarily forced the start-up out of its San Francisco offices. A visit to Snocap's office in San Francisco's trendy "SoMa," or South of Market, district bears out the flood's damage. A Snocap banner and a few scribbles on a white board now overlook empty desks and exposed wallboards.
Nevertheless, the company is growing, with a total of nine employees as of early January, according to Mendelson's blog. A few job listings also are posted on the company's Web site.
The technology itself, according to sources familiar with the company, takes a page from Napster's last days as a file-swapping company. In late 2001, courts forced the company to block copyrighted songs before they were traded through the network. Napster, with partner Relatable, worked to develop a way to identify and filter material.
Ultimately, the company decided to shut the service down rather than try to develop the technology under the court's order. The Napster name is now being used by the Roxio-owned digital music download service, which is a rival to Apple Computer's iTunes store. The new Napster service does not have any of the file-swapping capabilities of the original, however.
Snocap has been working on ways to identify songs, as they are traded through a file-swapping network, including using a technique called "audio fingerprinting," which monitors the sonic characteristics of music files.
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