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When Greg Duffy shopped his business idea around in 2008, investor after investor told him the same thing: you're crazy.

Duffy wanted to build a gadget--an IP camera for home surveillance that's accessed via the cloud--and most startup investors didn't want anything to do with manufacturing. They wanted software, and software only.

Duffy persevered. Today, his company--Dropcam--uploads and processes more video every day than YouTube. This fall he raised $5.8 million, the first big pile of money for his San Francisco company. And while it's still in its early days, Dropcam's traction points to … Read more

Louis Szekely, the comedian better known as Louis C.K., has declared that his experiment selling an online video with no copy-protection restrictions is a success.

In the four days after putting "Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theater" for sale at $5, the stand-up comedian has made a profit of about $200,000 so far, he said in a statement yesterday. As a result, he said, he hopes all his future work will be distributed the same way.

Today's online entertainment world is a largely bipolar. On the one hand is legally sanctioned content that'… Read more

Louis Szekely, a bold, vulgar, and hilarious comedian better known as Louis C.K., released a new $5 video over the weekend that's totally free of DRM copy-protection restrictions.

The move is one piece of smart marketing, at least for somebody who's got good name recognition. Another smart piece is an IAmA interview on Reddit with Louis C.K. where his message--buy the video and forget the corporate nonsense--is most likely to resonate.

The video, "Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theater," is available worldwide for those who pay five bucks through PayPal, and there'… Read more

Two new paid torrent-managing programs have launched today from BitTorrent, Inc., as the 100-million-user base of uTorrent also earned an update.

First announced in July, uTorrent Plus 3.1 (download) debuted with an unexpected counterpart, BitTorrent Plus 8 (download). Both mark the first time that a paid selection of features the company calls "premium" have been added to either client. Accompanying them is the version 3.1 update to uTorrent (download).

People with the free version of uTorrent will be able to play media files directly in the uTorrent interface, thanks to the newly-baked in media player. The … Read more

One of the latest trojan horse malware attempts on OS X is a bitcoin mining and data stealing bot called "DevilRobber" that uses the system's parallel processing capabilities of systems (the GPU and CPU) to run Bitcoin mining operations to rapidly generate Bitcoins (an experimental digital currency).

All malware is expected to be altered, refined, and otherwise updated, and recently security firm F-Secure has reported it found another variant of the DevilRobber Trojan roaming around pirated software networks.

The original DevilRobber was being distributed in pirated versions of the popular program Graphic Converter, and in similar form … Read more

Copying large files can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Fortunately, there's ExtremeCopy Free (32-bit). This easy-to-use program can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to copy files. Although when we tried it the program didn't reach "up to eight times the speed of the Windows copying function" as the publisher claims it can, it still offered a meaningful improvement over the native Windows feature.

The program has no real interface of its own, aside from a configuration menu. Here, users can choose to set ExtremeCopy as Explorer's default copier and keep it … Read more

BitTorrent has achieved stability on the Mac with the release today of the newly stable version of its "mainline" client, an update to the stable μTorrent for Mac, and the launch of a new remote management Web interface that's been optimized for iPad users. BitTorrent for Mac (download) and μTorrent for Mac (download) transports the most popular features of those programs from Windows to Mac, including RSS feeds, a scheduler, remote access, and power user controls.

As with the Windows versions, the features are fairly robust. The RSS feeds can be set to automatically grab and start … Read more

CyberLink PowerDirector 10 is a feature-packed video editor that boasts some serious improvements over its previous iteration. With its revamped TrueVelocity engine and OpenCL support, it makes editing and rendering a bit speedier than before. Plus, it's got built-in 3D support.

As for the basics, PowerDirector can import and handle most of the video file types you would normally come across. You can also use it to easily add text, effects, and transitions; edit audio; capture video; burn discs; and share content online. Plus, it has intuitive, icon-based navigation and ample thumbnails, making it quite easy to zip around … Read more

The company that develops μTorrent announced today that the paid upgrade version of the popular torrent client, called μTorrent Plus, was ready for limited public testing. μTorrent Plus comes with additional value-added features in an attempt to entice fans into upgrading. Originally announced earlier this year, parent company BitTorrent, which also makes the original torrent client BitTorrent, has revealed a bit more about the value-added features that will come in μTorrent Plus.

These include drag-and-drop file conversion for transcoding files and then transferring them to another device, a built-in media player, remote file transfers, and customer support. It also comes … Read more