
Startup Idea: A butler for your idle computer - yaj
http://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/2009/05/26/what%e2%80%99s-next-a-butler-for-your-idle-computer/
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pohl
So the premise is "what to do with an idle CPU", and the answer is to tap an
entirely different resource, bandwidth, not knowing exactly how under/over-
utilized it is at the moment?

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GavinB
Movies and music stream very well already, unless you have full TV seasons
that you want to give away, I don't think you'll get much traction there.

The one place that this could work well is games. If Steam had a setting that
would automatically download and install demos for the hottest new games, I
bet a lot of people would try them out. I haven't used it in the last few
months, but I remember seeing demos available for that I would be happy to
play if I could _do it right then_ instead of having to download, install, and
(half an hour later) finally play.

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stratomorph
It seems to me that the people likely to want to see this quantity of stuff
are probably the people who already know how to use the download queue in
their bittorrent clients.

I suspect the less computer literate, who are likely to get this bundled with
something, will unknowingly let it run in the background until their network
is unacceptably slow or their hard drive is unacceptably full, when they will
have someone more knowledgeable "fix the internet", and this will just be one
more program that gets taken out with the rest of the trash.

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joepestro
Yep, this is basically bittorrent that tries to guess what you want based on
keywords.

The web-based version of this is FriendFeed. Pick what you want to see
(subscribe to friends/groups) and get a feed of articles, videos, pictures,
etc.

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evdawg
Anybody remember Bonzi Buddy? Haha.

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MichaelApproved
This idea only made sense when people had limited bandwidth and downloads took
forever.

If you start to push TV shows you're going to have to monitor if the
connection is idle too (not just for the current computer but also for the
entire house).

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jgilliam
A better title would have been: "Bring back PointCast!"

