“About a year ago, Rob Kramer read about Freenet and wanted
to get involved. The recording industry hadn’t yet sued Napster,
“peer-to-peer” was still not a buzzword and Ian Clarke, the creator
of this Napster-like network called Freenet, was still an unknown
Irish programmer. But Kramer — who had only recently sold his
stake in Moving Pixels, an animation company — saw value in
Freenet’s decentralized file-sharing network, and contacted Clarke
just days after finding the Freenet Web site.”
“Now the fruits of that correspondence can be seen. Or rather,
they can almost be seen. Uprizer, the company that Kramer and
Clarke have formed, remains mysterious. There is no Web site, and
when I talked to Kramer, who is the CEO, he refused to say when the
Los Angeles company would release its first product. He also
refused to talk about funding except to say, “We have some.” Even
the number of employees remains a secret.”
“Is Uprizer trying to be the Transmeta of P2P? Kramer, 40, says
that he is reticent to talk because the details are still being
worked out. “Ian [Clarke] is only now on his way here to
California,” he says.”