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Digital Fountain Flows. Most people have never heard of Digital Fountain, but they're a company to watch. I rarely report company press releases, but this one gives me an excuse to tell you about an important new technolgy. The company has raised a $20 "D" round. They have first-class investors and excellent boards of directors and advisors.
Why am I so excited about DF? In my research for one of my forthcoming books (At the Edge: Content Delivery on the Internet), I came across the research papers by Michael Luby, DF's CTO and co-founder. With an impressive mathematical background, Luby has devised a very efficieint forward error correction (FEC) codec that allows the company's products to support downloads and multicast streaming with scalability that is nearly infininte. (There are other FECs out there, but DF's is super fast and patent-pending.) As with TV broadcasting, DF allows you to add incremental clients without additional origin-server infrastructure. FECs (used in RAID, for instance) allow redundant transmission of data such that you can reconstruct the original by receiving a certain quantity of randomly-generated metadata (DF's term) rather than the exact fragments of the original (as is typically delivered by TCP).
If you want to learn more about Luby's work and the concepts behind Digital Fountain's products, I recommend downloading and listening to the MP3 of Luby's presentation at CDN Spring 2001. There's a transcript available there as well. You can also get whitepapers from DF's site, but I prefer the MP3 as an intro.
Trust me on this one. Content distribution using FEC techniques is way cool.
Posted Wednesday, October 17, 2001 9:55:47 PM 
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