(PRWEB) The Distributed Computing Industry Association (www.DCIA.info), announced yesterday that MP2P Technologies is the winner of its 2008 DCIA Pioneer's Award.

Last month we reported that DCIA would inaugurate Global P2P & MUSIC CONFERENCE. The conference took place yesterday at PopKomm in Berlin, Germany where the award was offered at a special ceremony to MP2P's CEO Pablo Soto.

"The DCIA Pioneer's Award is presented annually to that company which has demonstrated the greatest persistence on the forefront of transitioning distributed computing technologies for commercial purposes," said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty in presenting the award.

The history of MP2P protocol started in 2001 when Pablo Soto first developed it and used initially in Blubster and Piolet - two very popular P2P file-sharing clients back in the days. Two years ago, a third clone application made its debut, being released together with new versions of the aforementioned clients. Recently, Omemo, an open-source P2P software developed program for storage space sharing, has used the same protocol.

"MP2P ensures that recording artists and record labels have a meaningful and reliable means of online distribution," said Pablo Soto, CEO and developer of MP2P on receiving the award. "With the release of Blubster 3.0, P2P meshes with Web 2.0 to take the discovery of music to a whole new level. We are honored and grateful to celebrate its release while simultaneously receiving this award from the DCIA, an organization devoted to propelling P2P to new heights."

Pablo Soto's constant achievements in P2P technology has brought him international press recognition and names like CNN, The NY Times, Reuters, AP, USA Today, C/Net, Rolling Stone, CBS News, San Jose Mercury News, among many others can be mentioned here.

About MP2P

MP2P Technologies software offerings have been downloaded millions of times by scores of people from around the globe. Founded by renowned technology developer Pablo Soto in 2000, MP2P Technologies today remains a leader in the P2P sector and consumer technology. MP2P Technologies is headquartered in Madrid, Spain. For more information, visit http://www.mp2p.net.

Looks like Play.com, the online music retailer, has thrown down the glove to Apple iTunes following deals with all four major music labels to sell their tracks and albums as MP3 downloads. Next to the already signed-up EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music and Universal Music have lined up for collaboration.

Music fans have 3million tracks to choose from purchased similarly to books, CDs and DVDs – by adding them to your shopping basket and paying at the online checkout. The offering went live yesterday.

Launched in February this year, PlayDigital addresses exclusively to UK residents and has agreements with a number of independent record labels. It comes forward with an attractive offer - the top 100 chart singles at 65p each (compared to iTimes 79p) and also offers albums at lower prices.

According to PlayDigital head Wendy Snowdon the service is the cheapest for music downloads and there’s a pricing strategy sustaining it has been created to "steal even more market share".
These arrangements gave Play.com the advantage of launching a download service before its most important rivals - Amazon, HMV and Tesco.

PDF Splitter & Merger, Division of VERTX SYSTEMS, LLC today officially released PDF Splitter & Merger 3.5.

PDF Splitter & Merger (www.PDFsplit.com) desktop utility (an user-oriented PDF tool excellent at splitting and merging PDFs) has made quite an impression since its apparition (November, 2004) – it’s actually made a habit out of being awarded 5 star rating both by end users and software reviewing organizations since. According to Download.com there were over 30,382 downloads since the product launched.

This utility was developed towards the end user’s convenience. It only takes seconds to open a pdf file and then choose to split up the pages based on page ranges or page numbers or sequences and set the location to save the new pdf file and done. Its flexibility was proven during serious testing on documents with well over 10 million pages and the process went on flawlessly.

Naturally there are numerous customers looking for a solution to combine many pdf files into a single file. Such things as sale presentation with proposals, group ticket information, creating books for print and many more require now no more than a few seconds. All you have to do is add the pdf files, order the files in a certain sequence you’d like and press the merge pdf files and there you have it - a new pdf file with all of the files combined.

About two weeks ago we reported the release of Michael Moore’s 'Slacker Uprising' on torrents. When the filmmaker himself says "share it or show it in any way you see fit," one may think (as I did) that finally there’s an illegal sharing-free matter this time. That is not the case, however. After the documentary started to appear on torrent sites, a lot of people got, much to their surprise, letters of cease-and-desist, and now we have a real geographical sharing debate.

This was actually possible because Moore only owns the North American rights to the movie which makes anyone from across the pond downloading it liable for copyright infringement. Moore’s response was prompt: "What are 'geographical rights'? I'll say it for the hundredth time: If I buy a book and read it, and then give you the book to read, I have broken no laws. Why is that not true for all media?"

I for one agree with Michael – I mean, first of all, he actually made the film, it’s absurd that he can't distribute it anyway he wants to! Ok, I admit I may have shallow knowledge about this industry but still…

To those of you with some file sharing background Blubster may sound familiar (the interesting P2P application that spawned the Manolito P2P network, and fellow application Piloet). However, since the days this app emerged, file sharing has come to know great development and changes. Despite that Blubster stubbornly wants a piece of the action and yesterday it launched version 3.0.

Starting with the Blubster homepage, which falls far from the original, the whole “package” looks, to be honest, disappointing. What we remember as a home built website with community news, discussion and forums appears now only as a failed replica. All that’s kept is a generic website with a single purpose - to promote Blubster, and that it’s indeed a pity.

If you wonder about the client itself, well, the installation process could be a little crowded – owing to many options to install different tool bars. When running the program disillusionment hit again as we saw a homepage “packed” with ads and displaying pop ups.

However, Blubster maintains more than 200,000 users but don’t go on comparing it to some of today's well established communities like BitTorrent, the newsgroups, and eDonkey2000 – it would only add to disappointment.

Music fans that are into file sharing are always one step ahead. As soon as a popular band or artist is preparing to launch new material they are sniffing out the stuff right away.

So it’s actually no surprise that countless file sharing sites have copies of AC/DC's latest album, Black Ice, available as a free download, though the material is scheduled for release on October 18 in Australia and October 20 for other markets.

Enjoying massive downloading since it has leaked on torrents this fifteenth album of veteran Australian rock band is their first one in eight years (the previous being 2000’s Stiff Upper Lip).

The CD includes 15 songs, had Brendan O'Brien as producer and was recorded at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver.

During the Olympic Games AT&T Inc. initiated a musical program aiming to support the U.S. Olympic Team. The project titled the AT&T Team USA Soundtrack was actually a compilation of rock, pop, R&B, rap and country music which and today AT&T Inc. announced that it raised $1 million – money meant to help the Team USA athletes.

A number of today's most popular artists dedicated some of their time and sweat to make this possible, and consumers all over the country made their support of the athletes obvious by kindly and massively buying full-track downloads, ringtones and AT&T Answer Tones(SM) from the soundtrack.

"This was an amazing effort by the artists and the consumers who demonstrated unfettered support for the athletes, the music and the program," said Jamie Butcher, vice president, AT&T Corporate Sponsorships. "One of our main Team USA sponsorship goals was to connect fans to these amazing athletes, and we couldn't be more pleased with the response and the support the athletes and the artists received."

During the Olympic Games you could download the music as full tracks on iTunes. In addition to that, music videos and artist interviews were made available for viewing via http://www.att.net/TeamUSA, and the results were impressive – about 1 million page views on the site were generated.

Jim Scherr, chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee made the following statement: "We are thrilled to see the support, not only from the artists who devoted their time to make the AT&T Team USA Soundtrack but also from the fans that purchased the music. Sometimes, athletes' hardest obstacles aren't training but securing funds so they can devote themselves full time to their sport.

Here's the whole lineup of artists:

• 3 Doors Down, "The Champion in Me"
• Army of Me, "Perfect" (acoustic)
• Colbie Caillat, "Somethin' Special"
• Clique Girlz, "Incredible" (acoustic)
• Sheryl Crow, "So Glad We Made It"
• Chris Brown, "Dreamer"
• Flipsyde, "Champion"
• Luis Fonsi, "No Me Doy Por Vencido" (exclusive track)
• Goo Goo Dolls, "Real"
• Josh Kelley, "To Remember"
• Lady Antebellum, "I Was Here"
• Queen Latifah, "Champion"
• Mere, "Hold On"
• Nelly, "Warrior" (Team USA edition)
• Taylor Swift, "Change"
• Kate Voegele, "Lift Me Up"

Warner Bros is trying to increase its vigilance regarding digital piracy and now is watching closely the social file sharing and storage network Wua.la., Netzwelt.de reports. Discovering that numerous titles belonging to it were circulating between members of a private group on the Wua.la network, Warner immediately contacted the company.

Netzwelt also informs that the Gulli Usergroup included over 3000 members. Allegedly, one of the members from the group was a Warner employee, and he unsurprisingly alarmed the company upon seeing 80 titles of the studio being swapped within the group. Soon after, Warner demanded those movies to be removed. Wua.la’s response was to threaten the group admin with exclusion of the group unless the movie trading stopped. However, the admin chose to do that himself and the group is no longer active.

Wua.la allows users to store only one Gigabyte at signing up. Afterwards, you can earn more Gigabytes if you share parts of your hard drive for Wua.la's decentralized storage system which, however, remains a condition most users will not meet.
We covered the Wua.la's offerings in previous posts.

Due to Scenemovies.org the Gazelle codebase known to do a great job with music trackers (as a result of the advantageous categorical grouping and tagging attributes) was actually shown to function just as well in the case of movie trackers provided that the same operations are respected. These operations refer to multiple tagging criteria (genre, year, language, codec).

Scenemovies came into play about a month ago, but things are just starting to take off. So far it has gathered more than 1,300 members and 330 torrents (with over half of them added just this week alone), and there are strong reason to believe the service will do just fine in the future. The max user limit is set to 6,000 and slots are filling up pretty quickly. For membership you can register here.

Noteworthy - all films are already extracted and ready for playback (no RAR or ZIP files are allowed).

Scenemovies is more than a simple movie tracker. Although it’s still under development the service incorporates automation of parsed movie data from IMDB.com into the torrents. So you can be pleasantly surprised at times with impressive features like, for example, movie cover art and an actor/character listing for each film. Things don’t stop here – with respect to the criteria used, "advanced search" fields for actor / character / director, have been included. With features like these and others we present below Scenemovies will definitely establish itself as one popular movie tracker offering complex and ground-breaking options.

More Features:

Coming soon, users will be able to simply add the imdb link to a movie, and all film data will be automatically added to a new upload. This is revolutionary to movie trackers, and not seen anywhere else. It’ll help to keep torrent ‘details’ consistent and uniformed, while also providing a hoard of data.

All users can make requests for torrents, as well as upload. Advanced searching and Top 10 lists are also open to all.

As with all Gazelle trackers, torrents can be downloaded as *.txt files in the event that you’re blocked from downloading actual *.torrent files. Simply edit your profile, and checkmark this option:

To become a Power User, members will need to upload at least one torrent. This ensures a constant stream of new material to the tracker.

More info can be found on their IRC channel at irc://irc.scenemovies.org/scenemovies. Additionally, there’s also an in-browser (java) IRC chat on the site.

Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, and Dada Entertainment, one of the pioneers in digital and mobile entertainment services, have become partners in a deal according to which Dada.net users will have access to music from today’s popular stars like Young Jeezy, Pussycat Dolls, Ne-Yo,Lil Wayn and others.

Dada.net offering consists of DRM-free full-track MP3s and ringtones, now making available Sony BMG catalog, planning to include more material from other major and indie record labels in the near future. The company boasts with being the only company to provide its content via all major operators.

Massimiliano Pellegrini, CEO of Dada Entertainment said when the announcement was made "We are thrilled to add music from the biggest record label in the world to Dada.net. The Dada.net experience just got even better for our customers."

Here are some  details about the service Dada.net offers posted by marketwatch.com:

Music fans who sign up for Dada.net are given 15 tokens per month for only $9.99. Each token can be redeemed for one download of a full-track MP3, ringtone, or other mobile content including wallpapers and games. All MP3 tracks are DRM-free allowing consumers to transfer their download to any mobile phone, iPod or digital music player. Dada expects to be able to offer users over-the-air MP3 downloads to mobile devices in the coming weeks.

Dada.net users are billed for the service through their phone bill via Premium SMS.