BitTorrent Giant Mininova is Dead!

Well, Mininova is not really dead but all its interesting stuff was taken off of the server on Nov 26th, 2009.  This has been a long battle for mininova and finally as expected had to comply with copyright laws. However, If you are a content developer or have your own content, then you can use Mininova for free and use bandwidth to distribute across the world! Adieu Mininova…

Here is the official Blog Update!

“Hi all,

Today is an important day in the history of Mininova. From now on, we are limiting Mininova.org to our Content Distribution service. By doing so, we comply with the ruling of the Court of Utrecht of last August.

Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict (Dutch link) we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We’ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that it’s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on. We are still considering an appeal at this moment.

We launched our Content Distribution service in 2007. This service allows producers and artists to easily publish and distribute their content for free through Mininova. The launch of Content Distribution has proven to be a success. Countless content owners have used Content Distribution to distribute their content (e.g. albums and documentaries) for free to millions of users. For example, the Dutch band Silence is Sexy released their complete album on Mininova and received the Interactive Award 2009 for doing so. The Dutch television broadcaster VPRO decided to start using Content Distribution in 2009 in order to distribute documentaries.

We would like to thank you for your support. Especially everyone that contributed to Mininova receives a big “thank you!” for the effort! We hope to keep welcoming you on Mininova and our other projects (e.g. Snotr, Dispostable).

Thanks! The Mininova staff”

Recession Blues?

Current market condition is definitely troubled and people are pondering over "recession" and its consequences.

People started speculating that the US economy would enter in to a recession in the early 2008. They were mostly right as it is mostly a reality now. The word recession looks like a buzz word now and it is also being searched frequently on Google and the trend is increasing.

Check for yourself on Google Trends report on the word "recession" :-)

Average worldwide traffic of the word "Recession" on Google has too many peaks in 2008 showing that the search frequency of the word "recession" is growing.



More interestingly the majority of the traffic seems to be from Singapore and India!




The panic started when people learned about the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers and Merril Lynch getting taken over by BoA. Story continued with other Ameircan giants and made the things worse. People frantically started speculating on who could be next, recession, possible job losses etc.

Here in India, things really started to heat when rumors started spreading over ICICI Bank's bankruptcy filing (even though we don't have anything called 'filing for bankruptcy'),and people lined up at the ATMs, cash soon dried up at some ATMs with this mass panic. But, I knew ICICI bank would not fall so soon as Indian Banks have little exposure to sub-prime lending. But, by and large, situation was tense and slowly things stabilized after our finance ministers assurance that all banks here are doing god with enough cash reserve.

Recent Citibank crisis again fueled a rumor here that the Citibank India operation would get a hit and the depositors would lose money. I was a little worried this time as I mostly bank with them. Citibank Indian (outgoing) CEO Sanjay Nayar, even sent a public email to customers stating that the bank was doing really well with no cash issues.

Anyways, I'm finger crossed on how this recession would shape over the next few quarters.

Hmm...World is flat, Isn't it? Anything that happens at the other end of the world, just comes here in a day!

Technorati Tags: Recession blues, World recession, economy woes, google trends, world is flat, citibank bailout, merril lynch merge, lehman brothers bankruptcy