Grads Create File Sharing Program

Just one week after its deployment, nearly 127 million computer users have downloaded a new file-sharing program developed by three Harvard alumni while they were undergraduates.

Now available through Morpheus 4.5, NEOnet—created by Gitika Srivastava ’01, Ben B. Wilken ’01 and Francis H.R. Crick ’03—speeds up download time by drastically cutting back the number of computers an individual must search across to locate a particular file.

According to its creators, most file-sharing programs require users to jump across an average of 18 computers to find the file they are looking for. With NEOnet, however, there is a maximum of three jumps for any search.

“[Using NEOnet], any particular computer is actually responsible for keeping a piece of the database,” said Crick, whose grandfather and namesake won the Nobel Prize in 1962 with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for discovering the double helix structure of DNA.

“There is an amount of redundancy between computers so if one computer is down, you still have a complete database,” Crick added.

NEOnet is the product of SKYRIS Networks, a company Wilken and Srivastava created during their senior year at Harvard. Crick joined them a year later.

SKYRIS eventually sold the technology to Streamcast Networks, the parent company of Morpheus, and Crick and Wilken began to work for Morpheus full-time. Srivastava stayed on as head of SKYRIS under Stirling Bridge, which owns Streamcast.

While the creators declined to comment on how much they sold the program for, Srivastava said Don King, the boxing promoter, offered to buy the company in 2002 for millions in order to distribute online boxing videos.

Srivastava said she believes that with their technology, Morpheus will be the most downloaded file-sharing program in the country within a few months.

“We were able to take this technology and send it out in the worst of economic times,” she said. “I was able to get companies offering cash because they believed in it so much.”

When it started, the SKYRIS team was influenced by the explosion of file-sharing programs after Napster’s rise to popularity and the failures of early peer-to-peer programs like Gnutella.

Wilken said that the searches on these file-sharing programs did not span the entire network and had limited downloading speed because they only had a few possible hosts.

“I envisioned a world where there wouldn’t be centralized servers and that was just a few years ago,” Crick said.

Within a few years, the three created their own technology and began marketing it to media distribution companies like Sony and Lycos.

Although SKYRIS was the first to fully develop a radically new approach to file-sharing, the idea for the technology was widespread by 2001.

“We were kicking around these ideas on how to organize a peer-to-peer network and these papers started coming out that were exploring similar ideas,” Wilken said. “It’s interesting that our work was going on parallel to other companies.”

Srivastava, now a tutor in Leverett House, said that she hopes future students will follow in the footsteps of SKYRIS.

“I’m extremely interested in encouraging other students in going into their own line of entrepreneurship and starting their own companies,” she said. “I work with a lot of MIT students doing this, but I haven’t seen a lot of Harvard students doing it.”