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CrowdProcess

crowdprocess.com

11–16 of 16 posts

Re: CrowdProcess

#11
As someone who has tried (hard) to build something like this (seems I'm not the only one), I'll chime in.

This is a great execution of a bad idea. It's the worst kind of bad idea because it seems like a great idea until you try it. It's novel, interesting, timely, and attractive from a technical perspective, but unless your market is tech porn, you're selling to nobody.

This use case is served by countless hosting services, saturated at all levels from cheap VPS's to Amazon clusters to private farms. The market is really efficient here and doesn't afford much overhead. Distributing computation over volunteer users is enormous overhead both for you and your users -- in terms of molding problems to fit the computation model, maintaining the infrastructure, keeping it reliable and performant -- the list is endless. This overhead means you can't compete with the existing players. Forget about being significantly better, which you would need to be to get significant numbers of people to switch.

Quite simply, the math for this doesn't work. Not yet, maybe not ever.

Maybe there's some amazing secret sauce here, but I don't see it. So I offer a warning that a lot of people have tried this idea and failed because they were oblivious to reality.

Re: CrowdProcess

#12
post #11

As someone who has tried (hard) to build something like this (seems I'm not the only one), I'll chime in. This is a great execution of a bad idea. It's the worst kind of bad idea because it seems like a great idea until you try it. It's novel, interesting, timely, and attractive from a technical perspective, but unless your market is tech porn, you're selling to nobody. This use case is served by countless hosting se…

To add to the market saturation, botnet operators are very interested in monetizing their network now that Bitcoin is getting harder to mine. I never followed through, but I had no problem convincing an open-minded hacker to let me use idle GPUs on infected clients for scientific computation. I didn't even offer to pay.

Re: CrowdProcess

#13
There was a company that built this a while back called Plura Processing. They got pretty decent distribution (50k-100k nodes at any given time), but even on flash gaming sites and such the user duration wasn't long enough on a pageview to get any real work done and report it back.

The press also took note of Digsby (one of their distribution partners) and the controversy was huge.

They are now out of business.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/plura-processing

http://lifehacker.com/5336382/digsby-joins-the-dark-side-use...

Re: CrowdProcess

#14
What prevents a malicious client from simply editing the source and sending back "false" calculations?

In my time as a web developer, probably the most important lesson I've learned is Never Trust the Client.

Re: CrowdProcess

#15

Since I bump into one of you guys in the Startup Lisboa elevator I been thinking about your startup. As a concept is cool and sounds great but as an actual product doesn't work. First of, market. Not there isn't a market for computing power, but a market for this kind of thing. This is a good parlour trick, to show of browser power, but as a computational framework it doesn't work. There are far better and cost sensi…

I think you are kind of been unfair. How do you know that there is not any market for something like this? Have you gone out there and tried to market a smiler product? Also you state that AWS is cheaper. Can you give us some numbers? Could you explain why AWS is cheaper, than Crowdprocess? On the Ethical issue I think they require an opt in.

Re: CrowdProcess

#16

What prevents a malicious client from simply editing the source and sending back "false" calculations? In my time as a web developer, probably the most important lesson I've learned is Never Trust the Client.

I believe that it was thought
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