Kim Dotcom's new Mega project

http://kim.com/mega

by dutchbrit • 14 years ago

161 136 14 years ago

kim.com

dutchbrit2• 14 years ago

An the new URL: http://me.ga

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Also redirects to http://kim.com/mega/

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

Am I missing something? It's just a... landing page?

For anyone that can't get through here is the site:

http://i.imgur.com/dGSRk.png

http://i.imgur.com/OQjt9.png

http://i.imgur.com/JZvWD.png

http://i.imgur.com/K5Xst.png

http://i.imgur.com/69pfL.png

javis• 14 years ago

I think maybe he shouldn't have stuck to the Mega brand.

I'm confused to who would subscribe to 'Mega' after the last product called that was raided and everyone lost their data.

geekam• 14 years ago

Or on the other hand, everyone knows its 'that' product with added security?

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

    I think maybe he shouldn't have stuck to the Mega brand.

I think the idea they're using is that the US government took them down before and now they're building their product to be immune to that and so because they've been victims before they know what they're doing and that is why people should trust them.

I think.

zinssmeister3• 14 years ago

lame.

guylhem• 14 years ago

That's an interesting 5 letters reply.

Does that means you have something to show which might stand the comparison?

The guy did it, has a strong brand recognition and people who publicly expressed their sadness that megaupload was gone and their eagerness to give him their business again.

Now he is out there to get some.

I say good luck to him.

zinssmeister3• 14 years ago

Yeah that's one way of looking at it and I once did so myself. I've seen various projects of Kim Schmitz (aka Dotcom, aka Kimble) since the late 90s and all of them ended up failing because they weren't sustainable in one way or another. But he always came back with something fresh... This time he is trying the same things twice. So my personal opinion: lame.

Tyrannosaurs• 14 years ago

The issue here isn't that you need to do something better to critique what someone else has done. You don't need to write a book to have an opinion on a book.

The issue is that it adds nothing useful to the discussion.

tommaxwelll• 14 years ago

Kim just misses his money and fame.

bentlegen• 14 years ago

I'd miss my money too, were I in his shoes. Wouldn't you?

petitmiam• 14 years ago

but he created trendax - the money making machine. I just assumed he had a never ending money supply after that.

spdy• 14 years ago

Thats a fast-paced comeback. And he will succeed again this time with a lot more knowledge how to game the gang in hollywood.

Will be hard for them to even win the case they have put on and at the same time fight him again.

And for all who dont believe it TBP is still around too.

illuminate2• 14 years ago

"And he will succeed again this time with a lot more knowledge how to game the gang in hollywood."

Succeed for himself, though I doubt the venture will last.

He reminds me of a lower-classed Donald Trump, in that he's much better at selling his personal brand than he is in operating a business for very long.

ryanpers2• 14 years ago

I was neutral on this guy until I read the wired story, and then I became a fan.

He is a self made man (way more so than romney!), he suffers from persistent discrimination (overweight) and he has cycled thru the hero's journey.

I have heard a lot of these "major success stories", but they are people who have been put in ideal situations and then they made the best of it. That is just emotionally dead for me. Kim's story is more interesting because it is relevant to ME. I can imagine myself in the same spot, and it overlaps with my own personal history (timewise) a bit too.

Ultimately, I believe there is minimal legal differences between youtube in the early days (which was made successful via RAMPANT piracy), and megaupload.

Screw the government.

sanswork3• 14 years ago

You are skipping over his history of fraud, embezzlement, theft, etc.

andoriyu• 14 years ago

and how he started making even "bigger" air than RIAA and MPAA.

rscale• 14 years ago

He's a career criminal.

He hacked for profit. He traded in stolen phone cards and turned in his compatriots for reduced sentence. He ran a "premium" phone number scam. He ran a pump and dump scheme to defraud investors. He evaded prosecution by jumping jurisdiction. He tried (and failed) to run a fake hedge fund. He sold pirated software. He committed insider trading.

He's not a self-made man. He's a career criminal and a con man.

I find it shocking that so many people are eager to lionize this sociopathic asshole.

Screw Kim Dotcom.

ryanpers2• 14 years ago

That was years ago when he was a teenager. Many people went thru an "illegal period", his was just... more successful than most.

As for sociopathic, so what? Didn't you know that most CEOs are sociopaths? I find that argument... not compelling.

Like it or not, sociopathy appears to be an integral/essential part of human organizations.

kefs• 14 years ago

Did you find it shocking when the Prime Minister of a nation apologized directly for the ridiculous abuse of power and error in execution?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/national/news/video.cfm?c_id=15030...

damian2000• 14 years ago

"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime" -- Balzac

jpxxx• 14 years ago

Why can I only upvote this once? This man is needy garbage who doesn't rate any more attention from the industry that enabled his earlier bullshit.

larrybolt2• 14 years ago

I don't support everything Kim Dotcom does.. but I do support Internet neutrality. I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) the internet is one of the few mediums where the Government cannot stop free speech.. cannot stop people from posting their "real" opinion and the truth. And one of the few places where after reading an article you can do another search quite easy to ensure it is correct what you just read.

Television, Radio, the newspapers etc try to provide us with news a true as possible though I often question myself when watching the news, is this the entire truth? Is there not more behind it, or things they leave out to ease the mind of the crowd.

owenfi• 14 years ago

If he did all those things (not saying he didn't, might just be incompetence elsewhere) it should've been fairly easy to indict him at the time or on those grounds.

Still seems awful to wrongly impound an entire company with no due process.

thomasz2• 14 years ago

He didn't 'hack for profit'. He was a fence with a modem, nothing more.

shiven• 14 years ago

Welcome to CAPITALISM 101. All ethics are mere shades of grey. What is bad today will be good tomorrow, the villains will be heroes, the heroes will be losers who could have done more and every starry-eyed sucker aspiring to "make it" will swing like a pendulum within that grey spectrum, like it or not.

So, where in the grey zone are you, today?

jakeonthemove• 14 years ago

He did quite a lot of shady and downright illegal things, too. He's definitely a self made man, though...

Change the government.

CrankyPants6• 14 years ago

What's with the unnecessary injection of US presidential partisan politics?

We should be better than that around here.

illuminate2• 14 years ago

"He is a self made man (way more so than romney!)"

Most every con artist is.

"he has cycled thru the hero's journey"

Now, I think he's gotten a raw, horrid deal from how his most recent case has been approached, certainly. The most he has in common with "the hero's journey" is that his persona is based entirely on myth and self-propagated legend. His claims of personal genius are for the most part fluff and lies, pushed to credulous journalists. Heck, he couldn't even win Quake and Call of Duty bouts without being caught using aimbots and other chicanery.

I may be reading too far into this and his story is more interesting than the man himself, which I agree.

thomasvendetta• 14 years ago

I especially like the DMCA callout on the Hosting Partner's page:

Unfortunately we can't work with hosting companies based in the United States. Safe harbour for service providers via the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been undermined by the Department of Justice with its novel criminal prosecution of Megaupload. It is not safe for cloud storage sites or any business allowing user generated content to be hosted on servers in the United States or on domains like .com / .net. The US government is frequently seizing domains without offering service providers a hearing or due process.

yuhong• 14 years ago

Hopefully this is temporary.

tzs2• 14 years ago

That's hilarious. The Safe Harbor works fine for Dropbox, YouTube, and numerous others. That's because they don't have people on staff specifically looking for infringing material in order to reward the up loaders and encourage more infringement, and their responses when they are properly notified of infringing material is to actually deal with it instead of just trying to hide it from the notifier so he'll think it was taken down.

vidarh• 14 years ago

So far it has not been proven that Megaupload has violated the DMCA, and it looks uncertain whether the cased against them will even survive long enough for the claims to even get prosecuted, so how is that hilarious?

Whether or not Megaupload violated the DMCA, the US government have effectively demonstrated that if they think you've violated the right laws, it doesn't matter whether or not the courts agree, as your business will be dead before then.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

Heh, I misread "Easy Privacy" as "Easy Piracy".

salmanapk• 14 years ago

Haha same here. Cracked me up :P

logn• 14 years ago

He's soliciting for investors. Isn't that illegal? (Not that he would care)

arbuge• 14 years ago

In the USA it probably would be... he's in New Zealand.

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

Didn't stop the USA last time ...

damiankennedy2• 14 years ago

Yes, its illegal here too unless he filed a registered prospectus somehow.

justindocanto3• 14 years ago

What? Soliciting looking for an investor is illegal?? (Serious question). I know it's not 100% admirable, but i dont see anything wrong with it. Curious what the law is.

maaku• 14 years ago

In the USA, public solicitation of investors is a crime.

At least until the SEC rules on the crowd-funding legislation.

temphn• 14 years ago

It would be very interesting if he decides to use bitcoin or something similar for this.

pyre2• 14 years ago

How volatile is the bitcoin right now? For example, what happens when the bitcoin raises 200% vs. the US dollar? Do you change your pricing? What happens if it then drops the next day?

mario_sandler• 14 years ago

its not that volatile right now, therefore your statement is invalid.

kapnobatairza• 14 years ago

Bitcoin is a relatively stable asset and currency as far as I can tell.

Bitcoin's value in relation to the dollar is a product of demand and supply, like any other currency. However, given that supply is "hard coded" in the algorithm, supply is more or less a constant variable. That leaves demand.

Demand is there as long as Bitcoin has transactional value (how many people accept it as a form of payment) and asset value (how attractive it is as a store of value). Bitcoin has price floors as long as it is useful in transactions (for example, as long as online black markets like Silk Road flourish) and as long as Bitcoin "enthusiasts" accept it as an asset.

Barring some way for the government to thwart the TOR + Bitcoin combo for making anonymous online transactions, I would think that any volatility in the BTC-USD exchange rate would come from volatility in the value of the dollar over that of BTC.

chmod775• 14 years ago

History tells us that the US dollar is much more volatile than bitcoin can be.

Plus I do not think that Kim will want to have anything to do with that currency.

Jonovono• 14 years ago

I am interested to see how this goes. I am also rooting for the new myspace project. If you have not seen that check it out: ( https://new.myspace.com/ ).

What looks interesting is the ability for the artists to interact with the fans like they would on FB/Twitter on the same medium they could sell their music (I don't think there will be selling of music on the Mega project though).

Right now we have FB/Twitter where it is very easy to keep in touch with the artists and build a relationship and maybe find new ones but no real way to sell things that well. Then their is iTunes where you can buy music but no real community aspect.

I think bringing them together will be interesting. I could see something like a Kickstarter aspect working as well. Fans doing something like we want to see Kanye and Bieber do a song together. People could then show support etc and help chose what gets made.

Ultimately though it has to really help new/unknown artists get started. It's great that Louis CK can sell his stuff online by passing the record companies but that is unrealistic for most people. I system that provides a great community with a great "discovery" aspect could really help this. Fans could be like "I want a song made about blah blah" and some random artist could deliver. Maybe if you are doing a show somewhere you also film it and throw it up on the site for people to watch. Random thoughts. But I hope these provide some exciting opportunities for artists!

larrybolt2• 14 years ago

I did not knew about the new myspace project, thanks! I like how they bring "a new dimension" to the whole newsfeed/timeline idea by allowing both vertical (not really, tho switching from one page to another could be seen as vertical scrolling) as horizontal scrolling.

Also lovely how nowadays sites and software seem to be getting more simple, clean.. less icons, buttons, modal boxes; and maybe more important, fullscreen use!

trotsky2• 14 years ago

What sane organization would sign up to be a "hosting partner" in this situation? Let's see, most of his last venture's major unpaid creditors are hosting providers, previous hosters spent months after the indictments unable to use their servers and without an ability to bill. Not to mention that he apparently wants quotes with no capex component and requires full built and managed systems including space, power, cooling, data, management and operations on a fixed fee bid before the service launches for what will be impossible to accurately predict growth.

Oh, and by the way, he's willing to let you take part of your payment in ad inventory.

lol.

propercoil• 14 years ago

many will in eastern europe/russia. U.S is out of the question

revelation• 14 years ago

Uh, they are not being paid because the US government decided to dismantle his business, under authority from laws from (probably) the "prohibibiton", "war on drugs" or "war on terror" eras, all of which humanity could have done without.

And they have to keep the systems running because apparently the government can't even provide secure storage of what they claim as evidence.

justindocanto3• 14 years ago

Seeing a lot of css/javascript screw ups on Chrome. Popups and hover effects look pretty 'janky'. Anybody else seeing that?

majorlazer• 14 years ago

Yeah, it really irks me when developers replace an image with another on hover. Just combine the two images on top of one another and use:

background-position: top; and on hover use: background-position: bottom;

This makes the initial hover smooth with no flash.

pud3• 14 years ago

I can vouch for Kim's positive traits. He also has negative traits, as do we all - but I don't know much about them.

However he was a customer of AdBrite (a large ad network I founded around 2000) and I spoke with him via Skype many times around 2002. AdBrite is kinda like AdSense in that you can run our ads on your site and make money. And he was running AdBrite on one of his sites.

I don't remember which site of Kim's it was, and I don't remember why we had to kick them out for T&C infraction.

Regardless, he didn't like the AdBrite logo (which I paid a lot for) and told me his designers could make a better one. They did, and Kim let me use it for free. AdBrite raised around $40M using the logo Kim & his team designed for us. And I'm grateful.

AdBrite recently changed logos again so it's not there now. But here's the original (my designer) http://www.storesonline.com/members/963920/uploaded/adbrite_...

And here's Kim's, that we ended up using for years: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MsUpdWwPgms/UFOcvPMS74I/AAAAAAAAAW...

The differences are subtle but I believe it made a significant improvement to our brand.

And regardless if you think Kim is a brilliant entrepreneur or a criminal -- you can't deny that he makes very high quality products that people love to use. There's something we can all learn from that.

Thanks for the logo, Kim.

jyap• 14 years ago

The logos are practically the same. Cool story though.

mojowo112• 14 years ago

The logos were so similar that when I opened them in tabs, I began to question whether the original post was a joke. I'm still not really sure what's going on.

cloudwalking• 14 years ago

Kim's version is definitely better. It's much simpler and doesn't rely on superfluous visual effects. The shape of the logo comes through, and it uses fewer colors -- both of which make it much more recognizable.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

Remind of certain detergent(s)

BallinBige2• 14 years ago

ahh AdBrite. I remember trading ad impressions with your nextwork. ad tech was hot during those times!

BallinBige2• 14 years ago

ahh AdBrite. I remember trading ad impressions with your nextwork. around the right media exchange days.. ad tech was hot during those times!

sanswork3• 14 years ago

It still is. Ad:tech NY is next week.

PostOnce2• 14 years ago

Don't know much about his negative traits?

He was convicted (on separate occasions years apart) of computer fraud, embezzlement, insider trading, and data espionage (carding/etc). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigati...

I particularly don't like Kim because I find him a walking insult to honest entrepreneurs. Getting rich off of other peoples' work (Megaupload) is shameful, and while everyone else is out there working hard trying to make it legitimately (and often failing), this guy is out there getting rich off of theft, dishonesty, and outright criminal action, and being treated as some kind of hero for it.

I don't like the way the investigation has been handled, but that doesn't make Kim a good guy.

nikcub2• 14 years ago

In your mind how do you distinguish Megaupload and Youtube?

dutchbrit2• 14 years ago

That's a pretty cool story :)

chandika• 14 years ago

accidentally read that as 'easy piracy' vs 'easy privacy' :)

nej• 14 years ago

Anyone else having trouble entering their email? I keep getting 404 on the POST:

{"status":1,"response":{"error":"Unexpected error"}}

wickedbass• 14 years ago

There is an extra <head> tag in their site, I hope that isn't indicative of their programming talent! :x

Trufa• 14 years ago

Discussion apart, seriously slick landing page IMHO.

damiankennedy2• 14 years ago

Kiwi here and the rumour is that this new venture breaks his parole so back to the little jail cell with a mouldy mattress for him. We're not fans of people that try and bribe/blackmail our politicians here.

mattdw• 14 years ago

Also a Kiwi here and I think actually most of us are more concerned with the Police and Govt's apparent disregard for the rule and application of law.

Kim Dotcom is pretty funny and makes a good case for himself when he's given TV time, but the big story is how much damage the government will take over their buddy-buddy with the MPAA and all the insider dealings they've been up to. Dotcom has exposed a kind of corruption we didn't realise we had.

eupharis• 14 years ago

Kim's personal vices/virtues aside, this seems like yet another iteration of a while loop that has been running for awhile:

  1) A form of piracy exists.
  2) Prosecute!
  3) A faster, more secure form of piracy has been created!

arrowgunz2• 14 years ago

The email field seems to be broken

Torgo• 14 years ago

It did not work for me in Firefox, but I switched over to Chrome and it then worked.

arrowgunz2• 14 years ago

It doesn't seem to be working on Chrome either for me.

adir1• 14 years ago

So why would any sane person try his luck with this sketchy company versus Dropbox, which provides same functionality for free already?

CrankyPants6• 14 years ago

Dropbox has already demonstrated that they play it fast and loose with user privacy issues. While I use Dropbox for many things, and admire what they've built, we'd do well to be more realistic about it around here.

olefoo• 14 years ago

I appreciate your skepticism towards DropBox, but what makes you think that Mega is going to be the host-proof sharing nirvana?

I'm willing to bet that their initial client will be susceptible to MITB and various key leakages for the first year or two.

ForFreedom• 14 years ago

I like the design of the website.

shabble• 14 years ago

Single-page app for something that really doesn't need to be?

Not even a <noscript> so you're not actually sure if the page loaded or not[1].

Gratuitous animations between slides?

Barest hint of content scattered across slides?

If I was there for informational purposes, I'd say it was a terrible site.

[1] Although I don't really expect people to cater to the miniscule audience that is NoScript/equivalent users[2], it's nice to see at least the tiniest thought towards those who can't/don't have JS.

[2] In fact, there are even some tech-focused sites now that actually ask you to whitelist them for js instead of 'please upgrade to Netscape 3+ or IE5'!

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

Jesus people. It is possible to acknowledge that Kim is a criminal, think he is interesting, be interested in Mega, find his criminal history abhorrent AND think that raid of Megaupload was wrong and probably illegal, all at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive and there's no reason for this to be an argument.

Why do Kim discussions always turn into arguments instead of discussions?

zobzu• 14 years ago

welcome to the internet. you're making way too much sense. :-)

gadders• 14 years ago

Cognitive dissonance [1]. It seems to happen a lot with discussions of Julian Assange as well. i.e. he could be both a "freedom fighter" and a sex offender, and the one person could have both very admirable traits, and abhorrent ones. See also Mike Tyson, Roman Polanski etc etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

xSwag• 14 years ago

Just guessed the domain name, since they won't be using .com or .net anymore: http://me.ga/ redirects to that page, I hope that is the domain that they use since its pretty short.

sgt• 14 years ago

"Multi-centric data warehousing"? I don't think Kim knows what the term Data Warehousing usually means.

lmm3• 14 years ago

It's a stupid term, kudos to him for using it in a way that makes more sense.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

I guess it's typical but I've had this idea before. tptacek should stop by with his rant against javascript, client-side encryption.

The other trick to making this idea cool? Once you have the wiring hooked up to make Mega look like local storage (even though it's in the browser), you can wire that up to the PeerConnection Data Channel (once it's available) and literally implement peer-to-peer networks in your browser. There are limitations as you can't use aggressive discovery protocols like with a native socket, but it's still tantalizing.

Kim Dotcom's new Mega project

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