Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla - THE MAN IN BETWEEN Book 2 - Part 01

Sweden, Estonia, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, 1981 to 2011. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis build two pieces of software on the same idea: that a network of ordinary computers can carry what a company in the middle used to carry. The first, Kazaa, moves recorded music past the record industry and is sued on four continents. The second, Skype, moves telephone calls past the telephone companies and is sold to eBay for billions. Both rest on Estonian code and on broadband lines somebody else paid to lay. This is an account of what the two intermediaries were actually doing, which costs genuinely vanished, and which of them simply moved somewhere the accounting could not see. Covers Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, Kazaa, and Skype. Narrated with a synthetic voice.