"We think there are huge ramifications in the business arena in terms of peer to peer networking, " he said.

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In his keynote speech Tuesday, Barrett identified peer-to-peer networking -- popularized by Napster's music file sharing service -- as an important growth opportunity.

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Leveraging the breakthroughs of public-key cryptography, bitcoin also uses peer-to-peer networking to operate without a central authority whereby the new issuance and transaction verification functions are carried out collectively by the network.

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The top five tools that businesses used in 2007 were Peer to peer sharing, Social networking, Podcasts, Blogs, and RSS feeds.

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Like many other networking ideas, peer-to-peer is not a single concept, but a wide array of technologies.

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The top five in 2010 are Social networking, Wikis, Peer to peer sharing, Video sharing and then a three way tie between tagging, RSS feeds and Microblogging.

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While Napster is a consumer example of peer-to-peer computing, with the right networking technologies in place, businesses will be able to use it to harness the power of multiple computers connected to the Internet to run compute-intensive applications, he said.

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This is the basis of the sharing, networking, open-source, peer-to-peer economies now emerging in crowd-funding, such as by MOSAIC, community currencies, credit unions and cooperatives (which employ more people worldwide than all global corporations combined).

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By going to the public markets ahead of Facebook, the professional networking site can take advantage of the implied valuation of its larger peer without getting directly sized up by investors.

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