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Digital Fountain Taps Data Flow: Page 3 of 4

The brain behind Digital Fountain belongs to Michael Luby, CTO and cofounder, who lends the company much of its Street cred. A scientist in the areas of coding theory, randomized algorithms, cryptography, and graph theory, Luby is the inventor of the mathematical algorithm that generates Digital Fountain’s meta-content technology -- the ability to reassemble whole files from parts of them, which he affectionately calls "Luby Transform."

Luby's not the only high-profile honcho knocking around at this company. Clifford Meltzer, president and CEO of Digital Fountain, was a former Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) senior VP for IOS -- the routing code at the heart of all Cisco products.

It’s worth noting that Meltzer is still very much in contact with his old buddies at Cisco. In fact, back in July 2001, Cisco announced that it would run Digital Fountain’s software in its edge routers as part of its content distribution network (CDN) program for caching and serving up live content to end users. (See Cisco Systems and Digital Fountain.).

The company is also well-stoked on the funding side, having received close to $50 million in funding from Matrix Partners, Granite Systems Inc., Texas Instruments, Adobe Inc., Sony Corp. of America, and Cisco.

The new Digital Fountain products are available in two models: Transporter Fountain 1000 is a single-rack-unit appliance that includes 5 Gbytes of storage and supports meta-content delivery rates up to 10 Mbit/s. Transporter Fountain 3000 is designed for enterprise customers that distribute large amounts of data. It is a three-rack-unit appliance that includes 85 Gbytes of storage and supports meta-content delivery rates up to 70 Mbit/s.