Janus Friis

From Free net encyclopedia

Janus Friis (born in 1976) is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application KaZaA and Skype, the peer-to-peer telephony application. He and his partner Niklas Zennström have recently sold Skype to eBay for $2.6bn.

Before embarking on his entrepreneurial career with Niklas, Janus worked at the help desk of CyberCity, one of Denmark’s first ISPs. He has no formal higher education since he dropped out of high-school before starting the job at CyberCity. Later he worked at Tele2, the leading alternative consumer oriented pan-European telecom operator, where he met Niklas.

Janus and Niklas worked together at Tele2 to launch get2net, another Danish ISP, and the portal, everyday.com.

After this, the partners decided to leave Tele2 and co-founded Kazaa, the company responsible for the most popular software for use with the FastTrack file sharing network protocol. The FastTrack protocol itself is also codesigned by Janus.

From the success of KaZaA’s P2P technology the duo co-founded Joltid, a software company developing and marketing P2P solutions and P2P traffic optimization technologies to companies.

Janus is also co-founder of Altnet, a network that sells commercial music to Kazaa users.

Janus enjoys skydiving, pool, martial arts and winter sea bathing.

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