Pando

» see pando.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Pando Networks started in New York in 2004 and shipped its client in the spring of 2006 to solve a problem that has since disappeared. Email attachments had hard limits, usually ten or twenty megabytes, and there was no obvious way to send someone a video file. Pando's answer was to not send the file at all. You sent a small .pando descriptor, and the recipient's copy of Pando pulled the actual bytes from a mix of your machine and Pando's own servers. Free accounts got one gigabyte per transfer and paid accounts got three.

The server-side copy was the part that made it usable. A pure peer-to-peer transfer fails the moment the sender closes the laptop, so Pando held its own copy for a week or so and served it if the original seeder went away. It was BitTorrent underneath with a company standing behind it, and the free version paid for itself by bundling SmartShopper adware, which tells you most of what you need to know about the era.

The consumer product was never large. What put Pando on tens of millions of machines was Pando Media Booster, a separate downloader sold to game and software publishers who wanted their multi-gigabyte installers delivered without paying for all the bandwidth. PMB ran a closed peer-to-peer network among a publisher's own users. If you installed League of Legends or Lord of the Rings Online in that period, PMB went onto your machine alongside it, generally without a prominent notice, and it kept running afterward.

Microsoft bought the company in early 2013, reportedly for no more than eleven million dollars, with the rumor at the time being that the technology was headed for Xbox content delivery. Pando shut down its servers and ceased business on August 31 2013. The consumer client stopped working and PMB stopped being maintained. In February 2014 its update path was hijacked and used to push a browser hijacker called Sweet Page onto people who accepted a prompt from software they had never chosen to install.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the thing you did not install ~

PMB is the part worth remembering, because it was one of the clearest cases of a category that shaped a decade of desktop computing: software that arrives attached to software you actually wanted. It was not malware. It did a real job and did it competently, saving publishers a great deal of money on distribution. It also ran at startup and consumed upload bandwidth under a process name you had no reason to recognize.

The complaint threads from that era all have the same shape. Someone notices the connection is slow, finds PMB in the task list, and has no idea where it came from. Uninstalling it sometimes broke the game's patcher. This was ordinary, and a large part of why people later accepted app stores and sandboxing with so little resistance.

~ the founder ~

Robert Levitan had history. He co-founded iVillage in 1995 and then Flooz.com, the online currency startup that Whoopi Goldberg advertised and that collapsed in 2001. Pando was the third act, and by the standards of the first two it went fine: a working product, real distribution and a modest exit. It just happened to be built on a problem that Dropbox and better email quotas were about to remove.

~ after the servers ~

The August 2013 shutdown left a large installed base of software with nobody behind it. The February 24 2014 hijack was the direct consequence, because an abandoned auto-updater sitting on millions of machines is an asset to whoever gets control of it. Game publishers spent the following year telling users to uninstall a component those same publishers had put there. The pando.com domain later ended up hosting an unrelated technology news site.

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