Popular Power was a company founded in January 2000 that sold
distributed computing

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

 software for CPU scavenging. The company was led by Marc Hedlund, CEO, and Nelson Minar, CTO.http://www.popularpower.com/company/background.html

The "Popular Power Worker" software was a downloadable Java-based application that Internet users could install onto their computers. It allowed users' computers to participate in a non-profit project to develop an influenza

Influenza

Influenza, commonly referred to as the flu, is an infectious disease caused by RNA viruses of the family Orthomyxoviridae , that affects birds and mammals...

 vaccine.

Although Popular Power was able to raise $1.6 million in
angel round funding

Angel investor

An angel investor or angel is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity...

, it was unable to close the venture capital it needed to continue.http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/d/246 As a result, it had to permanently shut down operations in March 2001.

External links

• You Got the Power (Aug 2000)
• OpenP2P: Popular Power Turns Off the Lights (03/19/2001).