Joost, which is currently in closed beta and was initially known as The Venice Project, is the big new kid on the block. They got the most media coverage of all the startups profiled here (26,527 mentions on Technorati -- none of the other sites here crack 1,000) and they have deep pockets by virtue of their founders, Kazaa and Skype creators Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom.

Tamago recently launched a peer-to-peer commerce system that enables people to sell digital media directly to customers. It's designed for semi-professional and amateur people who publish music, videos, photos, e-books, etc. to earn royalties whenever their creative content is downloaded. Meanwhile the buyers can also earn commissions, for distributing media to others.

The Linköping district court has decided to retry Sweden’s largest file sharing case.

The case involves a 31-year old Linköping man accused of illegally making 23,000 music files and 30 films available for download from the internet.

In December, the prosecutor was forced to drop the two counts related to the music files after an expert witness for the defense questioned the investigative methods used by Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency (APB).

New BitTorrent sites are launched every day, but only a few stand out or have something new to offer. YouTorrent is such a new site; feature-wise it’s just a meta-search engine, but the design and user interface make it one of the best I’ve seen.

uServ is a Java-based P2P work collaboration system based on the IBM Almaden Research Center's XML-based Vinci.

Groove Networks was founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie. The company's flagship product, Groove 1.0, is

Infobot is a Perl-based online fact gathering service that relies on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol. The fact-gathering involves factoids, perhaps another useful online research tool.

Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program is working with the scientific community on a distributed computation project that enables the average PC user to perform acts of PC Philantropy, or the donation of unused computing resources to benefit charity.

SmartPeer, LLC an affiliate of ToadNode.com, is the creator of the SmartPeer network appliance and software. The SmartPeer device ships with SmartPeer's embedded proprietary Peer-To-Peer networking software. The appliance allows brick and mortar retailers to cooperate in a network that helps customers locate products. The device works by communicating information from a local point of sale or inventory system to the distributed network.