As widely reported in the press today, Joost, the new venture from the founders of Skype and Kazaa, secured a $45 milllion round of funding. Their co-investors were a well chosen round of VC funds representing US (Sequoia), Europe (Index) and Asia (Li Ka-shing).

Joost are obviously hoping for Li Ka-shing to use his China network to get things moving there. But what I also managed to find on the Wired Magazine website was a frustrated Wired author who hung up his system when trying to install Joost. I did not have that pain when I installed the Joost beta, but observed that Joost provides no simple way to turn it off, other than moving it from the screen display or using the user-unfriendly <Ctrl-Alt-Del> key combination. Now that got me started thinking about the fact that somehow this is a peer-to-peer effort, and what could happen to my system performance-wise? I guess we will look into that soon as well and let you know...

In any way, Joost had better send this guy from Wired Magazine some pralines and help him so he will write in their favour, and maybe should also not forget him when they send out new press releases. Here some of his comments:

I tried this two more times—no update. Then I went to the site for an update (I’m a glutton for punishment) and it took me almost ten minutes to even find the new software update. But guess what? You have to sign in just to download the update! Joost, the Internet is too easy nowadays for me to suffer jumping through so many hoops. I didn’t log in, so I don’t have a new Joost update to freeze my system. I think I’ll be OK with YouTube for now.