Winamp Whiz kid - Justin Frankel

With zillions of music players available these days, it's easy to forget the original MP3 Player that revolutionized the world of MP3 music - Winamp. Justin Frankel was only a teenager when he started work on Winamp. He was promising with computers even when he was a youngster, writing software while at school.

Justin launched the first version of Winamp in 1997 under his newly formed company's name "Nullsoft". Initially launched as a shareware at $10, Winamp was a huge success. Millions of people would download the program and the revenue it generated ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. Although Justin sold "Nullsoft" to AOL in 1999, he continued working on the subsequent versions of Winamp and completed Winamp version 5.0 in late 2003 - just before he resigned.

Justin's subsequently worked on the Gnutella P2P system which he created with Tom Peppers. The system was similar to Napster; Gnutella has two distinct advantages over Napster. First, it allowed users to share all kinds of files and not just MP3s. Second, Gnutella did not have centralized servers, once the network was created, it could not be shut off.

After resigning from AOL, Justin has been working on several projects, including a program called "NINJAM" that allows several musicians to make real music together via the Internet and "REAPER", a multi-track audio editor for Windows.