McAfee.com Corp reckons it can grow its user base by over one million in the course of the current quarter, after striking deals with two major peer-to-peer file-trading software developers, Kevin Murphy writes. The company said its recently launched SecurityCenter application will ship with Blubster and Morpheus clients, which are in use by tens of millions of consumers.
SecurityCenter is McAfee.com"s free threat-assessment application, a loss leader that entices users to sign up for the company"s subscription-based antivirus, firewall and spam filtering services. The company did not say how high it expects its conversion rates to be with the new channels, and spokespeople were not available for comment.
Blubster is a Spanish-language Napster-alike that allows a current three million consumers to swap music files, owned by Madrid-based OptiSoft SL. Morpheus, created by StreamCast Networks Inc of Franklin, Tennessee, allows more types of files to be traded, and has been downloaded about 100 million times, according to the company.