Anyone who uses a computer knows what its like to have the system crash. Crashes are the digital worlds addition to that short list of inevitables, death and taxes. But what if you could record the crash and play it back, like a video recorder for software?

That idea inspired two software engineers, Jonathan Lindo and Jeffrey Daudel, to devise such a product. They have succeeded, and are now moving from the niche market where they proved the idea and onto a bigger stage.

System crashes and other software flaws are more than an annoyance. A 2002 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States estimated that software flaws cost the economy there as much as $59.5 billion a year.

For software developers, the flaws that cause crashes rank among their biggest problems, especially the ones that cannot be reproduced, like the noise in the car engine that disappears when you visit the mechanic.

Lindo says he and Daudel found themselves overwhelmed by bugs they could not find while working together at an Internet start-up in 2002. “We were spending almost all of our time not fixing the issues, but trying to get to the point where we could just see the issue, and we said, Wouldnt it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it? ” Lindo recalls.

Innovation by analogy is a powerful concept, says Giovanni Gavetti, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School who, with his colleague Jan Rivkin, has published research on how businesses can use analogic reasoning as a strategic tool. Human beings are analogy machines, he notes, dealing with new information by comparing it to things they already know something about.

It would take time for Lindo and Daudel to prove that their analogy worked. They were tackling a daunting problem - in fact, friends told them that they had a great goal, but one that was probably impossible to achieve. For one thing, they had to account for everything that can affect a program, from keystrokes, mouse movements and other software applications to network traffic and programming instructions that are designed to occur randomly (for instance, in a computer game, the villain should not always do the same thing).

Ideally, their tool would not slow down the system as it recorded what was happening. They also were developing it among the most complex of software environments: game platforms.

There were already programs on the market that could do things like log all the various inputs a program received. But none of them worked as the program was running, which is what developers really want, say analysts like Theresa Lanowitz of Voke, a technology research firm. In effect, that meant these products took snapshots, not the “video” that Lindo and Daudel thought was necessary.

Eventually, they got their technology working, and in December 2003 quit their jobs and started Replay Solutions - so named because it would replay software crashes.

Their product, ReplayDirector, works on the Xbox gaming platform and several versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. One customer is Electronic Arts, which began using the product in the fall of 2006, according to Steven Giles, its director of online operations.

Giles says he was referred to Replay by a venture capitalist he knows. The venture capitalist, however, worried that the companys software was “smoke and mirrors,” and Giles initially felt the same way. But when he realized that it worked, he convinced more than 10 developer teams at Electronic Arts to license the tool (the venture capitalist ended up investing in Replay).

Giles said that he liked a number of things about the tool but that one stood out: its ability to capture bugs that cannot be reproduced.

“Thats something that nobody inside or outside our industry has really been able to solve,” he says. “We refer to it almost as magic.”

He declined to say how much Electronic Arts saves by using Replay, but says that “where its obvious that there are savings is when you see your most senior and expensive developers working on the game rather than chasing these ghost bugs.”

Replays gaming software sells for $50,000 a project, with negotiated pricing for multiple projects.

There are still pieces missing from the TiVo analogy. For instance, software developers cant yet fast-forward to see their crashes. Still, having tackled games, Replay is now expanding into new markets. Last week, it released a beta version of its next product, for developers who write in the Java programming language. Versions for other markets will also start appearing later this year, and the technology should transfer to almost any kind of software environment, says Vishwanath Venugopalan, an enterprise software analyst at the 451 Group, a research firm in New York.

LOS ANGELES: Last autumn, just as Hollywood was starting to panic about the slowing injections from hedge funds, Warner Brothers struck oil.

The studio, home to Bugs Bunny and Harry Potter, reached an unusual multibillion-dollar agreement with investors in Abu Dhabi, a Gulf emirate. The partners agreed to build a theme park, a hotel complex and a chain of movie theaters in Abu Dhabi, while also creating a $500 million fund for making movies and a $500 million fund for developing video games.

The Warner deal seemed to offer a solution to worries that hedge funds were tiring of Hollywood after several movie-financing deals went under. No problem. Send in the sheiks.

But Dubai, another part of the United Arab Emirates, and nearby Qatar are not delivering the kind of gusher the industry had hoped to see. While media companies have signed lucrative licensing deals to create movie-themed amusement parks, Hollywoods money hunters are largely coming home without investments designated for movies.

“Film people are making the trip, but the money is mostly a mirage,” said Amir Malin, a partner at Qualia Capital, a media-focused investment firm.

As it turns out, Hollywoods typical bag of tricks does not work well with the people who control the sovereign wealth of the Middle East. Unable to guarantee sizable returns, moviedom relies on selling investors a lifestyle. But Middle Eastern investors, for the most part, are not enticed by the chance to rub elbows with celebrities or walk the red carpets.

Content poses a bigger hurdle. Gulf companies are never going to pour money into sex-themed comedies (”The 40-Year-Old Virgin”), films that deal with politically charged topics like terrorism (”The Kingdom”) or prestige projects that go against cultural and religious beliefs (”Brokeback Mountain”).

And because the studios keep potential blockbusters for themselves, investors are mostly offered middle-of-the-road pictures that carry a lot of risk. Sheik Sultan bin Tahnoon al-Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, recently told Variety that those types of movies would not cut it with financiers in the Gulf.

“If we convince the businessmen in the region there is a return, then they will jump in and invest,” the sheik said.

Still, the emirates are doing a lot of flirting. In recent years, Abu Dhabi and Dubai have created sparring film festivals, courting stars like Sharon Stone and George Clooney to attend. Abu Dhabi created a film investment fund in October but never said how much money would be available. Five months later, no big deals have been announced.

Theme park deals are great, but keeping the movie pipelines going is the true focus of the studios. As the cost of making movies escalates, “studios have come to realize how much they dramatically need outside capital,” Malin said.

So how did Warner pull it off?

Hunt Lowry, a veteran producer, attended the Dubai World Cup horse race in 2006 and was stunned at the regions building spree. Abu Dhabi had just unveiled plans with Ferrari for a theme park, and Lowry saw an opening for Warner. In its pitch, Warner emphasized how it could help Abu Dhabi become a bigger tourist destination and how they could make mutually agreeable movies with broad appeal.

After several trips to the United Arab Emirates - Warner was also talking to Dubai - Lowry and the studio walked away with a huge deal. “We looked them in the eye and we felt that we could be long-term partners,” said Kevin Tsujihara, head of Warners home entertainment unit.

PARIS: In a gray bunker of a building with a graveyard as its neighbor, a freshly hired strike force of Internet executives, programmers and advertising representatives is mounting a grand mission to take on a global behemoth: Googles YouTube.

This is the new international headquarters of Dailymotion, an online video-sharing company, in the north of Paris. In the sprawling landscape of Internet video sites, Dailymotion ranks a distant second, according to figures from the Internet audience tracking company ComScore. But in France, it has managed to pull ahead of YouTube, the only competitor that has managed to do so in any major market. That success has encouraged Dailymotion to expand in other places, including the United States and Britain.

“YouTube is the dominant player and other players are quite distant, but Dailymotion is the one player that has been able to counter that trend,” said Piers Stobbs, vice president for marketing at ComScore.

Fueled by the spread of broadband, video is one of the fastest-growing areas on the Internet, with “Internet television” services like Joost and Babelgum, video-sharing sites like YouTube and Dailymotion, and video sites from traditional broadcasters all competing for audiences. Investment is driven by the prospect of new revenue from advertising and product placement, even if hopes have so far mostly gone unfilled. With more than 80 percent of Internet users viewing online video in Britain, France and Germany, Europe has emerged as an important battleground.

YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006, and Daily Motion are locked in a fierce struggle for market leadership in France. Daily Motion overtook YouTube in February, with 10.2 million unique visitors, compared with 8.8 million for YouTube, according to Nielsen, another audience tracking service. But worldwide, YouTube remains the Godzilla of video-sharing sites, with 258 million unique visitors in January, compared with 32 million for Dailymotion, according to ComScore.

Daily Motions founders lay claim to bragging rights by starting one month earlier than YouTube, on March 15, 2005, although they struggled to build the high profile of their California-based rival, which quickly became synonymous with user-generated videos online.

The company was incubated in the French equivalent of a Silicon Valley garage, a Parisian apartment, with six partners pooling together \6,000, or $9,260. They opened for business in the living room of one of the founders, Olivier Poitrey, who says that their experience belies the stereotype that French red tape stifles start-ups and innovation.

“Over the last few years the government made some changes.” Poitrey said, “Administrative tasks are easier now. Theres a central place where you can go to do all the paperwork to start a company. It used to be far more complex and you had to go to a lot of places and you needed a lot more capital at the beginning. Now you can make a start with \1 and before it was \10,000.”

Since those modest beginnings, Dailymotion has picked up the pace, particularly after an infusion of $34 million in venture capital in late August from five European investors, including Paris-based AGF Private Equity, a member of the Allianz Group.

That money has brought new top management and 120 new employees, including 25 ad sales representatives. With the financing, the company has expanded into outposts in London, New York and Barcelona, and created local sites in a total of eight languages.

“From the beginning we were international, with Web sites in French and English, so it is the heart of our business to be local,” said Martin Rogard, who at the age of 27 has shifted from a government position at the French Ministry of Culture to preside over the local French operation as vice president for content. His office door is pinned with a Google “Most Wanted” caricature of the young executive with a beaming smile.

YouTube took the fight to the challengers territory in June when it held a Paris news conference, featuring a welcome message from a French rapper, Kamini, to announce its own localized versions in nine countries, including Britain and France .

Dailymotion, which is keenly aware that it does not get much search engine traffic from YouTubes parent Google , sought to counterpunch by hand-picking promising video producers, whose work is featured on the companys home pages. It is also touting its technology, introducing tools to upload high-definition videos - something that YouTube does not offer.

Dailymotions newly hired managing director, Kate Burns - former managing director of Google in Britain - is trying now to form alliances with film schools and students to develop original material. New management in the United States is considering an existing French approach from the home office: staging showings of the best videos at local cinemas.