Out of the blue, he heard from Gabe Newell, the managing director of Valve Software, based in nearby Bellevue, Wash. [...] "When we looked around to see who was doing the most interesting work in this space, Bram's progress on BitTorrent really stood out," Mr. Newell said. "The distributed publishing model embedded in BitTorrent is exactly the kind of thing media companies need to build on for their own systems."