I pop into the riovolution boards from time to time, and every once in a while mike has said something interesting... I just thought I'd pass the latest one along here...
The high level sequence of operations of synchronizing and download is the same among at least 3 or 4 Rio devices. There are at least two protocols that I know of (Protocol1 = Empeg/Jupiter/etc, Protocol2 = Karma/other new things).

Other new things, eh? Anyone care to speculate?

Matthew