SURVEY - CREATIVE BUSINESS: Centacom,
Financial Times; Feb 6, 2001
By ALAN CANE
It seems so obvious that someone must have done it before. However Centacom, a small, privately held technology group based in Southwick, West Sussex, believes its newly launched integrated voice and vision service for the internet is free from direct competition. Called “talk’n’view”, the service makes it possible for two people to hold a conversation over the internet while examining and passing web pages backwards and forwards between them. The commercial possibilities are attractive.
A customer seeking a holiday, for example, could browse through possibilities on a travel agent’s web site. A touch of a screen “button” enables the customer to talk directly to the agent over the net. Both parties can look at the same web page or pass alternative ones to each other.
It is this two-way ability to push pages over the net, made possible by advanced data compression techniques, that Centacom believes gives it the edge over competitors such as RealCall, Comxo or Help.magic.com.
The service will be free to the customer, who needs only a multimedia personal computer complete with microphone and loudspeaker. Both voice calls and web pages travel over a single, conventional telephone line but, Centacom says, at three times the usual data rate.
Centacom will make its money by charging businesses by the minute for the use of the service at about 8p a minute.
It could be a cheap way of satisfying and retaining a customer.
9www.centacom.com
There may be a whiff of the unworldly about DigiScents, a Californian company set on enhancing your online experiences with appropriate odours. Its technology is real enough, however, to have persuaded more than 4,000 software developers that it has more to offer than mere vapourware.
The company has developed a gadget it calls the “iSmell”, set for launch later this year. About the size of a small loudspeaker, it connects to a personal computer, where it creates and emits smells appropriate to the screen content. Consumers, DigiScents says, will be able to send scented mail, shop online using their nose as well as their eyes and play scented games. (The Tomb Raider genre could pose an interesting olfactory ordeal.) But even the company’s literature asks rhetorically: “Is this some kind of joke?” – an impression hardly dispelled by chief executive Joel Bellenson’s definition of its work as “aromagenomics” and its web site as the “Snortal”.
DigiScents has some impressive supporters, however, including Procter & Gamble and the perfumiers Givaudan and Quest International. In Asia, it has a partnership with the media group Pacific Century CyberWorks.
The iSmell device synthesizes recognisable smells from a palette of scents in response to digital commands sent over the internet. A relationship with RealNetworks means the RealPlayer multimedia plug-in can act as the digital conduit.
alan.cane@ft.com
9www.digiscents.com
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