The Art Of Surfing Gets A Push And A Shove
By Russell Blinch
TORONTO - Sometimes the information highway feels like it has all the speed and efficiency of a Los Angeles freeway at
quitting time.
Too often the highway, otherwise known as the Internet, is just too congested with traffic, employs bad road signs, and is
utterly confusing.
It can be aggravating when you want a news story on a subject and a search engine -- a searchable catalog of Web pages --
turns up some nifty home pages on the subject and a few eager vendors trying to sell you products -- but nary a headline that
would capsulize it all for you.
The solution to these problems is something called "push" technology, which essentially allows you to sit back while what are
known as intelligent agents go out and find the information you want and deliver it back to your personal computer.
Remember the "Browser Wars"? Well, don't bother, because that skirmish is history and a new one over push technology is
about to begin. Many Internet analysts believe push programs will expand like a nuclear reaction and, according to the Yankee
Group research firm, mushroom into a $5.7 billion business by 2000.
Push technology has been on the Internet for some time but gained widespread attention last year with the success of
PointCast. But while PointCast (http://www.pointcast.com) has become a leader in the field, it has not been resting on its
laurels, according to spokeswoman Stephanie Gnibus.
"We continue to grow at a very fast rate," she said.
PointCast, which broadcasts a collection of news stories, features and advertisements to your personal computer, now has
about 1.5 million users. In January, the company sold 50 national ads for the service, at prices ranging from $13,000 to more
than $40,000 each.
Gnibus said PointCast, which has 200 employees, will soon release the latest version, Version 2.0, of its software, which is
intended to be a significant upgrade to the existing one.
There are probably more than a dozen groups involved in push technology already, but ClariNet actually bills itself as the
pioneer with some 1.5 million paying customers.
"Did you know we were the original push news pioneers?" ClariNet spokesman Ed Vasquez asked in recent e-mail
correspondence. "Yes, go back to 1989 when we first started. When the U.S. invaded Panama, tens of thousands of Net users
experienced the ultimate push news ... an urgent bulletin to their desktop alerting them to the invasion."
New to the push field is HeadLiner (http://www.headliner.com), which is being offered by privately held, Toronto-based
Lanacom.
HeadLiner is the brainchild of Tony Davis, a graduate of Canadian software firm Delrina and its WinFax line of products. The
program is not a razzle-dazzle, high-information kind of product like PointCast. It works more like a personal search agent and
introductory service for existing sites.
The program, which can be downloaded for free from the HeadLiner site, searches the Net exhaustively for a range of news
sources. But instead of storing all the news on your computer, a user can read the summary before being transported to the site
to get the full story.
To make money on this, Davis said HeadLiner will offer a package to corporations as well as seek partnerships with content
providers on the Web. In addition, the company plans to sell a "power pack" to individual users so they can design their own
Internet news channels.
Davis said while the company only got going in December, there are already thousands of users and hundreds more are signing
up daily.
So perhaps with the success of all this push technology, Web surfing may well become a lost art.
(For ideas and comments on the weekly Plugged In column send e-mail to russell.blinch@reuters.com) |
