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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mozek who wrote (52128)	10/24/2000 12:36:03 PM
From: Charles Tutt	Respond to of 74651

I'm happy to let it stand at that. Anybody who's interested can read back through and form their own conclusions on whether anybody overstepped. If I did, then I apologize. Charles Tutt (TM)

To: mozek who wrote (52128)	10/24/2000 2:27:56 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 74651

Ozzie to unveil Napster-style networking (Interesting use of you Local storage - DiViT) zdnet.com After three years of secret research, Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie's Groove Transceiver combines qualities of Napster and instant messaging. By William M. Bulkeley, WSJ Interactive Edition October 24, 2000 6:25 AM PT BEVERLY, Mass. -- Ray Ozzie, the programmer who designed Lotus Notes, is ready to unveil his next big software idea: a product that he hopes will transform small-group computer collaboration and bring Napster-style networking to the corporate world. Ozzie's product is the fruit of three years of secret-development work by him and 100 other programmers at closely held Groove Networks Inc., based here. The product has been widely awaited in the software business because of his background and backers. Notes, now owned by IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Armonk, N.Y., is on 60 million desktop computers. It made Ozzie rich and was the main reason IBM purchased Lotus Development Corp. in 1995 for $3.3 billion. The new product, Groove Transceiver, is expected to sell for $50 to $100 a desktop and allows groups of two to 20 people to create shared spaces on their computer screens that all group members could access. Common space The product uses elements of such consumer technologies as instant messaging, the always-on form of e-mail popularized by America Online Inc. (NYSE: AOL); and the peer-to-peer file sharing pioneered by Napster Inc. to move music over the Internet. With this kind of sharing in Groove Transceiver, group members keep parts of their computer hard drives as a common space for each other. Ozzie, 44 years old, calls it "a platform for person-to-person-to-person collaboration with the spontaneity of e-mail" that does not rely on larger, central computers, as Notes and other collaborative software do. Having a shared space on the individual computer's hard drives could make work faster, minimize the bandwidth burden on corporate networks, and ease the encryption of documents necessary to keep group work secure on a network. Groove Networks, which has 150 employees, was initially funded by Ozzie and Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor with an undisclosed sum. Later Ozzie raised $50 million in venture funding from Silicon Valley's Accel Partners, and more recently, $10 million from Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC). Whether Groove Transceiver, which works both on the Internet and internal company networks, will hit it big is an open question. It is entering a field already crowded with ways for groups to communicate, whether via Internet chat rooms, or with more sophisticated, Notes-like systems. More powerful than e-mail? But Dan Bricklin, founder of Trellix Inc., a Concord, Mass., company that develops software for building personal Web pages, says Groove Transceiver is "more intimate and powerful than e-mail" and he predicts its use will be just as common. Trellix plans to include a stripped-down version of Groove Transceiver in its Web-page-building facility that runs on the ZDNet (Nasdaq: CNET) Web site. People will be able to download the software for free and include a button on their Web pages to let people join groups. Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, a New York technology newsletter published by EDventure Holdings, says Ozzie's product "is really exciting," because it creates substantial links among people who wouldn't ordinarily meet. She says a British freight-logistics company in which she has invested, closely held Sourceree Ltd., is testing Groove as a way to create work groups for dealing with emergencies -- such as a typhoon that has delayed a ship. "This could be the next killer application for the Internet," because it allows sophisticated networking without the help of corporate-computer departments, says Kevin Morgan, director of portals for closely held market-researcher Hurwitz Group. In addition to the $50 to $100 per-seat tariff, Groove also hopes to sell storage to back up the work groups' data, and assure prompt updates to that data when members sign on. Groove also hopes to get consultants and corporate-software developers interested in creating differentiated applications in specific lines of businesses.