Getting the jump on Netscape Communications Corp’s silent Navio Inc subsidiary, Spyglass Inc has released a product road map that it hopes will give it a foothold in the soon-to-be-emerging Internet appliance market; a market Netscape co-founder and chief technology officer Marc Andreessen thinks will be worth half a billion dollars in a couple of years. Spyglass hopes to market a complete line of client, server and even groupware applications by the end of 1997 (CI No 3,057). The cornerstone of Spyglass’s strategy is a product called Remote Mosaic, scheduled for release in the second quarter of 1997, that would turn browsing on devices like telephones or pagers into a client-server operation. Lightweight ‘viewers’ would be custom-integrated into devices, which would then connect to a ‘proxy browser’ on a Unix or NT server. The proxy browser would handle resource-demanding browser functions like caching, while connecting the device to other servers. Spyglass says that one proxy browser could support hundreds of clients at a time. The viewers would require about 20 to 75Kb of RAM. Spyglass also intends to deliver an embedded browser, called Device Mosaic in the first quarter of 1997. Device Mosaic will be aimed at machines, like network computers, with enough resources to handle browsing on their own. Spyglass says that at its smallest, Device Mosaic would require about 1Mb RAM. A small footprint Web server, called MicroServer, will be delivered in the form of a software developers kit in the first quarter of next year. Spyglass expects developers to embed the MicroServer into various real time operating systems, turning non-computer devices like office or manufacturing equipment into servers, capable of serving up diagnostic information via Internet protocols. Also in the works is Spyglass Prism, server software that converts Web content into whatever form an embedded browser may prefer; it should ship some time in the second quarter of 1997. Spyglass will begin to sell Mail and Conferencing servers, acquired from OS Technologies Inc, within the month. Other collaborative software will follow.
