Push – and proud of it – company PointCast Inc yesterday introduced a new cut of its client-server software for distributing news and other information down to desktops via the internet and intranet. The Sunnyvale, California company is also planning to make its services available over the web. At present, a PointCast client is required on the desktop. The new version, 2.5, which will be up on the company’s website in a public beta from the end of this month, incorporates IP multicasting technology licensed from Reuters Holdings Plc’s Tibco unit, to provide the multicasting between PointCast’s data center and the caching servers, and PointCast developed its own multicasting to work between the caching server and the client. Also new is what PointCast calls intelligent defaulting, which basically means, based on the profile the user completes at registration, PointCast will now make available any of the 10 vertical market channels it previously only offered through its vertical market partners, and there will be 25 more rolled out over the next few months. The third new element is a real-time alert function, so network administrators and others can send messages down to desktops, and that would happen instantly if multicasting was supported on the corporate LAN. Chief executive David Dorman, who has been at the company for 120 days now, proudly proclaimed PointCast to be a push technology and he noted how the term had gone from last year’s biggest thing to this year’s tag to avoid. He feels that’s because some companies have disappeared – Intermind for one – and others have been sold – inCommon. But that’s because push is difficult to do, says Dorman and doesn’t just involve putting a client on a desktop that filters news. The company’s move to the web is interesting because it is bound to draw comparisons with what others, such as Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp do with their channels, and what the likes of Yahoo! Inc, Infoseek Inc and Excite Inc do as content aggregators. Dorman said PointCast will not be providing information over the web in the way Microsoft and Netscape do because their method is too slow and does not exploit server functions in the way PointCast does. The company will instead continue with its client-server architecture, offering ISPs and corporations PointCast caching servers to get the information down to browser in much the same way as now, by gathering the news and information, categorizing it, compressing and pushing it down to browsers. At present, clicking on the internet icon on the PointCast desktop takes users to the company’s website, where it offers a few services. With the 3.0 client due later this year, the content on the user’s browser, fed from the PointCast web site will mirror that of the PointCast client. Dorman says the addition of email and search facilities are naturals for that market. The move will again take the company head-to-head against companies such as Yahoo!, Excite and Infoseek, who all offer personalized news and information services, but Dorman feels PointCast can offer far more proprietary content than those web-based services, and it will still be free to use, he says. PointCast presently has about 1.25 million users with revenues last year of about $17m. Dorman would not divulge the exact figure, as PointCast is a private company, but said it was about half the sales of CNet, Lycos and Infoseek, all of which did between $33m and $35m last year.
