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Friday, March 17, 2000
Surfers in the DesertThe PC was an also-ran at the PC ForumE-mail messages which answer themselves and Web pages which generate their own content, based on the preferences of the user and with the aid of a variety of information sources: these were noteworthy product announcements at the PC Forum in the Arizona desert which promise new opportunities for using the Internet. Each year in March, the biggest names in the computer industry -- and all those who want to be numbered among them -- meet in the deserts of Arizona. Gathering at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess luxury hotel, not far from the booming desert metropolis of Phoenix, they discuss the trends in computer technology within the framework of the PC Forum. Technology is one thing, being there is everything. Those who put down the $4500 entrance fee for three and a half days want to see and be seen. During conference breaks, swimming in one of the three pools is recommended, as is a round of golf on one of the two courses. The atmosphere is relaxed, the wearing of neckties frowned upon. Esther Dyson, the organizer of the PC Forum, could be seen walking barefoot over the hot desert sand. "The real world with which we are familiar is being replaced by a 'virtual familiarity' in the form of One-Click-Shopping, automatic price comparisons and sellers who -- with the permission of the user -- know more about him than he does himself", said Dyson at the opening of the conference. An illustrious crowd of businessmen and experts had followed her call into the desert. Kevin O'Connor, head of the Doubleclick Company, which has come under a crossfire of criticism for its gathering of data on consumers, debated with the data privacy advocate Jason Catlett of Junkbusters.com. Michael Bloomberg, founder of the news service which carries his name, or Richard Bressler, Managing Director of Time Warner Digital Media, cultivated a carefully-maintained dissent with Larry Lessig. Lessig, a law professor, accused the large media conglomerates of stifling the openness and innovative strength of the Internet with patent law and copyright claims. Serial Letters A central component of the PC Forum is a show room for mostly smaller firms which want to present their latest products and technologies to the assembled industry giants. This year the start-up company Fire-Drop, located in Silicon Valley, generated a lot of excitement with its Zaplet communications software. Zaplet stands for a technology which combines in itself the best features of a variety of Internet services -- personal contact and the speed with which e-mail disseminates, as well as the colorful variety and interactivity of the Web -- and which thus intends to revolutionize telecommunications. It functions as follows: the surfer first enters a message, complete with the e-mail addresses of all the recipients, into several formula fields at the Fire-Drop Web site. A message then arrives at the recipients' electronic mailboxes like a regular e-mail. The actual content of the zaplet remains however at the Fire-Drop server and can thus be made permanent. This allows one to avoid chains of answers and answers to answers. It is particularly true that when several users want to organize or discuss something with one another that entire series of messages build up rapidly with electronic mail. The zaplets work against the over-saturation of electronic mailboxes in that they collect all messages which belong together and continuously update them. Among the areas of application visualized by Fire-Drop are such things as appointments, invitations, spontaneous question surveys, exchanges of photos or addresses as well as virtual teamwork. If, for example, a group of skiers plans a trip, then the clever zaplets are not just responsible for ensuring that it becomes simpler for the participants to be able to come up with an agreed destination and departure time; the company even advertises that the price for lift tickets and accommodations will be recalculated if other group members decide to join them. The new service is to be free of charge to private users. Fire-Drop1 wants to earn money with business customers who implement zaplets for internal communications. The company also sees commercial utilization possibilities in connection with newspapers or stock market services which want to provide their customers with what is always the latest news in the same, single mailing. The technology becomes problematic, however, when the "news zaplet" falls ever further downwards in the in box, becoming forgotten, or when it doesn't even allow the user enough time to read the information. This is because the next time the zaplet is called up, the latest reports replace the news which was missed. In contrast with familiar text messages, the downloading of a zaplet also takes a bit longer, because one is dealing with web pages. Automatic Web Sites Onepage2 also had its coming out at the PC Forum. Supported by such well-known investors as Strauss Zelnick, the head of Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, the company wants to make it possible for its customers to display information from a variety of Web sites in a single browser window. Instead of repeatedly calling up several pages, one after the other, the user who is under time pressure should be able to call up all the desired data with a single click. In one personalized browser window, the user can, for example, present next to one another stock market exchange rates, news from his or her local paper, picture sequences from a Webcam and personal lists of matters still pending which are stored at yet another Web site. The product from Onepage is currently still in the development stage. With it, the company from Silicon Valley is entering a market which did not exist as recently as a few weeks ago, but in which in the meantime several competitors are already struggling. The term "Metabrowser" is beginning to catch on for this product. According to Marc Fest, a journalist from Germany who emigrated to Florida, this means the "displaying and combining of assorted Web contents according to user preferences". The term was coined about a month ago in an article in the on-line magazine "Traffick". Marc Fest claims however to have invented the first "Metabrowser" back in January 1999: as a correspondent for German print media, he usually began his editorial day by going through the Web sites of the approximately 20 most important American daily papers. In doing so, he hit upon the idea that combining this news onto a single "master page" would allow one to get an overview much more quickly. So he refreshed his knowledge of Perl and programmed the code for his Quickbrowse3 service. Actually thinking more about his pleasures than anything else, he thought that the more rapid news overview would enable him to hit the beaches sooner, and not have to spend so much time in front of the computer screen. But then when he told a friend about Quickbrowse, the latter invested spontaneously in the idea. Since then, Fest is a businessman against his own will and is building up his own company with the financial support of David Bohnett, the founder of Geo Cities. Meanwhile, however, other start-ups in addition to Quickbrowse and Onepage, such as Call the Shots4, Katiesoft5, Octopus6 and Yodlee7, are also trying to make money on metabrowsing. Individualized Mass Communication Metabrowsers offer a personalized form of information accumulation and presentation and compete with services such as Yahoo or Excite. The possibilities of personalizing of the information offerings extend however much further with the Metabrowsers than they do with portal sites. Quickbrowse, Call the Shots or Yodlee gather interesting Web sites and/or selections from them for a single user into a multi-section browser window. Octopus has developed a Java Applet which the surfer needs to load onto his own computer. The application of Katiesoft consists of a specially-developed browser which can display four individually-navigable Web sites next to one another in a single window. Because the individual offerings then take up only a quarter of the browser window, their display is smaller than usual. The software is not intended for more than an overview of the contents; hyperlinks which have been clicked on are downloaded in a separate window in the background and can be read off-line. Each of the Metabrowsers mentioned has its own individual strengths. Octopus, for example, is noteworthy for its easy drag-and-drop handling, with which the user can line up together preferred contents of advertising offers. In addition, it is possible to call up several search machines at the same time with the Applet. Yodlee, on the other hand, even permits the administration of Web-based e-mail services: without entering the password, the user receives, at least with Hotmail, an overview of the messages which have arrived, with name of the sender and the subject of the message. Quickbrowse, on the other hand, which is said to already have 20,000 metasurfers using it, also permits one to have the combi-page sent with daily updates by e-mail. PC Pushed Aside The personal computer is losing more and more of its importance in the "information-rich environments" which Dyson sees arising as part of the ever-greater penetration of home and office by the Internet. "The PC platform which we have become accustomed to is transforming itself into integrated operating systems on the one hand and into a large number of graduated platforms and communication protocols on the other," declared Dyson. Therefore, the time has come to change the name of the conference to "Net Forum". Stefan Krempl 1 http://www.firedrop.com 2 http://www.onepage.com 3 http://www.quickbrowse.com 4 http://www.calltheshots.com 5 http://www.katiesoft.com 6 http://www.octopus.com 7 http://www.yodlee.com Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17 March 2000
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