Pushed Out

Something like that happened to Individual Inc. (www.individual.com), whose Newspage service (www.newspage.com) we had covered here before. While Newspage still survives, Freeloader, its push technology offering, has downed shutters.

Individual, as the name suggests, tries to provide surfers with individualised fare. This was a company that realised much before anyone else did that surfers spent a lot of time aimlessly searching, which they could save if only you could collect their stuff and serve it to them.

So whats new? That's what PointCast has been doing all along, right? And isnt that what push technology is all about?

Your are right on both counts. Individual Inc. was a pioneer, who found its prime service hijacked by just about everyone else, including some big names.

Freeloader was Individual's price acquisition at 38 million dollars. The company has nothing to show for it now. Freeloader works quite similarly to Pointcast, which transmits your choice of information and entertainment to your desktop in the background for you browse at your leisure, or display them on the screen as a screensaver. Well, Pointcast made a success of it when they went methodically about it, publicising Murdoch's interest in the venture. Freeloader, sadly, was not half as successful.

I had downloaded Freeloader almost an year ago. The installation was simple enough, but push tech really delivers when you have good allies. There must be websites that cater to the off-line reader. He is not your average surfer who will be satisfied with information with a tinge of graphics to pep up things. There is a bit of the couch potato in the Pointcast and Freeloader user he wants his PC to look a bit more like his TV. And there wasn't much that Freeloader offered.

Even then, there were other reasons. In the words of one Individual spokesperson, in the last year, "the market had just gone ballistic." Why? Take a look at new generation browsers and the answer stares you in the face. Internet Explorer 4.0 is push enabled, and so is NetCaster from Netscape. Push is no more about downloading websites during modem idle time or in periodic intervals. It is now more about content, and both Microsoft and Netscape have enlisted the support of the many who are better at that business, and this has left the likes of Freeloader in the lurch.

Thinking about it again, perhaps the company deserved this too. There was none of the efficiency that one has come to expect of a service on the Net either. The day after the service closed shop, its website still had no idea about it at all there it was, abandoned by its parent and no one to even put up a message announcing the closure. Even the parent company, while announcing it in a press conference, ignored to put it up on its website. Perhaps they should have never started this whole business at all.

But now, the whole scenario has changed. In the battle between Microsoft and Netscape, the internet baddies, the one who got bruised was Freeloader. Now, when you sign up after installing Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0, you have an option of requesting web pages to be delivered to your mailbox.

The debate is currently raging on which side to plump for. Do you go for Microsoft with its Channel definition Format (CDF) or Netscape's simpler vision? The fact is, whatever your option, you will be losing out on everything that the other offers. That is not a question of technology. There is nothing here that they cannot work out by sitting around a table and talking, but when technology majors act like kids, we have reason to worry.

Babychen Mathew

When the pioneers of push technology gets shoved off, you know a shakeout is on the cards.