The Online REPORTER
WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
November 18 - 22 1996 Issue No 25
SUN SWAPS JAVA AND WEBNFS FOR NDS
In what seems like a last-ditch effort to flood the market, Novell Inc has announced that it will license its NDS Directory Services, royalty-free, to hardware and telecommunications companies. So far Sun Microsystems Inc is the first company to step forward and collect.
In a deal announced last week, Sun will support NDS in its Solaris operating system by the first half of next year. Novell, in return, is licensing several Java-based products from Sun, including WebNFS, Java Workshop and the Java Just-in-time compiler. Novell has already licensed Sun's Java Virtual Machine.
The two companies will collaborate on the development of Java development tools and Java class libraries. Sun product marketing director Joe Keller says the deal will help ensure that Java and Java WorkShop work well on the Novell platform, and, with WebNFS, he adds, Novell users will be able to use the Sun's NFS as "a fairly reliable transport protocol across Internet connections."
It doesn't seem that either Sun or Novell's customers will be paying directly for all this technology. Novell's DeveloperNet subscribers, for example, will get Java WorkShop at no extra charge starting in December. But nobody was saying anything about whether or not any money was changing hands in the deal.
Both Sun and Novell played down profit as a motive, with the familiar "it's for the good of our customers" mantra. Sun clearly wants to license WebNFS to other players to prevent it from being negated by Microsoft's Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol, which is favored by fellow Unixer SCO. Oracle, Spyglass and Netscape are among the next expected to sign up for WebNFS.
IBM NC DIVISION TO CONCENTRATE ON POWERPC, PC CO ON INTEL
IBM Corp will demonstrate a PowerPC 603e-based NC reference platform for building network computers at Comdex this week, although Big Blue's newly-created NC division under Bob Dies doesn't expect to ship what it will call Network Center products based upon the design until the end of next summer at the earliest.
IBM Microelectronics will market OEM kits using the design running Microware Systems Corp OS/9 or Sun's JavaOS. Internet division general manager Irving Wladawsky-Berger said the company is already in "heavy discussions with consumer electronics companies" about such deals.
Until the Network Centers debut, IBM will market the PowerPC 403-based Network Station designed by the AS/400 division and built by Network Computing Devices Inc. The Network Station will be demonstrated at Comdex being served by a raft of new Lotus and Java applications. It ships next month with NCD's ACTware system software, 8Mb of RAM but no local disk drive and is expected to cost from $700. Network Stations can access Windows applications running on Intel servers across NCD's WinCenter software. They'll provide AS/400 5250 and 3270 emulation and support Unix applications. Early ships are due next month, volumes at the beginning of next year.
Although IBM's NC Comdex plans are still changing day-to-day, it's also expected to demonstrate technology conforming to the Microsoft/Intel NetPC specification for which it has also announced support.
Although general manager Bob Dies doesn't rule out eventually providing an Intel-based device through his NC division, Phil Hester, now the division's technology lieutenant, says the group's work is PowerPC-based for the moment. Hester says Intel processors are still too expensive to meet NC requirements and that the IBM PC Company will provide Big Blue's NetPC and other WinTel product requirements for the time being. Wladawsky-Berger said the PC Co will "definitely do an Intel-based" so-called network computer based on the NetPC spec developed by Microsoft and Intel. IBM's third desktop environment is the high-end RS/6000 AIX workstation.
Hester was most recently general manager of IBM Microelectronics' integrated product solutions group and has apparently been co-
SUN LOOKING AT INTERNET PROTOCOL FOR CLIENT PREFERENCES
Though it's saying nothing officially, Sun Microsystems Inc is looking with eager eyes at the nascent Application Configuration Access Protocol (ACAP) as a standard way of accessing client preference and configuration information remotely.
ACAP is the next generation of the Internet Message Support Protocol developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and was developed to operate hand-in-hand with the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP 4) that Sun has lately productized in its Solstice Internet Mail Server.
ACAP could be used to store things like address books, bookmark files, and subscription lists centrally so that users could change computers without having to reconfigure their preferences. The protocol is being worked on right now through an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, which hopes to have a proposed standard by February next year, but members including Microsoft and Netscape are not necessarily committed to supporting this open Internet standard.
Both are also reportedly developing their own ways of doing what ACAP does: Netscape by extending its Light Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) services and Microsoft by extending IMAP 4.
According to working group member Chris Newman, Netscape has expressed some willingness to embrace ACAP, but only if it can be finished within a few months. As for Microsoft, Newman says "they sort of understand that they need these things but they're not willing to wait." http://andrew2. andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/acap/
IBM Corp and Netscape Communications Corp have signed a cross-licensing deal whereby Netscape will include IBM's Host On-Demand Web-to-3270 software in Communicator Professional Edition. In return, IBM says it will include Communicator with various hardware and software packages of its own.
INFORMIX TOUTS UNIVERSAL WEB ARCHITECTURE AGAINST ORACLE
Informix Software Inc has revealed its dynamic Web page builder as Universal Web Connect, which will ship for OnLine database users next month, and for the forthcoming Universal Server next quarter. Allowing developers to create Web pages that work against Informix databases, the module is one element of a Universal Web Architecture the company has created, rivalling Oracle's Network Computing Architecture.
The Universal Web Connect includes HTML Application Pages into which developers can embed SQL statements, JavaScript and Java applets (via support for Netscape One). App Pages access Informix databases and construct HTML documents for display by browsers. It includes a Microsoft Visual C++ App Page builder API enabling HTML pages, App Pages and their associated content to be exported to the database automatically.
Third party tools - such as BlueStone, FutureTense, Haht Software, NetDynamics and Wallop - can be integrated with the API to provide Web site management and application services. Additional interfaces provide state and connection management for deploying applications, and through these developers can plug in Corba IIOP-based object distribution products, including ORBs, support for which Informix announced support a couple of weeks ago. There are also security drivers for Netscape and Microsoft Web servers, so users can create database-driven authentication services. Subscription and notification services enables user access to specific information, with automatic notification when the information changes.
Additional Java classes - Informix's extension of the Netscape Internet Foundation Classes in the Netscape One development environment - enable developers to retrieve information from Informix databases via a dedicated Java API or JDBC connections. Of course the company is also providing a raft of new Java development tools that utilize these classes. Its Java offerings now comprise an Informix-specific Java API, JDBC support and JWorks development tools. Collectively they enable developers to write applications in Java that access Informix databases and other services. JWorks is a drag and drop Java development tool said - unlike rival database company offerings - to support SQL3, it comes with pre-built (Java Beans-compliant) components and enables developers to create and customize database forms using Java.
Informix claims it's the only database vendor with a Java API enabling users to access the database directly from client or middle tiers and claims resulting Java application code is stored in the Informix database and applications using the applications don't require a run-time plug-in for their browser. JWorks application code can be integrated in new DataBlade modules by re-using components. JWorks is due mid-1997.
JWorks connects to the database over an Informix-specific Java API or JDBC, both of which will be available by year-end. Developers can also write DataBlades for Universal Server in Java. A Web DataBlade is used to store content and application logic in the database and provides the basic Web application development and deployment environment. The Web DataBlade Module is available now.
ART BUILDS ON DYNAMO FOR SPECIFIC MARKET WEB SERVERS
Art Technology Group, which claimed back in May to have the first application development environment to be written in Java, has expanded that Dynamo technology into three turnkey Web development and deployment packages Ad Station, Profile Station and Retail Station, all written in Java. A new version of the Dynamo Developer's Kit is at the center of each application, and the Boston, Massachusetts company says the next stage is to support JavaSoft Inc's Servlet API, with details expected in the next few weeks.
The Retail Station is an electronic retail management application to set up storefronts, with electronic shopping carts and the like, and will support the secure electronic transaction (SET) standard once it's finalized. Dynamo Profile Station is for collecting and analyzing Web site user information, with a published API to customize and extend the application, and Dynamo Ad Station combines ad targeting, scheduling, session tracking and Web user profiling, and requires the Profile Station to work. Ad Station can be enhanced with something called Ad Transceiver, which enables the delivery of adverts from servers connected to any Web server running Ad Transceiver.
Version 1.0 of Ad Station and Profile Station will be out in 30 days, while Retail Station won't be generally available until February 1997. All three are up on Solaris 2.4/2.5 and Windows NT 3.51 and include a Dynamo Developer's Kit license. Dynamo Ad Station and Retail Station will cost from $50,000, with Ad Transceiver costing an extra $5,000. Dynamo Profile Station will start at $15,000, and there will be a 90-day introductory offer bundling Ad and Profile Station, starting at $50,000. www.atg.com
DIBA INCLUDES MPC860 AS A TARGET CHIP, OPENS IN EUROPE
Diba Inc, the company formed by Oracle Corp refugees to enable manufacturers to put your electrical appliances on the Internet, so you can read your mail while you make the toast, has adopted Motorola Inc's MPC860 as the first processor for its Diba Application Foundation software environment.
It has also won the Panasonic arm of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd and Proxima Inc - for its technologies: the two want to use Diba's designs as the basis for new families of Internet Information Appliances.
Meantime, Diba has poached Nigel Seed, the managing director of Silicon Graphics Inc's UK and Ireland operations to run its newly-established European office in Reading, just west of London. Panasonic plans a family of Internet telephones and Proxima, a line of Internet-enabled multimedia projectors and all will be revealed this week at Comdex. And Samsung Electronics Co, which has adopted the Diba design, plans to use the MPC860 family to power information appliances and televisions. Its MPC860-based 27" Internet television - it was going to have been 29" - will be available in South Korea this year and elsewhere in 1997.
NATSEMI CREATES ODIN WEB TV REFERENCE CHIP SET
National Semiconductor has spent 15 years trying to create a hit microprocessor, and reckons it may finally have struck paydirt with its NS486SXF embedded version of Intel Corp's 80486, so it's milking the part for all it's worth.
NatSemi's latest initiative is Odin, a reference design for what the company reckons is a superset of Oracle Corp's Network Computer spec, and which it says will hopefully enable companies to build Web browsers that use the television as the display, for less than $200. It is intended specifically to run Java, and as well as the NS486SXF embedded processor, NatSemi's AT/LANtic Ethernet controller, Trident Microsystems Inc's TVG9470 graphics controller for a Super VGA monitor or NTSC television output, and Rockwell International Corp's WaveArtist single-chip audio system for compact-disk quality sound, and its RCV336ACF/Sp 33.6Kbps modem.
It includes optional support for mass storage and other add-ons using PC Cards, infra-red communications and two-dimensional graphics acceleration. The Odin reference design will be available to computer makers and software developers from next quarter. www.natsemi.com
THE PIE MAY BE OK, BUT STAY AWAY FROM THE PIPPIN
Vowing to weave its identity "into every aspect of the restaurant", Apple has chartered the UK's, Mega Bytes International BVI, with setting up a world-wide chain of "cyber-based theme restaurants".
The first site is currently being scouted out in the Los Angeles area and should open in about a year. It will seat about 250 people and feature an eclectic and international menu, some technology toys and Internet thingeys, as well as conference and reception rooms. An Apple spokesperson said the restaurant chain is not expected to have any long-term impact on the company's strategic goals.
W3C TO HEAR ITS MEMBERS' DCOM TO CORBA STORIES
The W3C is holding a DCOM/Corba technology symposium today, Monday, with all members invited. Details were sketchy as we were going to press, but Microsoft claimed it was just a chance for each side to put its story to the other and a chance for Microsoft to put its Active Group message to the W3C for the first time formally.
The company said it was not a standards meeting, just a workshop - a chance to explain why DCOM would "kick the ass" of IIOP as one put it - and how it binds into COM while IIOP doesn't have a standalone story to tell, Microsoft said. That explanation sounds a bit twee to us, but Netscape or the W3C wasn't willing to talk about the meeting.
IBM TRIES TO KEEP FOCUS ON RETAIL, AND POWER E-BUSINESS
With so many heavy-duty IBMers assembled in one place, most of the press were more interested in everything but the e-business initiatives IBM was supposed to be announcing last week in New York, but it did actually have new partnerships with retailers, oil companies and others to talk about, with the aim of boosting business over the Internet and intranets.
The company named 13 new retailers that are joining its Internet shopping mall, World Avenue and PetroConnect is a network-based service IBM announced for the petroleum industry, with digital databases, maps, surveys, well logs, seismic data and other geographical and geological data, for all segments of the industry.
It also announced a service in conjunction with Siemens for electricity companies to sell excess capacity over the Internet and other networks. IBM expects the worldwide information technology industry to grow to $1,200bn from $800bn, in the next four years, with 60% of that growth driven by network computing, it said. www.ibm.com
COREL PLANS VIDEO NC FOR EARLY NEXT YEAR
Corel Corp is coming out with a Video Network Computer in the first quarter of next year, in addition to its PDA that is now due in the second quarter, having slipped a quarter (OR 16).
Corel has chosen Motorola Inc's MPC821 embedded version of the PowerPC and will probably have it manufactured by Triton Corp, a Montreal-based company that currently makes Corel's video-conferencing stuff. The Video NC will ship with a color digital camera, Corel Office for Java software, 16Mb RAM, an internal V34 modem, 10Base-T ethernet connection, and can be expanded to include a floppy or a hard disk via two PCMCIA slots, for "under $1,000," minus a keyboard, monitor and mouse. The company said all the software necessary for the camera is inside the camera itself. The Video NC also has an embedded microphone and speaker. Meantime, Corel's executive director sales and marketing, Alen Bartsch, is leaving at the end of the month after eight years to do a master's degree and set up his own marketing and promotions company.
COMMITTEE ANSWERS ITS CRITICS BY NAMING NAMES
The dissension and confusion over Top Level Domains (TLDs) and global directories (OR 22,23) that the Internet Society (ISOC) had hoped to address with its International Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC) is still apparent in Internet newsgroups, just weeks after the committee was formed.
ISOC President, Don Heath, seemingly weary of the criticism that the ISOC really has no authority over TLDs, that the committee has been set up in a behind-closed-doors fashion and that its formation is simply another delay in a stalled process, says that none of it is true. "Actions" he says, "speak louder than words." The committee has been chartered to establish global registries and up to 150 new TLDs by mid 1997.
One action the IAHC has taken recently is to name its hitherto unknown appointees, of which there is one more than the nine expected. Critics had been complaining that the lack of information on committee members was indicative of the IAHC's secretive procedures. Heath admits "it was a little slow in getting logistics out, but we are on our way". He adds, "we are not a bureaucratic organization, and except for the logistics of how we must operate, there is nothing to prevent us from acting with dispatch."
The question is, can the committee act quickly enough to prevent other parties, such as AlterNic (OR 6) from solving the problem for him? Don Heath will sit as chair. As of now, the IAHC address is: www.iahc.org
HP GOES AFTER NETRA MARKET
Hewlett Packard Co has beefed up its Internet product offerings with a new line of enterprise Internet servers targeted squarely at Sun's Netra market. HP is also juggling a variety of programs and product features in order to keep its NT and Unix, Microsoft and Netscape party going.
Leading the Unix charge is the Domain Enterprise Server product line, which comprises HP's new Domain Business Suite software on a range of HP Unix boxes - from the 715 to the K460 and running in price from $9,500 to $85,000. The Business Suite is made up of OpenView IT/Operations software, Netscape's Suite Spot and HP OpenMail for $4,000. HP says it will add Netscape Communicator, HP Praesidium plug-in capability, Oracle's WebServer, a Java JIT compiler and high-availability services to the product line. Both products are available now.
On the NT side, HP NetServer Web Master is billed as a $10,000 turnkey solution with a "Microsoft personality" that, HP promises can put customers on the Net in less than an hour. It's an HP NetServer E30 166MHz Intel Pentium box running NT, Internet Information Server, Front Page, with a Cisco Inc Access Pro router, along with some HP-developed glue to make it all work together. It ships January 1. Along with the usual service and support programs, HP is launching a HP Domain Partner Program, for software developers porting across NT and Unix environments. Marketing programs with Microsoft and Netscape have also been announced.
TRITEAL SERVES JAVA INTERFACE TO NC VENDORS
Common Desktop Environment shop TriTeal Corp's created a Java interface it's calling SoftNC and is licensing it to a bunch of companies building thin client Network Computers, including Fujitsu Ltd, Network Computing Devices Inc, Japan Computer Corp and Wyse Technology Inc.
We're not sure what Fujitsu wants with it, and it wouldn't get back in time to tell us, though the other companies are known in the terminal business, where most vendors are re-modeling themselves as NC manufacturers.
TriTeal says SoftNC will run wherever a Java virtual runs and can run in less than 1.5Mb memory while supporting login, window, session and style management capabilities. TriTeal likens SoftNC to JavaSoft's HotJava Views NC user environment, though it currently lacks an integrated browser function which the JavaSoft product includes.
The OEM-only product also does not yet include an integrated version of NCD's WinCenter Connect software which enables windowing terminals to access multi-user Windows apps running on a server. NCD's software is based upon the eponymous Citrix Systems ICA protocol server software which TriTeal has already incorporated in its CDE-based NTed Unix desktop for accessing Windows applications.
SoftNC is TriTeal's fourth desktop product following the CDE-based Ted, NTed, and the Ted for Windows implementation. NCD is currently supplying Network Stations running its ACTware NC OS to IBM and has indicated it will support Java stuff in a future release.
POLL FINDS JAVA DEVELOPMENT NOT CONFINED TO THE NET
Morgan Stanley analysts were patrolling the floor of a Java Developers Conference in San Francisco recently and polled the attendees for an interesting snapshot of how the nascent Java paradigm is getting along.
Morgan Stanley qualifies its findings by pointing out that there was probably a slightly disproportionate number of Unix and leading edge development shops, but otherwise it was a pretty representative sample. Some 75% said they were developing, or considering developing non-Internet Java applications and 51% said they were already using apps to access relational databases, which is where any money will probably be made early on.
It's not clear of course whether that means Java is being used for everything that moves, or that there are not as many Internet applications being developed as previously thought. Not surprisingly there was a 2:1 vote in favor of Java being an incomplete language, perhaps that should have been 100% as most of its proponents don't pretend that it's the whole enchilada just yet, but maybe they just didn't want to sound too controversial.
As to what else is needed, better tools and libraries were out front, with better security only cited by 15% of those who want enhancements. Browser plug-ins are being eschewed by most developers it seems, with 80% of those questioned not bothering to develop any, but Navigator was the most popular platform for those that were.
Java WorkShop and Symantec Cafe were way out in front of other vendors offerings, though we don't know the significance of Sun's sponsorship of the event, but what most of the developers wanted was debugger improvements. The development platforms were fairly evenly distributed, with Windows 95 narrowly ahead of NT, Solaris and then other Unix, with Macintosh a lowly fifth with just a 7% share. The Java performance overhead was described as "significant" by 56%, "extreme" by 11%, "modest" by 28% and not noticeable by just over 4%.
I-PLANET TO RELEASE FAX SOFTWARE FOR VPNS
i-Planet will roll out its CypherSpace 1.0, an Internet-based Virtual Private Network (VPN) product, Faximilator, which routes faxes via the public telephone network, and its MailSuite 1.0 e-mail software next month.
The software currently only works on the IPS-168 platform, released last August, which is a combined router, firewall, Web server, e-mail server and various other things. At between $5,000 and $6,000, the Sunnyvale, California company reckons it's a far cheaper way of getting started on the Internet than by buying from various hardware and software vendors. i-Planet, formed in January this year by two ex-Sun Microsystems employees David Vereeke and Francis Young, says its CypherSpace 1.0 contains tunneling technology, and can link multiple networks using private LAN addresses without the need for static Internet addresses at the remote site. CypherSpace is supposed to be able to compress data traveling between nodes on an iVPN and encrypt the information with public and private encryption technologies. i-Planet is aiming for small to mid-sized businesses claiming CypherSpace delivers the compressed information across a modem on lower-speed links in the same amount of time as T1 or ISDN lines. Faximilator 1.0 links Fax and Internet through a Web browser and routes individual or broadcast fax requests to other i-Planet Solution IPS-168s on a company's network. MailSuite provides remote e-mail access, manages automatic mailing lists for private discussion groups, and i-Planet claims it reduces costs via automatic distribution of patches and product collateral via e-mail. Faximilator will go for $500, MailSuite 1.0 $600, and CypherSpace $1,000. www.i-planet.com
PEAK SHIPS WEB ANIMATOR
Peak Technologies will ship its Java-based Web page development software, Web Animator by the end of the month for $50. Targeted at the retail market, Web Animator uses a drag and drop interface to let Webmasters convert text or graphics into Java applets that can then bounce around the viewer's screen. It will be sold on Peak's Web site, as well as through retailers like CompUSA.
At Comdex, Peak will also announce that it has licensed Infinop's Lightning Strike Java-delivered compression software. When an image compressed with Lightning Strike is viewed on the Web, the server streams down a 30Kb image decompresser to the client. Subsequent images are then downloaded and decompressed on the fly. Peak will sell Lightning Strike for $50 on its Web site and hopes to announce some bundling deals as well. www.peak-media.com
HOTOFFICE DEBUTS AT COMDEX
Targeting small companies and organizations who want to do groupware without the administration overhead of Lotus Notes, Florida's LinkStar Communications is today announcing its HotOffice service.
For $15 per user per month customers get a "publish to HotOffice" button on their Microsoft Office applications that allows them to publish RSA-encrypted documents on their own part of a HotOffice server via the Web. The documents are published with brief HTML descriptions, which can be searched, using a Verity Inc search engine on the server.
Subscribers will also have access to a variety of services, like chat, packages tracking, or Internet phone calls, according to the company.
tunity to store important corporate documents on outside servers across the less-than-completely-reliable Internet remains to be seen.
LinkStar President Andy Ruppanner says they will because of savings and simplicity. "You don't have to buy a server," he says, "you don't have to have a guy with a pony tail." Hot Office will be available for free beta tests to 25-50 companies and is expected to be in full operation by first quarter 1997. On top of the subscription fees, LinkStar hopes to bring in revenues by charging potential Internet services such as travel agents and booksellers to be part of the HotOffice environment. www.hotoffice.com
PERFECTDATA AIMS TO CLEAN UP WITH PERFECTCASH
PerfectData Corp wants your money. The Simi Valley, California computer cleaning products company has announced the modestly-titled PerfectCash that can be used to purchase goods or services - but initially shares - over the Internet.
The company is effectively establishing a bank, and will be touting for partners at Comdex this week to put up floats of unspecified amounts. It will then set up Web sites to trade stocks. PerfectData will make its money solely from the interest on the deposited money. There will be no charge for either vendors or users says president and CEO Joseph Mazin.
It's got clearance from the Securities & Exchange Commission to trade in just two stocks right now, it's own and those of a chemicals company, Flamemaster Corp. The SEC grants 60 day licenses to trade in the stocks, a so-called No Action letter, and PerfectData obviously after a few more of those to make the scheme viable. PerfectData admits the company is "probably a bit fast out of the gun announcing it," admits Mazin, but it will look to drum up interest at the show, prior to establishing the first trading sites using PerfectCash. www.perfectdata.com
InterNex Information Services Inc has integrated Portland Software's ZipLock encrypted container technology, CyberCash Inc's secure Internet payment system, and Oracle Corp's information management technology with its own Internet connectivity and hosting architecture to form something called PowerCommerce Clearinghouse. The Santa Clara, California-based company says the package provides transaction security, payment, tracking and delivery services for software companies selling software over the Internet. Rates range from $1,000 for a software company selling one product to $5,000 for 100 products. Companies with one product pay a transaction fee of $1.25, and it's $0.75 for the 100-product subscribers. InterNex says it's already signed up CNET, Claris and Metatools and plans to release the package on December 11 at InternetWorld in New York. www.internex.net
IBM Corp has developed a set of components to detect previously unknown viruses that are now of course spread much faster than when we relied only on disks. It uses neural nets to "learn" from the behavior of known viruses. But old habits die hard, and it's gonna take IBM a year to get the technology out as a service and a set of products, the company said last week. www.av.ibm.com
A "well known" group of Swedish hackers is being blamed for vandalizing the Ibero-American Summit Web Page, Reuters reports. The summit, attended by 21 heads of state, had its Website varnished with the pornographic photos and jokes (The words "Housing Forum and Public Development", for example, were changed to "Drinking Forum and Pubic Under development." ) in a style reminiscent of a recent attack on the CIA homepage. www.cumbre.cl
Webtitles, a tool which creates 3D titles, banners and animations on Websites, is now available from Asymetrix Corporation for $20. The tool works with all Asymetrix Web products as well as Powerpoint and other desktop publishing software. www.asymetrix.com.
FreshWater Software has released SiteScope, a Web site monitoring and administration tool that automatically identifies Web site performance problems and alerts administrators as they occur. The Boulder,Colorado-based company claims SiteScope monitors URLs, Web servers, search engine processes, network connections, traffic, and disk space and initiates error-handling by rebooting impaired processes and executing automated recovery scripts. It's ISGI, IRIX, Sun Solaris Unix platforms,and NT compatible, costs $1,300 for Unix and $500 for NT can be downloaded from www.freshtech.com.
KPMG Peat Marwick LLP has released a September survey of 165 human resource and tax professionals who participated in KPMG's Forum '96, a conference about the management of international assignments. Seventy-four percent said the Internet will not lessen the need for expatriate employees but thought the Internet would have a significant impact on the management of expatriate programs within the next two years. Eighty-seven percent said they would step up investments in management technology within the next five years.
Apple Computer Inc has updated its Apple Internet Connection Kit to version 1.2, including Navigator 3.0, Shockwave and Real Audio multimedia plug-ins, Apple Guide help software, Farallon Communications Inc's Look@Me utility, which enables a user to view another user's screen over the Internet, Claris Corp's Emailer Lite, and various communications packages, news readers and viewers: it's priced at $50, with upgrades from the old version for $20. www.apple.com
MAID Plc has detailed the deal it inked with CompuServe Corp earlier this year. The pair will launch a business intelligence service intended to enable CompuServe users to track US industry information in a personalized, automated format. The service, expected to be available next month, is intended to help users to track investments, US company information and news events. MAID will receive a proportion of all advertising and subscription revenues taken in.
In a show of good humor, Apple recently took the opportunity to lampoon Microsoft's "exclusive" Windows CE (formerly WinPad) Comdex pep rally, held on the Sunday before the show, and featuring headliners Bill Gates and the Cirque du Soleil. Apple chose a similar circus theme for its collateral, twisting P.T. Barnum's famous quote into, "There's a sucker born every minute and you're not one of them" and imploring Comdex illuminatae to visit the Newton Pavilion instead.
IBM Corp will demonstrate a PowerPC 603e-based NC reference platform for building network computers at Comdex this week, although Big Blue's newly-created NC division under Bob Dies doesn't expect to ship what it will call Network Center products based upon the design until the end of next summer at the earliest.
IBM Microelectronics will market OEM kits using the design running Microware Systems Corp OS/9 or Sun's JavaOS. Internet division general manager Irving Wladawsky-Berger said the company is already in "heavy discussions with consumer electronics companies" about such deals.
Until the Network Centers debut, IBM will market the PowerPC 403-based Network Station designed by the AS/400 division and built by Network Computing Devices Inc. The Network Station will be demonstrated at Comdex being served by a raft of new Lotus and Java applications. It ships next month with NCD's ACTware system software, 8Mb of RAM but no local disk drive and is expected
IBM'S NC FOCUS
DOT Gossip
Apart from Novell Inc, what are Sun Microsystems Inc's compadres doing with WebNFS? Well, according to Sun, IBM Corp and Sequent Computer Systems Inc have "licensed" WebNFS; they get it through their ONC+ 2.0 licences. The current terminology for Spyglass, Auspex, Apple, Oracle is "adopted." Still all quiet on the Netscape front. The one thing that is certain is that nobody is "paying."
Netscape posted a beta of its Java-enabled Navigator for Windows 3.1 at: http://developer.netscape.com/index.html.
Careful where you point that thing! A set-top box Internet access device, designed by hotshot WebTV Networks and manufactured in the US by Sony and Philips Electronics has been classified as "munitions" by the US government, thereby requiring an export license, the New York Times reports. The boxes employ 128-bit encryption deemed too powerful to fall into the wrong hands.
Netscape, wisely opportunistic, has turned what still looks a very optimistic share price into hard cash by selling 5.6m shares, 2.25m of them new, at $53.75 a share, raising $110m or so net for working capital.
Two weeks ago, Bill Gates was energetically rubbishing Network Computers and all Larry Ellison's works, but a week is an eon in the life of the Internet, and it is now clear that NCs have been giving Gates sleepless nights after all. "We have a number of competitors that are working in concert together there that pose a major challenge to us," he told his shareholders Microsoft's annual meeting, adding that thin clients and their backers presented "perhaps the largest challenge that's faced us in a long, long time."
Taking a page from Netscape's playbook, Sun Microsystems says that there are 100,000 copies of its Java WorkShop development tool out there. It won't say how many have been actually paid for, though.
Progressive Networks Inc has put reference implementation source code of the Real Time Streaming Protocol it developed in conjunction with Netscape Communications Corp up for free download. It's got C code for both the client and server and also pre-compiled versions of Windows 95 and most Unixes. www.realaudio.com
Novell Inc has postponed its developers conference next month until March next year.
Lotus is re-writing its SmartSuite PC product - WordPro, 1-2-3 and the like, as Java components, according to president Jeff Papows. He added that around half - 100 - of the company's developers are now writing exclusively in Java. The company is also preparing a bunch of Domino-based e-commerce applications for release first thing next year.
HotMail claims to have doubled its subscribers in a month to 500,000, adding some 10,000 each day. The free Web-based e-mail, launched in July (OR 20). www.hotmail.com
AmeriTrade Holding Corp has set up eBroker on the Web, whereby after an initial deposit of $10,000 you can trade in any listed US stock or foreign stock on US exchanges for $12 per trade up to any number of shares, through Navigator, Internet Explorer, AOL or CompuServe front ends. www.ebroker.com
Microsoft Corp says its long-term goal is to seek partnerships to help it deliver a range of Internet services - anything from banking to news, over the next 10 years. Chairman and CEO Bill Gates said the company would invest heavily to achieve this aim - "It will take a huge investment, absolutely gigantic, but money is not in short supply," he said airily - "we've got $7bn in the bank."
Microsoft has published a draft of its DCOM 1.0 Object Model Protocol spec through the IETF's Network Working Group, available at: ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-brown-dcom-v1-spec-01.txt
America Online Inc's first quarter loss of $353.7m (OR 24) is greater than all the profits it has ever reported, the Washington Post points out.
As we went to press most vendors had either posted patches or declared their systems immune to the so-called "Ping of Death" flaw discovered in TCP/IP. It was found that by sending a large IP packet of 65536 bytes - as opposed to the default 64 bytes - remote Unix, Microsoft and Novell operating systems and hardware could be crashed or forced to reboot. The Linux community got a patch out within four hours of being notified of the problem. www.sophist.demon.co.uk/ping/.
Network Solutions apparently did further damage to its reputation last week when it deleted GE Information Services' domain name, geis.com from its InterNIC database because of a mix-up as to whether or not it had paid its $100 registration fee, according to IDG's Network World Fusion. GE users were cut off for about 24 hours. The EDI and X.400 concern does about $700m in revenues and therefore is not one to upset. Separately, the Burton Group had its domain pulled, without notification after it mistakenly thought Burton's registration fee had not been paid. After some frantic calls, www.tbg.com was back on the Web within a day
Microsoft Corp is splitting its shares two-for-one on November 22.
MasterCard International is to buy a majority stake in Mondex International Ltd, the Financial Times believes. The deal is expected to give MasterCard 51% of Mondex. Unlike the rival Visa International payment system, Mondex does not leave up any audit trail. www.mondex.com
Santa Cruz Operation Inc has added DEC, Unix, AIX and SunOS 4.0 support to its VisionFS Unix-to-Windows file and print sharing-over-the-Internet-software, which uses the Common Interface File System (CIFS) client technology that's embedded in Windows NT 4.0. But SCO also wants it to be known that it has extended CIFS to works on all Windows platforms - 3.x, 95 and NT 3.51 and 4.0, and not just NT, as it has now become apparent that NT 4.0 represents a dot on its marketplace right now. SCO has put a site up at www.cifs.com where users can download demos of VisionFS.
A week after Californians passed Proposition 215 legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, the Berkeley Medical Cannabis Growers and Buyers Club is providing an Internet order form and home delivery at www.medicalmarijuana.org
Citing the recent Pierre Salinger TWA flight 800 fiasco before a San Francisco audience, Walter Cronkite worried that the Internet may present a "frightful danger" to society because of its capacity for disseminating fraudulent information.
JavaSoft says it's still a little bit too early to be talking about Java in the Open Group.
IBM Corp's formation of a new Network Computer Division under Bob Dies last week is an indication that the company has decided it has missed so many buses of late. Its mission is to coordinate network computing efforts throughout the company and help set industry standards in the area. IBM already has an Internet division and networking division, but this one will concentrate on the hardware. It will likely mean cannibalizing some sales at the Personal Computer Co - hardly any great hardship IBM-watchers observe, since the business at best does little better than break even. Although Dies, the former general manager of the AS/400 business is stepping from a $14bn business to one that hasn't yet turned over a cent, there'll be a fair amount of synergy early on, with the company's first network computer having been developed by the AS/400 division, and IBM initially targeting its millions of green screen users. He will report to senior VP Robert Stephenson and be replaced by William Zeitler, currently VP software development for IBM Asia/Pacific, but also a former VP marketing at the AS/400 division. There are echoes here of IBM's formation of the Personal Computer Co when it attempted to create PC standards and drive the industry forward. It did the former, but failed to capitalize and others made a lot of money at IBM's expense achieving the latter. The formation of the new division will cast renewed doubt on the maligned PC Co, which has variously been expected to be merged with the RS/6000 business, sold off, or have it's work farmed out to OEMs including Acer Inc, which now looks more likely than ever.
ordinating the company's NC initiatives behind the scenes for sometime. All of IBM's hardware and software NC technologies are being poured into the new NC division which supposedly has 300 to 400 staff spread around several locations including Rochester, Austin and Lotus operations centered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The 1997 Network Centers will be offered in several configurations from low-end devices supporting AS/400 and mainframe sessions, to those with some groupware and browsing functions and others with more expandability and peripheral options. In addition IBM will create those long-promised NCs for vertical application markets, such as kiosks, reservation and check-in systems.
The NC division will offer packaged solutions, including client and server hardware and software, though much of the server-side software that'll push Java and other applications down to clients is still on the bench. Wladawsky-Berger said Lotus will launch that kind of stuff early next year. It maybe at LotusSphere in January. www.ibm.com
TREACHEROUS TIMES FOR AMERICA ONLINE
America Online Inc celebrated its passing the 7 million subscriber mark and laid off 300 employees last week, including about 60 from its Berkeley GNN subsidiary.
America Online says its move into the $20/all you can surf space made the GNN service, which was doing good business both as a search engine and with its Internet in a Box product, redundant. AOL took over GNN from previous owners, O'Reilly and Associates in May 1995, paying $11m.
AOL downplayed the layoffs, saying that the company plans to hire another 1,000-1,500 employees between now and June. It also downplayed the fact that Fidelity Funds had cut its investment in AOL by 50%, or about 5 million shares, saying "this is not unusual - they're still one of our largest shareholders." The transaction apparently took place in the summer and was not linked to AOL's recent restructuring.
Meantime, Reuter reports that Prodigy was recently sued because one of its customers claimed she contracted the AIDS virus from a Prodigy employee she met through the service. Prodigy was found not liable last Wednesday. Prodigy plans to roll out Mac and Win 3.1 versions of its Prodigy Internet 1.1 client software this week. www.aol.com www.prodigy.com
"WORLD'S FIRST ISP" USING APPLIEDTHEORY
NyserNet, a not-for-profit company that can lay justifiable claims to being the world's first Internet Service Provider, has spun out an affiliate company, AppliedTheory Communications Inc, only this time it's for-profit. AppliedTheory plans to make money by building corporate intranets, linking legacy back-ends with Web front-ends, with two product lines, AppliedWeb Management Services and AppliedIntraneting, using the AppliedAccess network, backbone, previously the NyserNet network, which in turn is linked to Sprint's worldwide 155Mbps SprintLink network.
NyserNet was formed in 1985 by representatives of 15 major New York state universities, institutions and corporations including IBM, Kodak and General Electric, and built a 56Kbps network between them, leading to T1 speeds by 1988. NyserNet claims to have connected IBM, Kodak and GE to the Internet in 1987. It also co-developed the SNMP protocol the following year. PSINet was spun out of NyserNet in 1989 and NyserNet contracted the running of the network out to PSINet. Demands became too great, however, with member institutions demanding T3 speeds in 1994 - and NyserNet looked to bids from telecommunications companies to supply network services, and signed with Nynex, Frontier and Sprint.
SUNRIVER POSTPONES TRADEWAVE'S IPO
SunRiver Corp, Austin now plans to delay the initial public offering of its TradeWave Corp unit until 1997. It was to have been in September, but the company may also consider interim financing alternatives because of what it described as softness in the market for Internet-related stocks. "We are in active negotiations to secure a private placement to fund TradeWave's current capital needs, thereby enabling us to pursue an initial public offering of TradeWave in 1997," acting president and CEO Len Mackenzie said. TradeWave offers secure Web access and Virtual Private Networks.
Of course there was no mention of that when the company reported its third quarter figures late last week. The numbers made the current state of TradeWave all too apparent. The network computer arm, Boundless Technologies Inc, nee SunRiver Data Systems, turned in an operating profit of $1.4m, only to be offset by TradeWave's $1.6m operating loss. Third quarter revenues were up 27% at $29.7m. Nine month net losses were $1.5m, against $2.8m profits previously, on revenues that were up 49% at $101.6m.
WYSE LAUNCHES NCS
Forget the plethora of Network Computer announcements at Comdex next week, Wyse Technology Inc reckons it's got the thing covered. Having sold 20,000 of its Winterm not-quite-so-dumb Windows terminals since their launch last Comdex, the company has launched the Winterm 4000 series of enhanced Network Computers. Fully compliant with the Network Computer Reference Profile, the 4000 series run Java applets as well as accessing Windows applications. They run Javasoft Inc's JavaOS operating system and use Digital Equipment Corp's StrongARM RISC chip. Wyse also has a new modular version of the Winterm 2000SE series offering enhanced video due to flat-panel active-matrix liquid crystal display. An agreement just signed with Cruise Technologies Inc will herald a wireless, battery-powered Winterm for mobile thin clients, and the forthcoming Winterm, code-named Elite, will enable access to HTML Internet or intranet data without the need to go through a Windows NT server. First shipments are due early next year. Pricing will be announced at Comdex.
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WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
November 18 - 22 1996 Issue No 25
SUN SWAPS JAVA AND WEBNFS FOR NDS
In what seems like a last-ditch effort to flood the market, Novell Inc has announced that it will license its NDS Directory Services, royalty-free, to hardware and telecommunications companies. So far Sun Microsystems Inc is the first company to step forward and collect.
In a deal announced last week, Sun will support NDS in its Solaris operating system by the first half of next year. Novell, in return, is licensing several Java-based products from Sun, including WebNFS, Java Workshop and the Java Just-in-time compiler. Novell has already licensed Sun's Java Virtual Machine.
The two companies will collaborate on the development of Java development tools and Java class libraries. Sun product marketing director Joe Keller says the deal will help ensure that Java and Java WorkShop work well on the Novell platform, and, with WebNFS, he adds, Novell users will be able to use the Sun's NFS as "a fairly reliable transport protocol across Internet connections."
It doesn't seem that either Sun or Novell's customers will be paying directly for all this technology. Novell's DeveloperNet subscribers, for example, will get Java WorkShop at no extra charge starting in December. But nobody was saying anything about whether or not any money was changing hands in the deal.
Both Sun and Novell played down profit as a motive, with the familiar "it's for the good of our customers" mantra. Sun clearly wants to license WebNFS to other players to prevent it from being negated by Microsoft's Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol, which is favored by fellow Unixer SCO. Oracle, Spyglass and Netscape are among the next expected to sign up for WebNFS.
IBM NC DIVISION TO CONCENTRATE ON POWERPC, PC CO ON INTEL
IBM Corp will demonstrate a PowerPC 603e-based NC reference platform for building network computers at Comdex this week, although Big Blue's newly-created NC division under Bob Dies doesn't expect to ship what it will call Network Center products based upon the design until the end of next summer at the earliest.
IBM Microelectronics will market OEM kits using the design running Microware Systems Corp OS/9 or Sun's JavaOS. Internet division general manager Irving Wladawsky-Berger said the company is already in "heavy discussions with consumer electronics companies" about such deals.
Until the Network Centers debut, IBM will market the PowerPC 403-based Network Station designed by the AS/400 division and built by Network Computing Devices Inc. The Network Station will be demonstrated at Comdex being served by a raft of new Lotus and Java applications. It ships next month with NCD's ACTware system software, 8Mb of RAM but no local disk drive and is expected to cost from $700. Network Stations can access Windows applications running on Intel servers across NCD's WinCenter software. They'll provide AS/400 5250 and 3270 emulation and support Unix applications. Early ships are due next month, volumes at the beginning of next year.
Although IBM's NC Comdex plans are still changing day-to-day, it's also expected to demonstrate technology conforming to the Microsoft/Intel NetPC specification for which it has also announced support.
Although general manager Bob Dies doesn't rule out eventually providing an Intel-based device through his NC division, Phil Hester, now the division's technology lieutenant, says the group's work is PowerPC-based for the moment. Hester says Intel processors are still too expensive to meet NC requirements and that the IBM PC Company will provide Big Blue's NetPC and other WinTel product requirements for the time being. Wladawsky-Berger said the PC Co will "definitely do an Intel-based" so-called network computer based on the NetPC spec developed by Microsoft and Intel. IBM's third desktop environment is the high-end RS/6000 AIX workstation.
Hester was most recently general manager of IBM Microelectronics' integrated product solutions group and has apparently been co-
SUN LOOKING AT INTERNET PROTOCOL FOR CLIENT PREFERENCES
Though it's saying nothing officially, Sun Microsystems Inc is looking with eager eyes at the nascent Application Configuration Access Protocol (ACAP) as a standard way of accessing client preference and configuration information remotely.
ACAP is the next generation of the Internet Message Support Protocol developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and was developed to operate hand-in-hand with the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP 4) that Sun has lately productized in its Solstice Internet Mail Server.
ACAP could be used to store things like address books, bookmark files, and subscription lists centrally so that users could change computers without having to reconfigure their preferences. The protocol is being worked on right now through an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, which hopes to have a proposed standard by February next year, but members including Microsoft and Netscape are not necessarily committed to supporting this open Internet standard.
Both are also reportedly developing their own ways of doing what ACAP does: Netscape by extending its Light Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) services and Microsoft by extending IMAP 4.
According to working group member Chris Newman, Netscape has expressed some willingness to embrace ACAP, but only if it can be finished within a few months. As for Microsoft, Newman says "they sort of understand that they need these things but they're not willing to wait." http://andrew2. andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/acap/
IBM Corp and Netscape Communications Corp have signed a cross-licensing deal whereby Netscape will include IBM's Host On-Demand Web-to-3270 software in Communicator Professional Edition. In return, IBM says it will include Communicator with various hardware and software packages of its own.
INFORMIX TOUTS UNIVERSAL WEB ARCHITECTURE AGAINST ORACLE
Informix Software Inc has revealed its dynamic Web page builder as Universal Web Connect, which will ship for OnLine database users next month, and for the forthcoming Universal Server next quarter. Allowing developers to create Web pages that work against Informix databases, the module is one element of a Universal Web Architecture the company has created, rivalling Oracle's Network Computing Architecture.
The Universal Web Connect includes HTML Application Pages into which developers can embed SQL statements, JavaScript and Java applets (via support for Netscape One). App Pages access Informix databases and construct HTML documents for display by browsers. It includes a Microsoft Visual C++ App Page builder API enabling HTML pages, App Pages and their associated content to be exported to the database automatically.
Third party tools - such as BlueStone, FutureTense, Haht Software, NetDynamics and Wallop - can be integrated with the API to provide Web site management and application services. Additional interfaces provide state and connection management for deploying applications, and through these developers can plug in Corba IIOP-based object distribution products, including ORBs, support for which Informix announced support a couple of weeks ago. There are also security drivers for Netscape and Microsoft Web servers, so users can create database-driven authentication services. Subscription and notification services enables user access to specific information, with automatic notification when the information changes.
Additional Java classes - Informix's extension of the Netscape Internet Foundation Classes in the Netscape One development environment - enable developers to retrieve information from Informix databases via a dedicated Java API or JDBC connections. Of course the company is also providing a raft of new Java development tools that utilize these classes. Its Java offerings now comprise an Informix-specific Java API, JDBC support and JWorks development tools. Collectively they enable developers to write applications in Java that access Informix databases and other services. JWorks is a drag and drop Java development tool said - unlike rival database company offerings - to support SQL3, it comes with pre-built (Java Beans-compliant) components and enables developers to create and customize database forms using Java.
Informix claims it's the only database vendor with a Java API enabling users to access the database directly from client or middle tiers and claims resulting Java application code is stored in the Informix database and applications using the applications don't require a run-time plug-in for their browser. JWorks application code can be integrated in new DataBlade modules by re-using components. JWorks is due mid-1997.
JWorks connects to the database over an Informix-specific Java API or JDBC, both of which will be available by year-end. Developers can also write DataBlades for Universal Server in Java. A Web DataBlade is used to store content and application logic in the database and provides the basic Web application development and deployment environment. The Web DataBlade Module is available now.
ART BUILDS ON DYNAMO FOR SPECIFIC MARKET WEB SERVERS
Art Technology Group, which claimed back in May to have the first application development environment to be written in Java, has expanded that Dynamo technology into three turnkey Web development and deployment packages Ad Station, Profile Station and Retail Station, all written in Java. A new version of the Dynamo Developer's Kit is at the center of each application, and the Boston, Massachusetts company says the next stage is to support JavaSoft Inc's Servlet API, with details expected in the next few weeks.
The Retail Station is an electronic retail management application to set up storefronts, with electronic shopping carts and the like, and will support the secure electronic transaction (SET) standard once it's finalized. Dynamo Profile Station is for collecting and analyzing Web site user information, with a published API to customize and extend the application, and Dynamo Ad Station combines ad targeting, scheduling, session tracking and Web user profiling, and requires the Profile Station to work. Ad Station can be enhanced with something called Ad Transceiver, which enables the delivery of adverts from servers connected to any Web server running Ad Transceiver.
Version 1.0 of Ad Station and Profile Station will be out in 30 days, while Retail Station won't be generally available until February 1997. All three are up on Solaris 2.4/2.5 and Windows NT 3.51 and include a Dynamo Developer's Kit license. Dynamo Ad Station and Retail Station will cost from $50,000, with Ad Transceiver costing an extra $5,000. Dynamo Profile Station will start at $15,000, and there will be a 90-day introductory offer bundling Ad and Profile Station, starting at $50,000. www.atg.com
DIBA INCLUDES MPC860 AS A TARGET CHIP, OPENS IN EUROPE
Diba Inc, the company formed by Oracle Corp refugees to enable manufacturers to put your electrical appliances on the Internet, so you can read your mail while you make the toast, has adopted Motorola Inc's MPC860 as the first processor for its Diba Application Foundation software environment.
It has also won the Panasonic arm of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd and Proxima Inc - for its technologies: the two want to use Diba's designs as the basis for new families of Internet Information Appliances.
Meantime, Diba has poached Nigel Seed, the managing director of Silicon Graphics Inc's UK and Ireland operations to run its newly-established European office in Reading, just west of London. Panasonic plans a family of Internet telephones and Proxima, a line of Internet-enabled multimedia projectors and all will be revealed this week at Comdex. And Samsung Electronics Co, which has adopted the Diba design, plans to use the MPC860 family to power information appliances and televisions. Its MPC860-based 27" Internet television - it was going to have been 29" - will be available in South Korea this year and elsewhere in 1997.
NATSEMI CREATES ODIN WEB TV REFERENCE CHIP SET
National Semiconductor has spent 15 years trying to create a hit microprocessor, and reckons it may finally have struck paydirt with its NS486SXF embedded version of Intel Corp's 80486, so it's milking the part for all it's worth.
NatSemi's latest initiative is Odin, a reference design for what the company reckons is a superset of Oracle Corp's Network Computer spec, and which it says will hopefully enable companies to build Web browsers that use the television as the display, for less than $200. It is intended specifically to run Java, and as well as the NS486SXF embedded processor, NatSemi's AT/LANtic Ethernet controller, Trident Microsystems Inc's TVG9470 graphics controller for a Super VGA monitor or NTSC television output, and Rockwell International Corp's WaveArtist single-chip audio system for compact-disk quality sound, and its RCV336ACF/Sp 33.6Kbps modem.
It includes optional support for mass storage and other add-ons using PC Cards, infra-red communications and two-dimensional graphics acceleration. The Odin reference design will be available to computer makers and software developers from next quarter. www.natsemi.com
THE PIE MAY BE OK, BUT STAY AWAY FROM THE PIPPIN
Vowing to weave its identity "into every aspect of the restaurant", Apple has chartered the UK's, Mega Bytes International BVI, with setting up a world-wide chain of "cyber-based theme restaurants".
The first site is currently being scouted out in the Los Angeles area and should open in about a year. It will seat about 250 people and feature an eclectic and international menu, some technology toys and Internet thingeys, as well as conference and reception rooms. An Apple spokesperson said the restaurant chain is not expected to have any long-term impact on the company's strategic goals.
W3C TO HEAR ITS MEMBERS' DCOM TO CORBA STORIES
The W3C is holding a DCOM/Corba technology symposium today, Monday, with all members invited. Details were sketchy as we were going to press, but Microsoft claimed it was just a chance for each side to put its story to the other and a chance for Microsoft to put its Active Group message to the W3C for the first time formally.
The company said it was not a standards meeting, just a workshop - a chance to explain why DCOM would "kick the ass" of IIOP as one put it - and how it binds into COM while IIOP doesn't have a standalone story to tell, Microsoft said. That explanation sounds a bit twee to us, but Netscape or the W3C wasn't willing to talk about the meeting.
IBM TRIES TO KEEP FOCUS ON RETAIL, AND POWER E-BUSINESS
With so many heavy-duty IBMers assembled in one place, most of the press were more interested in everything but the e-business initiatives IBM was supposed to be announcing last week in New York, but it did actually have new partnerships with retailers, oil companies and others to talk about, with the aim of boosting business over the Internet and intranets.
The company named 13 new retailers that are joining its Internet shopping mall, World Avenue and PetroConnect is a network-based service IBM announced for the petroleum industry, with digital databases, maps, surveys, well logs, seismic data and other geographical and geological data, for all segments of the industry.
It also announced a service in conjunction with Siemens for electricity companies to sell excess capacity over the Internet and other networks. IBM expects the worldwide information technology industry to grow to $1,200bn from $800bn, in the next four years, with 60% of that growth driven by network computing, it said. www.ibm.com
COREL PLANS VIDEO NC FOR EARLY NEXT YEAR
Corel Corp is coming out with a Video Network Computer in the first quarter of next year, in addition to its PDA that is now due in the second quarter, having slipped a quarter (OR 16).
Corel has chosen Motorola Inc's MPC821 embedded version of the PowerPC and will probably have it manufactured by Triton Corp, a Montreal-based company that currently makes Corel's video-conferencing stuff. The Video NC will ship with a color digital camera, Corel Office for Java software, 16Mb RAM, an internal V34 modem, 10Base-T ethernet connection, and can be expanded to include a floppy or a hard disk via two PCMCIA slots, for "under $1,000," minus a keyboard, monitor and mouse. The company said all the software necessary for the camera is inside the camera itself. The Video NC also has an embedded microphone and speaker. Meantime, Corel's executive director sales and marketing, Alen Bartsch, is leaving at the end of the month after eight years to do a master's degree and set up his own marketing and promotions company.
COMMITTEE ANSWERS ITS CRITICS BY NAMING NAMES
The dissension and confusion over Top Level Domains (TLDs) and global directories (OR 22,23) that the Internet Society (ISOC) had hoped to address with its International Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC) is still apparent in Internet newsgroups, just weeks after the committee was formed.
ISOC President, Don Heath, seemingly weary of the criticism that the ISOC really has no authority over TLDs, that the committee has been set up in a behind-closed-doors fashion and that its formation is simply another delay in a stalled process, says that none of it is true. "Actions" he says, "speak louder than words." The committee has been chartered to establish global registries and up to 150 new TLDs by mid 1997.
One action the IAHC has taken recently is to name its hitherto unknown appointees, of which there is one more than the nine expected. Critics had been complaining that the lack of information on committee members was indicative of the IAHC's secretive procedures. Heath admits "it was a little slow in getting logistics out, but we are on our way". He adds, "we are not a bureaucratic organization, and except for the logistics of how we must operate, there is nothing to prevent us from acting with dispatch."
The question is, can the committee act quickly enough to prevent other parties, such as AlterNic (OR 6) from solving the problem for him? Don Heath will sit as chair. As of now, the IAHC address is: www.iahc.org
HP GOES AFTER NETRA MARKET
Hewlett Packard Co has beefed up its Internet product offerings with a new line of enterprise Internet servers targeted squarely at Sun's Netra market. HP is also juggling a variety of programs and product features in order to keep its NT and Unix, Microsoft and Netscape party going.
Leading the Unix charge is the Domain Enterprise Server product line, which comprises HP's new Domain Business Suite software on a range of HP Unix boxes - from the 715 to the K460 and running in price from $9,500 to $85,000. The Business Suite is made up of OpenView IT/Operations software, Netscape's Suite Spot and HP OpenMail for $4,000. HP says it will add Netscape Communicator, HP Praesidium plug-in capability, Oracle's WebServer, a Java JIT compiler and high-availability services to the product line. Both products are available now.
On the NT side, HP NetServer Web Master is billed as a $10,000 turnkey solution with a "Microsoft personality" that, HP promises can put customers on the Net in less than an hour. It's an HP NetServer E30 166MHz Intel Pentium box running NT, Internet Information Server, Front Page, with a Cisco Inc Access Pro router, along with some HP-developed glue to make it all work together. It ships January 1. Along with the usual service and support programs, HP is launching a HP Domain Partner Program, for software developers porting across NT and Unix environments. Marketing programs with Microsoft and Netscape have also been announced.
TRITEAL SERVES JAVA INTERFACE TO NC VENDORS
Common Desktop Environment shop TriTeal Corp's created a Java interface it's calling SoftNC and is licensing it to a bunch of companies building thin client Network Computers, including Fujitsu Ltd, Network Computing Devices Inc, Japan Computer Corp and Wyse Technology Inc.
We're not sure what Fujitsu wants with it, and it wouldn't get back in time to tell us, though the other companies are known in the terminal business, where most vendors are re-modeling themselves as NC manufacturers.
TriTeal says SoftNC will run wherever a Java virtual runs and can run in less than 1.5Mb memory while supporting login, window, session and style management capabilities. TriTeal likens SoftNC to JavaSoft's HotJava Views NC user environment, though it currently lacks an integrated browser function which the JavaSoft product includes.
The OEM-only product also does not yet include an integrated version of NCD's WinCenter Connect software which enables windowing terminals to access multi-user Windows apps running on a server. NCD's software is based upon the eponymous Citrix Systems ICA protocol server software which TriTeal has already incorporated in its CDE-based NTed Unix desktop for accessing Windows applications.
SoftNC is TriTeal's fourth desktop product following the CDE-based Ted, NTed, and the Ted for Windows implementation. NCD is currently supplying Network Stations running its ACTware NC OS to IBM and has indicated it will support Java stuff in a future release.
POLL FINDS JAVA DEVELOPMENT NOT CONFINED TO THE NET
Morgan Stanley analysts were patrolling the floor of a Java Developers Conference in San Francisco recently and polled the attendees for an interesting snapshot of how the nascent Java paradigm is getting along.
Morgan Stanley qualifies its findings by pointing out that there was probably a slightly disproportionate number of Unix and leading edge development shops, but otherwise it was a pretty representative sample. Some 75% said they were developing, or considering developing non-Internet Java applications and 51% said they were already using apps to access relational databases, which is where any money will probably be made early on.
It's not clear of course whether that means Java is being used for everything that moves, or that there are not as many Internet applications being developed as previously thought. Not surprisingly there was a 2:1 vote in favor of Java being an incomplete language, perhaps that should have been 100% as most of its proponents don't pretend that it's the whole enchilada just yet, but maybe they just didn't want to sound too controversial.
As to what else is needed, better tools and libraries were out front, with better security only cited by 15% of those who want enhancements. Browser plug-ins are being eschewed by most developers it seems, with 80% of those questioned not bothering to develop any, but Navigator was the most popular platform for those that were.
Java WorkShop and Symantec Cafe were way out in front of other vendors offerings, though we don't know the significance of Sun's sponsorship of the event, but what most of the developers wanted was debugger improvements. The development platforms were fairly evenly distributed, with Windows 95 narrowly ahead of NT, Solaris and then other Unix, with Macintosh a lowly fifth with just a 7% share. The Java performance overhead was described as "significant" by 56%, "extreme" by 11%, "modest" by 28% and not noticeable by just over 4%.
I-PLANET TO RELEASE FAX SOFTWARE FOR VPNS
i-Planet will roll out its CypherSpace 1.0, an Internet-based Virtual Private Network (VPN) product, Faximilator, which routes faxes via the public telephone network, and its MailSuite 1.0 e-mail software next month.
The software currently only works on the IPS-168 platform, released last August, which is a combined router, firewall, Web server, e-mail server and various other things. At between $5,000 and $6,000, the Sunnyvale, California company reckons it's a far cheaper way of getting started on the Internet than by buying from various hardware and software vendors. i-Planet, formed in January this year by two ex-Sun Microsystems employees David Vereeke and Francis Young, says its CypherSpace 1.0 contains tunneling technology, and can link multiple networks using private LAN addresses without the need for static Internet addresses at the remote site. CypherSpace is supposed to be able to compress data traveling between nodes on an iVPN and encrypt the information with public and private encryption technologies. i-Planet is aiming for small to mid-sized businesses claiming CypherSpace delivers the compressed information across a modem on lower-speed links in the same amount of time as T1 or ISDN lines. Faximilator 1.0 links Fax and Internet through a Web browser and routes individual or broadcast fax requests to other i-Planet Solution IPS-168s on a company's network. MailSuite provides remote e-mail access, manages automatic mailing lists for private discussion groups, and i-Planet claims it reduces costs via automatic distribution of patches and product collateral via e-mail. Faximilator will go for $500, MailSuite 1.0 $600, and CypherSpace $1,000. www.i-planet.com
PEAK SHIPS WEB ANIMATOR
Peak Technologies will ship its Java-based Web page development software, Web Animator by the end of the month for $50. Targeted at the retail market, Web Animator uses a drag and drop interface to let Webmasters convert text or graphics into Java applets that can then bounce around the viewer's screen. It will be sold on Peak's Web site, as well as through retailers like CompUSA.
At Comdex, Peak will also announce that it has licensed Infinop's Lightning Strike Java-delivered compression software. When an image compressed with Lightning Strike is viewed on the Web, the server streams down a 30Kb image decompresser to the client. Subsequent images are then downloaded and decompressed on the fly. Peak will sell Lightning Strike for $50 on its Web site and hopes to announce some bundling deals as well. www.peak-media.com
HOTOFFICE DEBUTS AT COMDEX
Targeting small companies and organizations who want to do groupware without the administration overhead of Lotus Notes, Florida's LinkStar Communications is today announcing its HotOffice service.
For $15 per user per month customers get a "publish to HotOffice" button on their Microsoft Office applications that allows them to publish RSA-encrypted documents on their own part of a HotOffice server via the Web. The documents are published with brief HTML descriptions, which can be searched, using a Verity Inc search engine on the server.
Subscribers will also have access to a variety of services, like chat, packages tracking, or Internet phone calls, according to the company.
tunity to store important corporate documents on outside servers across the less-than-completely-reliable Internet remains to be seen.
LinkStar President Andy Ruppanner says they will because of savings and simplicity. "You don't have to buy a server," he says, "you don't have to have a guy with a pony tail." Hot Office will be available for free beta tests to 25-50 companies and is expected to be in full operation by first quarter 1997. On top of the subscription fees, LinkStar hopes to bring in revenues by charging potential Internet services such as travel agents and booksellers to be part of the HotOffice environment. www.hotoffice.com
PERFECTDATA AIMS TO CLEAN UP WITH PERFECTCASH
PerfectData Corp wants your money. The Simi Valley, California computer cleaning products company has announced the modestly-titled PerfectCash that can be used to purchase goods or services - but initially shares - over the Internet.
The company is effectively establishing a bank, and will be touting for partners at Comdex this week to put up floats of unspecified amounts. It will then set up Web sites to trade stocks. PerfectData will make its money solely from the interest on the deposited money. There will be no charge for either vendors or users says president and CEO Joseph Mazin.
It's got clearance from the Securities & Exchange Commission to trade in just two stocks right now, it's own and those of a chemicals company, Flamemaster Corp. The SEC grants 60 day licenses to trade in the stocks, a so-called No Action letter, and PerfectData obviously after a few more of those to make the scheme viable. PerfectData admits the company is "probably a bit fast out of the gun announcing it," admits Mazin, but it will look to drum up interest at the show, prior to establishing the first trading sites using PerfectCash. www.perfectdata.com
InterNex Information Services Inc has integrated Portland Software's ZipLock encrypted container technology, CyberCash Inc's secure Internet payment system, and Oracle Corp's information management technology with its own Internet connectivity and hosting architecture to form something called PowerCommerce Clearinghouse. The Santa Clara, California-based company says the package provides transaction security, payment, tracking and delivery services for software companies selling software over the Internet. Rates range from $1,000 for a software company selling one product to $5,000 for 100 products. Companies with one product pay a transaction fee of $1.25, and it's $0.75 for the 100-product subscribers. InterNex says it's already signed up CNET, Claris and Metatools and plans to release the package on December 11 at InternetWorld in New York. www.internex.net
IBM Corp has developed a set of components to detect previously unknown viruses that are now of course spread much faster than when we relied only on disks. It uses neural nets to "learn" from the behavior of known viruses. But old habits die hard, and it's gonna take IBM a year to get the technology out as a service and a set of products, the company said last week. www.av.ibm.com
A "well known" group of Swedish hackers is being blamed for vandalizing the Ibero-American Summit Web Page, Reuters reports. The summit, attended by 21 heads of state, had its Website varnished with the pornographic photos and jokes (The words "Housing Forum and Public Development", for example, were changed to "Drinking Forum and Pubic Under development." ) in a style reminiscent of a recent attack on the CIA homepage. www.cumbre.cl
Webtitles, a tool which creates 3D titles, banners and animations on Websites, is now available from Asymetrix Corporation for $20. The tool works with all Asymetrix Web products as well as Powerpoint and other desktop publishing software. www.asymetrix.com.
FreshWater Software has released SiteScope, a Web site monitoring and administration tool that automatically identifies Web site performance problems and alerts administrators as they occur. The Boulder,Colorado-based company claims SiteScope monitors URLs, Web servers, search engine processes, network connections, traffic, and disk space and initiates error-handling by rebooting impaired processes and executing automated recovery scripts. It's ISGI, IRIX, Sun Solaris Unix platforms,and NT compatible, costs $1,300 for Unix and $500 for NT can be downloaded from www.freshtech.com.
KPMG Peat Marwick LLP has released a September survey of 165 human resource and tax professionals who participated in KPMG's Forum '96, a conference about the management of international assignments. Seventy-four percent said the Internet will not lessen the need for expatriate employees but thought the Internet would have a significant impact on the management of expatriate programs within the next two years. Eighty-seven percent said they would step up investments in management technology within the next five years.
Apple Computer Inc has updated its Apple Internet Connection Kit to version 1.2, including Navigator 3.0, Shockwave and Real Audio multimedia plug-ins, Apple Guide help software, Farallon Communications Inc's Look@Me utility, which enables a user to view another user's screen over the Internet, Claris Corp's Emailer Lite, and various communications packages, news readers and viewers: it's priced at $50, with upgrades from the old version for $20. www.apple.com
MAID Plc has detailed the deal it inked with CompuServe Corp earlier this year. The pair will launch a business intelligence service intended to enable CompuServe users to track US industry information in a personalized, automated format. The service, expected to be available next month, is intended to help users to track investments, US company information and news events. MAID will receive a proportion of all advertising and subscription revenues taken in.
In a show of good humor, Apple recently took the opportunity to lampoon Microsoft's "exclusive" Windows CE (formerly WinPad) Comdex pep rally, held on the Sunday before the show, and featuring headliners Bill Gates and the Cirque du Soleil. Apple chose a similar circus theme for its collateral, twisting P.T. Barnum's famous quote into, "There's a sucker born every minute and you're not one of them" and imploring Comdex illuminatae to visit the Newton Pavilion instead.
IBM Corp will demonstrate a PowerPC 603e-based NC reference platform for building network computers at Comdex this week, although Big Blue's newly-created NC division under Bob Dies doesn't expect to ship what it will call Network Center products based upon the design until the end of next summer at the earliest.
IBM Microelectronics will market OEM kits using the design running Microware Systems Corp OS/9 or Sun's JavaOS. Internet division general manager Irving Wladawsky-Berger said the company is already in "heavy discussions with consumer electronics companies" about such deals.
Until the Network Centers debut, IBM will market the PowerPC 403-based Network Station designed by the AS/400 division and built by Network Computing Devices Inc. The Network Station will be demonstrated at Comdex being served by a raft of new Lotus and Java applications. It ships next month with NCD's ACTware system software, 8Mb of RAM but no local disk drive and is expected
IBM'S NC FOCUS
DOT Gossip
Apart from Novell Inc, what are Sun Microsystems Inc's compadres doing with WebNFS? Well, according to Sun, IBM Corp and Sequent Computer Systems Inc have "licensed" WebNFS; they get it through their ONC+ 2.0 licences. The current terminology for Spyglass, Auspex, Apple, Oracle is "adopted." Still all quiet on the Netscape front. The one thing that is certain is that nobody is "paying."
Netscape posted a beta of its Java-enabled Navigator for Windows 3.1 at: http://developer.netscape.com/index.html.
Careful where you point that thing! A set-top box Internet access device, designed by hotshot WebTV Networks and manufactured in the US by Sony and Philips Electronics has been classified as "munitions" by the US government, thereby requiring an export license, the New York Times reports. The boxes employ 128-bit encryption deemed too powerful to fall into the wrong hands.
Netscape, wisely opportunistic, has turned what still looks a very optimistic share price into hard cash by selling 5.6m shares, 2.25m of them new, at $53.75 a share, raising $110m or so net for working capital.
Two weeks ago, Bill Gates was energetically rubbishing Network Computers and all Larry Ellison's works, but a week is an eon in the life of the Internet, and it is now clear that NCs have been giving Gates sleepless nights after all. "We have a number of competitors that are working in concert together there that pose a major challenge to us," he told his shareholders Microsoft's annual meeting, adding that thin clients and their backers presented "perhaps the largest challenge that's faced us in a long, long time."
Taking a page from Netscape's playbook, Sun Microsystems says that there are 100,000 copies of its Java WorkShop development tool out there. It won't say how many have been actually paid for, though.
Progressive Networks Inc has put reference implementation source code of the Real Time Streaming Protocol it developed in conjunction with Netscape Communications Corp up for free download. It's got C code for both the client and server and also pre-compiled versions of Windows 95 and most Unixes. www.realaudio.com
Novell Inc has postponed its developers conference next month until March next year.
Lotus is re-writing its SmartSuite PC product - WordPro, 1-2-3 and the like, as Java components, according to president Jeff Papows. He added that around half - 100 - of the company's developers are now writing exclusively in Java. The company is also preparing a bunch of Domino-based e-commerce applications for release first thing next year.
HotMail claims to have doubled its subscribers in a month to 500,000, adding some 10,000 each day. The free Web-based e-mail, launched in July (OR 20). www.hotmail.com
AmeriTrade Holding Corp has set up eBroker on the Web, whereby after an initial deposit of $10,000 you can trade in any listed US stock or foreign stock on US exchanges for $12 per trade up to any number of shares, through Navigator, Internet Explorer, AOL or CompuServe front ends. www.ebroker.com
Microsoft Corp says its long-term goal is to seek partnerships to help it deliver a range of Internet services - anything from banking to news, over the next 10 years. Chairman and CEO Bill Gates said the company would invest heavily to achieve this aim - "It will take a huge investment, absolutely gigantic, but money is not in short supply," he said airily - "we've got $7bn in the bank."
Microsoft has published a draft of its DCOM 1.0 Object Model Protocol spec through the IETF's Network Working Group, available at: ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-brown-dcom-v1-spec-01.txt
America Online Inc's first quarter loss of $353.7m (OR 24) is greater than all the profits it has ever reported, the Washington Post points out.
As we went to press most vendors had either posted patches or declared their systems immune to the so-called "Ping of Death" flaw discovered in TCP/IP. It was found that by sending a large IP packet of 65536 bytes - as opposed to the default 64 bytes - remote Unix, Microsoft and Novell operating systems and hardware could be crashed or forced to reboot. The Linux community got a patch out within four hours of being notified of the problem. www.sophist.demon.co.uk/ping/.
Network Solutions apparently did further damage to its reputation last week when it deleted GE Information Services' domain name, geis.com from its InterNIC database because of a mix-up as to whether or not it had paid its $100 registration fee, according to IDG's Network World Fusion. GE users were cut off for about 24 hours. The EDI and X.400 concern does about $700m in revenues and therefore is not one to upset. Separately, the Burton Group had its domain pulled, without notification after it mistakenly thought Burton's registration fee had not been paid. After some frantic calls, www.tbg.com was back on the Web within a day
Microsoft Corp is splitting its shares two-for-one on November 22.
MasterCard International is to buy a majority stake in Mondex International Ltd, the Financial Times believes. The deal is expected to give MasterCard 51% of Mondex. Unlike the rival Visa International payment system, Mondex does not leave up any audit trail. www.mondex.com
Santa Cruz Operation Inc has added DEC, Unix, AIX and SunOS 4.0 support to its VisionFS Unix-to-Windows file and print sharing-over-the-Internet-software, which uses the Common Interface File System (CIFS) client technology that's embedded in Windows NT 4.0. But SCO also wants it to be known that it has extended CIFS to works on all Windows platforms - 3.x, 95 and NT 3.51 and 4.0, and not just NT, as it has now become apparent that NT 4.0 represents a dot on its marketplace right now. SCO has put a site up at www.cifs.com where users can download demos of VisionFS.
A week after Californians passed Proposition 215 legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, the Berkeley Medical Cannabis Growers and Buyers Club is providing an Internet order form and home delivery at www.medicalmarijuana.org
Citing the recent Pierre Salinger TWA flight 800 fiasco before a San Francisco audience, Walter Cronkite worried that the Internet may present a "frightful danger" to society because of its capacity for disseminating fraudulent information.
JavaSoft says it's still a little bit too early to be talking about Java in the Open Group.
IBM Corp's formation of a new Network Computer Division under Bob Dies last week is an indication that the company has decided it has missed so many buses of late. Its mission is to coordinate network computing efforts throughout the company and help set industry standards in the area. IBM already has an Internet division and networking division, but this one will concentrate on the hardware. It will likely mean cannibalizing some sales at the Personal Computer Co - hardly any great hardship IBM-watchers observe, since the business at best does little better than break even. Although Dies, the former general manager of the AS/400 business is stepping from a $14bn business to one that hasn't yet turned over a cent, there'll be a fair amount of synergy early on, with the company's first network computer having been developed by the AS/400 division, and IBM initially targeting its millions of green screen users. He will report to senior VP Robert Stephenson and be replaced by William Zeitler, currently VP software development for IBM Asia/Pacific, but also a former VP marketing at the AS/400 division. There are echoes here of IBM's formation of the Personal Computer Co when it attempted to create PC standards and drive the industry forward. It did the former, but failed to capitalize and others made a lot of money at IBM's expense achieving the latter. The formation of the new division will cast renewed doubt on the maligned PC Co, which has variously been expected to be merged with the RS/6000 business, sold off, or have it's work farmed out to OEMs including Acer Inc, which now looks more likely than ever.
ordinating the company's NC initiatives behind the scenes for sometime. All of IBM's hardware and software NC technologies are being poured into the new NC division which supposedly has 300 to 400 staff spread around several locations including Rochester, Austin and Lotus operations centered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The 1997 Network Centers will be offered in several configurations from low-end devices supporting AS/400 and mainframe sessions, to those with some groupware and browsing functions and others with more expandability and peripheral options. In addition IBM will create those long-promised NCs for vertical application markets, such as kiosks, reservation and check-in systems.
The NC division will offer packaged solutions, including client and server hardware and software, though much of the server-side software that'll push Java and other applications down to clients is still on the bench. Wladawsky-Berger said Lotus will launch that kind of stuff early next year. It maybe at LotusSphere in January. www.ibm.com
TREACHEROUS TIMES FOR AMERICA ONLINE
America Online Inc celebrated its passing the 7 million subscriber mark and laid off 300 employees last week, including about 60 from its Berkeley GNN subsidiary.
America Online says its move into the $20/all you can surf space made the GNN service, which was doing good business both as a search engine and with its Internet in a Box product, redundant. AOL took over GNN from previous owners, O'Reilly and Associates in May 1995, paying $11m.
AOL downplayed the layoffs, saying that the company plans to hire another 1,000-1,500 employees between now and June. It also downplayed the fact that Fidelity Funds had cut its investment in AOL by 50%, or about 5 million shares, saying "this is not unusual - they're still one of our largest shareholders." The transaction apparently took place in the summer and was not linked to AOL's recent restructuring.
Meantime, Reuter reports that Prodigy was recently sued because one of its customers claimed she contracted the AIDS virus from a Prodigy employee she met through the service. Prodigy was found not liable last Wednesday. Prodigy plans to roll out Mac and Win 3.1 versions of its Prodigy Internet 1.1 client software this week. www.aol.com www.prodigy.com
"WORLD'S FIRST ISP" USING APPLIEDTHEORY
NyserNet, a not-for-profit company that can lay justifiable claims to being the world's first Internet Service Provider, has spun out an affiliate company, AppliedTheory Communications Inc, only this time it's for-profit. AppliedTheory plans to make money by building corporate intranets, linking legacy back-ends with Web front-ends, with two product lines, AppliedWeb Management Services and AppliedIntraneting, using the AppliedAccess network, backbone, previously the NyserNet network, which in turn is linked to Sprint's worldwide 155Mbps SprintLink network.
NyserNet was formed in 1985 by representatives of 15 major New York state universities, institutions and corporations including IBM, Kodak and General Electric, and built a 56Kbps network between them, leading to T1 speeds by 1988. NyserNet claims to have connected IBM, Kodak and GE to the Internet in 1987. It also co-developed the SNMP protocol the following year. PSINet was spun out of NyserNet in 1989 and NyserNet contracted the running of the network out to PSINet. Demands became too great, however, with member institutions demanding T3 speeds in 1994 - and NyserNet looked to bids from telecommunications companies to supply network services, and signed with Nynex, Frontier and Sprint.
SUNRIVER POSTPONES TRADEWAVE'S IPO
SunRiver Corp, Austin now plans to delay the initial public offering of its TradeWave Corp unit until 1997. It was to have been in September, but the company may also consider interim financing alternatives because of what it described as softness in the market for Internet-related stocks. "We are in active negotiations to secure a private placement to fund TradeWave's current capital needs, thereby enabling us to pursue an initial public offering of TradeWave in 1997," acting president and CEO Len Mackenzie said. TradeWave offers secure Web access and Virtual Private Networks.
Of course there was no mention of that when the company reported its third quarter figures late last week. The numbers made the current state of TradeWave all too apparent. The network computer arm, Boundless Technologies Inc, nee SunRiver Data Systems, turned in an operating profit of $1.4m, only to be offset by TradeWave's $1.6m operating loss. Third quarter revenues were up 27% at $29.7m. Nine month net losses were $1.5m, against $2.8m profits previously, on revenues that were up 49% at $101.6m.
WYSE LAUNCHES NCS
Forget the plethora of Network Computer announcements at Comdex next week, Wyse Technology Inc reckons it's got the thing covered. Having sold 20,000 of its Winterm not-quite-so-dumb Windows terminals since their launch last Comdex, the company has launched the Winterm 4000 series of enhanced Network Computers. Fully compliant with the Network Computer Reference Profile, the 4000 series run Java applets as well as accessing Windows applications. They run Javasoft Inc's JavaOS operating system and use Digital Equipment Corp's StrongARM RISC chip. Wyse also has a new modular version of the Winterm 2000SE series offering enhanced video due to flat-panel active-matrix liquid crystal display. An agreement just signed with Cruise Technologies Inc will herald a wireless, battery-powered Winterm for mobile thin clients, and the forthcoming Winterm, code-named Elite, will enable access to HTML Internet or intranet data without the need to go through a Windows NT server. First shipments are due early next year. Pricing will be announced at Comdex.
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