To newspaper people, modems and mailrooms may seem to have little in common. But our new competitors view it differently. "[Microsoft] sees desktop PCs as a delivery thing, like your trucks," said David Zweig, publisher of Internet-based Salon magazine. "They're going after your movie listings, personals, classifieds and young readers...They play to win, and they usually do."
A brief sampling of some of the new Internet-delivery technologies showcased at NEXPO and Connections'96:
Freeloader. One day when bandwidth is infinitely fast and cheap, mass audiences will find accessing information on the Web easy. But not now.
"Freeloader focuses on the present day," said Frank Babbitt, vice president of sales and marketing for Washington, D.C.-based Freeloader Inc., noting that a recent survey of Web users found that more than 70 percent complained about the time it takes to load pages. "Not everybody's going to have a cable modem."
Dubbed a "Web VCR," Freeloader's free software (http://www.freeloader.com) automatically downloads Web pages from selected sites so they can be read later at the user's convenience. Supported by advertising, Freeloader can serve publishers as a promotional tool that brings people back to their sites, Babbitt argued.
PointCast. Francis G. Blot, vice president of business development for PointCast of Cupertino, Calif., goes so far as to call its Internet screen-saver software a new medium that blurs the lines between online publishing and broadcasting.
Another free program available on the Internet (http://www.pointcast.com), Pointcast automatically downloads user-selected news and advertising, and displays it when the user's PC becomes idle.
Like Freeloader, PointCast remains advertiser-supported and boasts promotional appeal for publishers--Both The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times have entered agreements to provide regional content for the service.
Java. Perhaps the greatest frustration for traditional newspaper designers confronting the Web has been the limitations of HTML, which lacks such basics as columns, fonts and positioning. Such features become available with the introduction of Java and similar Web-programming languages, but the complexity of writing software "scripts" can put their use out of reach for nonprogrammers.
Accordingly, a variety of companies are scrambling to make the task of adding such scripted elements easier. Texture, a "virtual layout" program being developed by FutureTense Inc. of Andover, Mass., uses a familiar, Quark-like interface to allow Web designers to place columns of text and add such features as zooming and scrolling windows, rotating ads and multi-column displays--all without writing a line of Java script. Denver's Quark Inc. has a new multimedia-authoring tool called QuarkImmedia that provides Java-like interactivity on the Internet through a Netscape plug-in. Multimedia content developed with QuarkImmedia can also be incorporated into pages authored in the upcoming release of Quark Publishing System 2.0, whose database will manage media objects of all types.
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