Flushed with cash after selling the rights of its Internet connectivity software to General Magic Inc for $2m (CI No 2,952), boosted by a major round of private funding, Active Paper Inc has acquired another start-up, Intraverse Inc, and re-named itself Activerse Inc. Once billed as the only profitable company in the Personal Digital Assistant market, three year old Active Paper, which has 15 staff and is based in Austin, Texas, offloaded its Presto!Mail and Presto!Links software onto General Magic back in April, to be used for connecting the hand-held computers up to the Internet. Active was formed in 1993 by key members of Evolutionary Technologies Inc, also of Austin. With nothing to do, it looked around and lighted upon an even smaller company, Intraverse, formed by four breakaway members of the ParcPlace- Digitalk Inc VisualWave development team. VisualWave was launched by ParcPlace at the end of last year (CI No 2,807), billed as an object-based Web application development tool. The team, Jim Dutton, Kelly Looney, Steve Sigler and Gordon Mohr, all worked out of Parcplace-Digitalk’s Austin-based Internet Products and Services division, and formed Intraverse to build a family of products for constructing and supporting next-generation Web sites. The new Activerse plans collaborative applications written in Java for building visual, object-based, customizable places on the Web, and insists on using the metaphor of place instead of the usual page. Websites will become work places, it says, with meeting rooms and private offices, and will allow people to talk, collaborate on documents, share tools, documents and applications, and will allow visitor to know at a glance where to find co-workers. It promises to reveal more of its new product line by the end of the year.
