Geoworks Inc, the smart phone software specialist that provides the GEOS operating system for Nokia Oy’s 9000 Communicator phone- organizer, has licensed Spyglass Inc’s Prism server-based software that converts web pages to a suitable format for mobile devices. Prism runs on a server and takes the HTTP request from a mobile client, whose HTTP header contains browser and device information. The Prism software consults a database for the specification of the smart phone, and converts the HTML pages into a form that can be displayed on the device. This could involve the removal of color, frames, animation, or non standard HTML tags incompatible with the device. Spyglass believes this will lead to web page download times improved by a factor of 2- 10. Spyglass has changed direction from promoting the Mosaic Browser, to chasing the embedded cut-down browser market as announced this year (CI No 3083). It now has the Spyglass browser licensed on 5 devices including 3Com Corp’s Palm Pilot. Both Spyglass and Geoworks are in a potentially lucrative arena as the smart phone market will be worth $2,000m by 2000 according to industry analysts Mobile Insights. Geoworks is licensing Prism to re-distribute it bundled with GEOS, and will pay per copy royalties to Spyglass. Spyglass is currently running a number of technical pilots and expects to launch Prism commercially in October.
