A start-up founded by one of the architects of the Microsoft Network (MSN) will today begin shipping its first product, an internet acceleration tool. The company, Web3000 Inc, which is based about a mile and half from the Microsoft Corp campus in Redmond, Washington, will today launch NetSonic, which it claims works in a different way to all the other accelerators – there are not actually that many out yet – and can reduce internet traffic by up to 80 percent. It has a proprietary cache, separate from the browser’s cache – it works with any browser – which caches a copy of the page from the last time a user visited it, and when they return checks to see if the page has been updated. If it has, it advises the user to reload the page and only requests things from the site that would probably change. For instance, things like logos, which change rarely, are not updated. Director of marketing for the company, Scott Barton says that the product employs a different approach from all other internet accelerators out there which he says do one of two things: they either pre-fetch web pages and store them in cache for displaying later, but that means that pages are old, or they cache all the links from a page in anticipation of a user visiting them. That makes the process of following links faster, but greatly increases the level of network traffic. Barton also points out that unlike other tools, NetSonic is implemented at the Winsock later, rather than as a proxy, which would involve running a separate program, with the resulting increased I/O for the operating system switching between programs. Barton claims that as it’s in the Winsock layer, there is also no need for browser re-configuration. Barton says that users could have multiple browsers running that could all share the same NetSonic proprietary cache. Obviously if NetSonic is running and is then terminated, the browser would not be able to access the NetSonic cache and would have to re-build its own, but that’s not a model of use Web3000 expects. Web3000 was founded about 18 months ago by Gene Kavner, who was one of the architects of MSN, back in its proprietary days and spent seven years at Microsoft before leaving to establish this company. It is funded by the founders at present, but Barton says it would be interested in venture capital, naturally enough. The company is to use two distribution methods. It is to use the internet through download sites, links from CNet and its own sites, as well as OEM relationships with companies that make ‘internet peripherals’. Its first deal, with Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc, which will ship version of NetSonic with its 20th anniversary signature series 56Kbps Speakerphone modem, which started shipping recently. Barton hopes to expand on that deal with Hayes across the rest of its modem products, as well as get others. Version 1.0, which ships today will be free, but a forthcoming deluxe version will be about $30, and while Barton was reluctant to detail the features, he said it will have more choice of acceleration methods and will automatically reload pages, rather than prompting the users to do it. That should ship in May, he said. This version has been in beta with 12,000 users in 90 countries for the past three months, said Barton.
