By William Fellows
Mirror Worlds Technologies Inc will contribute a Solaris version of its LifeStream information management ‘dashboard’ to today’s festivities at the Sun Microsystems Inc Enterprise Computing Forum in New York. In addition we expect Mirror Worlds to contribute a cut of its software designed for use with Sun’s second generation JavaStation which will be announced today as the SunRay Enterprise Appliance. Unlike its ill-fated predecessor, this version is bound to be festooned with software to make the thin client model attractive to users.
The Mirror Worlds LifeStream Office 1.4 software, which now runs on Solaris in addition to Windows NT servers and multiple client types, is used to organize documents, email, calendars, multimedia, web bookmarks and news feeds in visual streams or collections of information which is chronologically ordered, indexed and searchable. The company claims it enables users to find information right across an organization and eliminates the need to juggle between multiple programs to open files or among folder hierarchies to find it. LifeStream shipped in June.
TopSight Office, a Java server based on LifeStream that supplies an interface, written in Dynamic HTML, will be actively marketed next quarter. The company has dropped plans for a standalone desktop client claiming that its value proposition is further up the stack. Like Sun it believes that the network is the computer. It is also currently working on some high-level storage APIs for Sun’s Jini Java-based naming a lookup network service.
The 20-person New Haven, Connecticut 1997 start-up had originally planned to get its ‘dashboard’ software embedded into network devices but says it realized the important thing is to get its own product in front of customers and partners, not someone else’s name. The company raised a second tranche of private funding in January and says it will be looking for additional capital in six to nine months. It may do a Linux port, it says.
