By Phil Jones
A six-year-old refugee from the British educational software market has reinvented itself as a developer of thin-client browser and email technology, and last week secured first-round funding of 5m pounds ($8.07m) to fuel further development and a scaled-up marketing effort. The company is too modest to say so, but it could prove an ideal new partner for Symbian Ltd, now that the London company’s its former UK micro-browser partner, STNC Ltd, has been snapped up by Microsoft Corp.
Cambridge-based ANT Ltd (pronounced like the insect) started life in 1993 developing educational software for the Acorn micro-computer. Once the UK education market switched to IBM standard PCs, the company needed a new market and about two years ago plumped for the emerging thin-client and digital appliance software space. Although ANT is still far from being a household name, it has already notched some notable successes, including the inclusion of its SimplEmail client on the popular Psion Series V personal digital assistant.
ANT’s other product, the Fresco small-footprint web-browser, has also picked up significant endorsements including a recent OEM win against Spyglass Inc, which will see Fresco providing the browser environment on a range of set-top boxes produced by Sagem, the diversified French electronics group.
According to John Cherry, ANT’s senior VP of sales and marketing, the Sagem win in a technology head-to-head with Spyglass is unlikely to prove a one-off. Fresco has some key differentiators that Cherry says will continue to attract OEMs, including a correcting parser, which enables Fresco to automatically ‘purify’ non-standard HTML code as it is received by the client. This is not a feature of any significance in the memory rich environments where standard browsers such as Navigator may be found, but in the memory constrained world of mobile phones and PDAs, Fresco’s correcting parser will help ensure an undistorted browsing interface.
ANT has also engineered Fresco to make it significantly easier to port to different devices, a potentially key consideration in a far from homogenous market where product lifecycles are measured in months. Cherry claims the separation of the core of the browser from the application layer means Fresco can within a week, or maybe days, be ported to a new platform and be ready to be productized. We think that’s going to be a powerful message, Cherry said. He added that, unlike some competitors, we have no big ego and Fresco’s interface is designed to make it easily customizable for OEMs, right down to the buttons and the other twiddly bits.
With SimplEmail already running against the EPOC operating system of the Psion, it is tempting to speculate that this existing relationship with EPOC’s developer, Symbian, may soon be expanded. Symbian has so far claimed it sees no immediate conflict of interest between itself and Microsoft, even though the US operating system company recently acquired STNC, which has contributed significant features to Symbian’s own micro-browser offering.
However, as the battle for the digital appliance software market intensifies, it is difficult to imagine that Symbian will remain comfortable with sourcing key software from a major competitor. ANT’s Fresco appears to offer a logical alternative, although so far that is not a conversation we have had with Symbian claims Cherry. But, he added, by the end of this month, ANT will be in a position to reveal details of a Fresco licensing agreement with a well known real-time operating system company. If this turns out to be Wind River, and if Fresco does find a home in EPOC, ANT may find it difficult to remain so modest in future.
