CrystalGate Corp hopes to make its innovative Live Assistance collaborative multicast software generally available within 60 days. Crystalgate founder and chief technologist Larry Brader, co-inventor of some of Windows 98’s threaded architecture is targeting customer service and computer-telephony integration markets with the Java software which runs on an HTTP servers. Live Assistance is claimed to support many types of distributed communications mechanisms and formats, unlike traditional ‘push’ technologies, and provides an online threaded space that’s ideal, Brader says, as an online call and customer management center for ISPs. He claims it’s already possible to replace a PBX with a Sun E450 or an NT server running Live Assistance. Brader claims Live Assistance is at least 18 months ahead of the work Sun and IBM are doing on their own threaded Java environments termed Jspaces and Tspace respectively which use the concept of tuples, collections of data items referenced by name, which are place in and retrieved from a temporary shared memory space. They’re intended to provide a simple and lightweight infrastructure for networked Java applications. Brader describes Live Assistance’s as a holographic system and dismisses conventional ‘push’ technology companies such as Marimba Inc as dressing up 1980s technologies in Java. Live Assistance uses a routing mechanism to send an inquiry to the appropriate service agent. The user needs only a Java-enabled browser and the agent can scroll down the user’s screen, fill in HTML forms remotely, highlight items on the user’s screen and includes a text chat area so the customer and agent can communicate. Brader’s currently seeking a CEO plus several million dollars funding to carry the six employee company beyond the $1.5m already committed by its founders. Brader claims to have 35 customers for a beta version of Live Assistance. He claims CrystalGate is being courted by three companies seeking to acquire Live Assistance. Brader claims Sun, Linkon and Netsco as partners. It previously demonstrated the technology within an application it called SoftSwitch for call center automation. SoftSwitch was designed for use by small to medium-size companies that can’t afford to deploy an ACD or PBX system in their sales or service organization.
