Electronic agents that are able to negotiate with each other look set to become a feature of the Web as Personal Digital Assistant specialist General Magic Inc breaks up its software and moves into the World Wide Web Consortium. Apple Computer Inc spin-off General Magic, the six-year-old software company with $100m in the bank yet little of the glory it hoped to have by now, is reorganizing to catch the Internet wave. Early this year, General Magic made its first move into outward implementations of its Personal Digital Assistant software with a cumbersome Windows version. At the time it said outward versions were not primarily revenue generators, but ways of stirring up flagging interest in Personal Digital Assistants. When that didn’t happen, General Magic had to put its Personal Digital Assistant development on the back-burner.

Surrogates

The advantages General Magic has are that it has its own script- based agent software – agents being the secure electronic surrogates that will one day travel from one Web site to the next searching for and monitoring information, negotiating with the sites on the user’s behalf, and automating transactions. To get to that point, General Magic is unbundling its Magic Cap and Telescript products so that it can build separate brand identities and pursue separate market segments. It’s abandoning its sole reliance on up-front licensing fees and annuity streams from exclusive partners to strike out for OEM customers, value-added resellers, independent software vendors and integrators, in addition to the big shots it has attracted over the years, and will eventually go direct to corporates, Web site operators and service providers. And it is obviously also embracing Web standards. The company also announced its entry to the international World Wide Web Consortium with the goal of developing standards for intelligent agent technologies. The 125- member Web Consortium exists to develop common protocols and reference code for the evolution of the Web (details can be found at www.w3.org). General Magic calls Tabriz – and the need for Internet agents in general – the third strategic component of a new class of distributed application, the others being Navigator or Explorer, and Java or ActiveX. Right now, it says, the Web is a large disorganized mass of information with only poor tools to collect, compile and use its data. It’s also passive and has to be driven by the on-line user. Web performance and traffic is unpredictable. Sites can be overwhelmed at peak periods, idle at others. Web sites don’t know preferences and previous actions and they don’t learn. Passivity is particularly bad because buyers and sellers can’t interact in real time. And Tabriz is intended to fix all that.

It’s said to be able to go multiple places, hide complexity, enable interaction, decouple the user from the task, store instructions, state and data while providing a secure environment that includes two-way authentication, access control and resource allocation. Essentially, the Tabriz agent manages the Web-based processes while the Java applet manages the user experience. It’s intended to eliminate the boundaries between physically co- resident but logically distributed information, geographically dispersed data and disparate enterprise legacy systems. It can draw content from non-Telescripted sites. General Magic’s new Active Internet Products Division has taken its Telescript technology, an object-oriented server-based communications language, and turn ed it into a product line called Tabriz. It says it can transform passive networks into active secure and persistent business vehicles with its new Tabriz AgentWare and Agent Tools. AgentWare is meant to execute and manage agent- based applications; Agent Tools to create agent-based applications that are deployed at Tabriz Web sites. In its first iteration, AgentWare will be Java-enabled. ActiveX approaches some way down the road. They are intended for Intranets and the Internet at large. The stuff ships under Unix in two weeks and under NT this autumn for a one-time fee of $5,000 per server. However, following a popular Internet tradition, it will be free for the first 90 days with free support for 30 days to get independent software vendors to sit up and take notice. Tabriz is also expected to sign up some partners, beginning with Tandem Computers Inc this week. In Tabriz’s first phase, it has to incorporate database and search engine support. General Magic then hopes to branch out into standard payment schema and transaction-based services along with international distribution. Meanwhile, the company’s has a new Communications Products Division that’s responsible for the engaging Magic Cap software, but which also has new Presto!Links and Presto!Mail products under its wing. They provide Magic Cap-based handheld communicators such as Sony Corp’s Magic Link and Motorola Inc’s Envoy Personal Digital Assistants with Web access, Internet electronic mail and corporate Intranet communications.

C-based SoftModem

Presto!Links is a full-featured Web browser; Presto!Mail is consonant with the array of open standards protocols like Point- to-Point Protocol, POP3 and SMTP. The two together cost $50 and derive from technology imported from Active Paper Inc. Otherwise, it has taken Magic Cap and come up with Magic Cap for Windows – that’s Magic Cap plus Windows-specific features – hoping to stir interest in Personal Digital Assistants. The first commercial version isn’t due until later this year. The unit is also responsible for General Magic’s new C-based SoftModem software, which requires no special signal processor and can share a single CPU with client applications. It will be offered OEM for R-series, Pentium MMX and Philip Electronics NV’s Personal Digital Assistant chips as well as others. During its run, General Magic, which once had Apple’s hyperlink wizard on board, has picked up a quite brilliant collection of 16 partners, including Sony, AT&T Corp, Motorola Inc, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, Fujitsu Ltd, Toshiba Corp, France Telecom, Philips, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Sanyo Electric Corp, Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd, Northern Telecom Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, Cable & Wireless Plc and Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV..pl 73.

By Morgan Holt