US telecoms equipment manufacturer Lucent Technologies is to market the Prism 2.0 web content conversion server from Spyglass Inc throughout its global sales organization, it announced yesterday. Naperville, Illinois-based Spyglass is best known for having provided the underlying browser technology for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer product two years ago, but since then has devoted its time to developing content conversion server technology for data-enabled mobile devices. The managing director of the company’s European operations, David Harris-Evans, says the number of such devices sold worldwide is tipped by major players in cellular telephony to reach anywhere from 200 million to 600 million units per annum within five years. Harris-Evans said Lucent will now be offering Prism on all its wireless applications platforms in the expectation of this boom in data-enabled handheld devices linking up with the web. He explained that the main advantage of Prism is its ability to rescale images and reduce their resolution in order to deliver them within the constraints of such devices’ memories. ‘A JPEG image with 100% resolution would typically occupy some 50k of memory on a PC, but Prism can take the resolution down to 25% and bring it down to around 5k, which with a smaller screen doesn’t make any difference.’
