Push pioneer PointCast Inc has duly launched the beta of version 2.0 of its desktop delivery software. And in a move almost certainly to prepare the five year-old company for a flotation, company founder and chief executive Chris Hassett has moved upstairs to become chairman, and the company has recruited a headhunter to find an absolutely world-class replacement, as Hassett put it. He wouldn’t be drawn on talks of an offering, or the general state of the company at the moment, but did say that it was looking for a CEO with a lot of operational experience and probably in a very short amount of time. And after selling its I- Server offering for $1,000 for seven months, the company is giving the technology away for free, and splitting it out into two separate tools, PointCast Caching Manager and Corporate Broadcast Manager, as well as introducing a third tool, PointCast Administrator. The company’s revenue model is still advertising- based said Hassett: We don’t really make money from push technology, he added. Version 2.0 of the PointCast client comes in a native 32-bit format, optimized for Windows 95 and NT, it has improved memory management, takes up less bandwidth and is faster to download, according to the company. It also has a more flexible interface, as features such as the news ticker can be split out and run separately. PointCast said it separated out the Caching Manager and Broadcast Manager products in response to demand from companies that managed their content out side the IT department. Broadcast Manager connects to a web server and enables companies to broadcast internal news and information from legacy systems, Notes and other corporate sources. The Caching Manager reduces the amount of traffic coming through a firewall at any one time. The NT beta will be out in the summer, with HP- UX and Solaris version going into testing later on this year. PointCast Administrator enables IT managers to optimize the network, filter up to five channels and five advertisers from desktops and control the frequency of updates to channels. The company is also planning an Added Control (AC) client, which it will charge for on a client usage basis, which will offer the ability to eliminate all advertising from channels, and will beta in late summer. Finally, the Santa Clara company has begun beta testing PointCast Studio, a development tool for channel content providers on its so-called super-channel, Connections, to create customized screens and animated promotions, like PointCast itself has been doing. Connections is free to any company to set up a PointCast channel and make it available on their website. It gets underway today, and PointCast says Connections is the first implementation of Microsoft Corp’s Channel Definition Format (CDF) push standard that it submitted to the W3C for consideration.
