Netherlands-based push pioneer, Netpresenter hopes to close the gap between itself and rival Pointcast with the launch of the latest version of its push software. The company says Netpresenter version 3.0 offers an economically viable alternative for newcasting information compared with other push services and in particular, compared with its main market-leading competitor, Pointcast. According to Frank Hoen, Netpresenter’s president and chief executive, Pointcast typically takes up anywhere between 7MB and 20MB of hard drive space per client whereas Netpresenter consumes just 200 Kilobits. And where other push technologies require their own, separate server, Netpresenter can simply be loaded, like any other application, on any file server. As well as eating up less system resources, Hoen argues that the company’s software gives the user greater control of the content too. Services like Pointcast force companies to push their information alongside reams of unsolicited ads, which not only frustrate the recipient but also eat away at valuable bandwidth capacity, he says. Netpresenter, on the other hand, allows the company to create its own news channels and push them, ad-free, over the intranet to its staff or over an extranet to corporate clients. But Netpresenter, unlike Pointcast, doesn’t come free. A starter pack, consisting of one server license plus 20 user licenses costs $1,495. But at that price, the company could pose a serious threat to its rival, whose accumulated losses to date amount to $56m with an operating loss in the last three months (to March) of $6.6m. Already, the company has secured a 2,500 user license of the new version of its software with Barclays Bank in the UK. And other corporate clients of version 2.0 of the technology include The Metropolitan Police in London, Shell, Unilever, Philip Morris and the US Navy. While its user base in the US has been slow to take off, Hoen estimates that the company has quietly amassed around 200 multinational users in Europe. All of which doesn’t bode well for Pointcast, who earlier this month announced its intentions to float on Nasdaq later this year. And this despite the fact that it has already stated that it does not expect significant growth, if any, in revenues for at least the next two quarters. It also expects to incur increased net losses for at least the next two quarters (CI No 3,411).