More twists in the ongoing saga of Verity Inc’s purchase of the Keyview file viewing and filtering technology from FTP Software Inc (CI No 3,170). Four months before Verity’s abandonment of Inso Corp’s QuickView technology and the acquisition of FTP’s Keyview software, Acton, Massachusetts-based Softscape Inc made a similar move. According to the company’s vice president of marketing and sales, David Watkins, previously director of product management at Inso, Softscape decided to act because it didn’t want to compete directly with its supplier and was worried that Inso was eyeing the company’s ideas. Softscape now uses technology provided by Verity and rivals in the information retrieval market, Personal Library Software Inc. Softscape, a seven man start up formed in 1995, specializes in information management products with personal computer-based tools for Windows 95 and NT. Its latest product, TurboFind, was launched in April in co-operation with Alpha Software, a division of SoftQuad International Inc. The product is a search utility for finding files, web pages and electronic mail on a personal computer’s hard drive, a local area network and the internet without the original applications or knowledge of file names. Softscape’s other major product is DiffXChange, a file exchange application for transferring files across the internet, intranet, local area network and wide area network. The company is currently beta testing its document library server, DocServer, and is also developing PolicyManager, which it describes as a policy procedure management system.
