What About PointCast?

OK, show of hands. Who remembers PointCast?

Remember that application/screensaver that pulled frequently updated news and image feeds across the Internet from websites and then displayed them on your desktop? From 1995-1999 or so, people loved it. Wired loved it (remember their cover story about how “push,” the technology used by PointCast, was going to kill the web browser?). Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. reportedly almost loved it to the tune of $450 million.

Do you remember, too, how PointCast was one of the spectacular crashes before the dot-com bust?

When you look at the coming content options for wireless digital picture frames — content channels, updated over the Internet, with news and images — it makes me think about PointCast and wonder if digital picture frame content companies are headed for the same fate.

I think they’re not. I think many lessons have been learned from what happened to PointCast. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start from the beginning.

PointCast, for those that don’t remember or weren’t there, was crowned the next big thing very early in its life. Within two years of its launch, 1.5 million people were getting content delivered right to their desktops without the need to browse the web. They loved that all that information was aggregated into a single interface for easy browsing. Venture capitalists loved the idea so much they sank $50 million into the company.

But as PointCast grew, it became overwhelmed by the flaws in its approach:

• It was a bandwidth hog back in the days when almost everyone was connecting to the web over dial-up modems.
• To make bandwidth matters worse, the hogging clogged corporate networks, causing corporations to ban PointCast, cutting off a big potential market.
• The application was generally a bit slow.
• The content feeds took up a lot of disk space (when I uninstalled PointCast, it was using hundreds of megabytes of disk space – and my hard drive only held about 1 GB).
• It used a proprietary technology to deliver its content.

With those problems weighing against it, along with some business/management issues, the company was eventually folded into other businesses.

So PointCast and wireless digital picture frame content companies seem to have a lot in common, at least at first glance. They both use the Internet to deliver text and image content to users who subscribe to various channels.

But, as I said, I don’t think that wireless frame content companies are heading towards PointCast’s fate. I think this space has learned from PointCast’s mistakes.

Here’s why:

• They leverage the web. Digital picture frame content is built on top of open, widely used, and lightweight web standards like RSS. And the very success of the Internet and the attendant decline of closed web systems like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy has showed that the open Internet wins out.
• They use popular tools. Rather than requiring proprietary technology, content will be delivered to wireless digital picture frames using RSS, the extremely widely used syndication technology. Using RSS will help frame content companies derive the benefits of the work done by developers around the world.
• They’re lightweight. RSS and the content delivered over it is lightweight and doesn’t clog networks.
• The timing is right. Even if PointCast’s execution wasn’t perfect, it’s vision was solid. It just came 5-10 years too early. Now that there’s much more broadband in the US and bandwidth is relatively plentiful, the slowness that plagued PointCast won’t trouble wireless frame content companies.

Clearly the industry has learned well from PointCast’s mistakes. With that knowledge, wireless digital picture frames may be transformed from image displays to true information appliances for home and business.

Time will tell, of course, if the market bears out this new, open, Net-centric vision, but if it does, PointCast’s legacy will be a little brighter than the slightly tarnished one it carries now.

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