This is a weekly newsletter describing what happened on the Internet market during the past week and how that might affect Ericsson (as interpreted my me, Tapio Anttila, working for LME/DMA in San Francisco as a business developer with a focus on Internet applications and enablers). The report will be published every Monday (except holidays).

Demo 99 (http://www.demo.com) conference in Palm Springs - 800 people attended, over 100 exhibitors (10% from Israel…)

Home Networking hot at Demo 99

This year there was a major focus on home networking. We are still very early in the game but there is a large market in the US of families with several PCs and well-equipped home offices. This would have been a perfect place to launch EBOX, hopefully there will be marcom people allocated to screen these opportunities in the future.

Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (http://www.homepna.org) promotes the creation of a “home backbone” using existing telephone wiring. TutSystems (http://www.tutsys.com) seems to be on its way to become a leading vendor in this space - IPO already planned… Other visible players at the home networking expo were Intel, Compaq and 3Com. By the way, should EBOX people take part in HomePNA?

And then on the wireless side, Sharewave (http://www.sharewave.com) is becoming the leading wireless alternative in the “home backbone” space and their investors include Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Philips, Softbank and Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen)… got the point?. They don’t see BlueTooth as competitive “due to its short range”.

Boyz from Tel Aviv are here again: an Israeli company Infra-Com http://www.infra-com.com (website not live yet) has developed a technology “IrGate” which removes the line-of-sight requirement of infra-red technology. Chipset for OEMs during 1999. Competing with Bluetooth?

Finally, the latest pet of the Silicon Valley investment community, Replay Networks (http://www.replaytv.com) was there. Replay has developed a set-top box with a large hard disk and a time-shifting technology which enables “buffering”, rewinding and fast-forwarding of live TV. With ReplayTV and the free Replay Network Service viewers create on-demand replay channels featuring programs that match their interests. The devices ship later this year with prices ranging from $700 to $1400 depending on the size of the hard disk. So what? This is a totally innovative way to combine an online service and TV broadcasting. Wait until the home shopping channels adopt this!

Run your hard disk remotely through a web browser

@Backup http://www.backup.com is an online data backup service. Their new product enables you to run a fully functioning image of your PC using web browser, directly from the backup server farm. The server farm is based on somewhat surprisingly - NT. This technology is potentially revolutionary - first time you might be OK just carrying a lightweight HPC device with you and doing everything via an Internet connection. Which is of course an optimal paradigm for GPRS and 3G. We should study this immediately!

The dote and antidote to copyright technologies are born

Caere Corporation (http://www.caere.com) showed their “logical structure recognition technology” which is leapfroging the accuracy with which paper-based information can be scanned directly into web-format. This will potentially revolutionize web publishing. On the other side of the coin, companies like iCopyright (http://www.icopyright.com), cSafe (http://www.csafe.com) and InterTrust (http://www.intertrust.com) demonstrated technologies enabling protected distribution of images, text and music. PixSafe image protection technology can be applied to websites without retrofitting existing content. iCopyright.com automated copyright clearinghouse has an alliance with Kinko’s to enable web-based delivery of copyrighted reprints.

Online music distribution? Promising but still premature

Interestingly enough, InterTrust came up with an intellectual property solution for MP3 music standard. Will online distribution of music now take off? Slowly since more bandwidth is needed and the online music services must improve usability. People are not going to spend their life surfing on the web for new music, the process needs to be automated.

E-commerce is not only transactions

New innovations pop up every day to facilitate conducting e-business over the Internet. Transactions are just one part of the puzzle. Active Research (http://www.activeresearch.com) provides web-based services for market research automation. What if your mobile subscription in the future will be partly subsidized by your taking part in market research during you spare time? Customer support solutions become increasingly industrial-strength, with solutions like Talisma (http://www.talisma.com) from Aditi. CustomerSat.com (http://www.customersat.com) launched a realtime service for e-commerce sites to easily conduct tailored customer surveys. Frictionless Commerce (http://www.frictionless.com) is an MIT startup lauunching a shopping bot technology which matches customer needs to available products solving the related multi-criteria optimization problem in an interactive fashion. DealTime.com (http://www.dealtime.com) launched a notification engine which collects comparison shopping and auction information based on user criteria and notifies upon finding satisfactoy deals. Great application for wireless Internet! E-mail application servers like the one from Delano (http://www.delanotech.com) speed up the deployment of messaging applications to support e-business processes. IQ Commerce Corporation (http://www.iq.com) launched a real-time management tool for promotional Internet campaigns - interesting for the Ericsson Internet Advertiser product…

Internet Calendaring is a new hot area - even for wireless Internet!

AnyDay.com (http://www.anyday.com) launched their new product with community management features. The service will be live by March 99 and it will build around sponsoring and cobranding as revenue models. They have advanced plans for synchronizing non-PC devices (using technology from Extended Systems which does the Ir in Palm III). As a potential application was mentioned “drug portals” which could launch alerts to people to remember to take their medication. Day-Timer Digital (http://www.digital.daytimer.com)  launched their consumer-oriented product which they plan to OEM to various destination sites on a “powered by” basis.

Business Portals are a new trend in the portal wars

Epicentric’s Portal Server (http://www.epicentric.com) enables companies to build custom portals for their Intranet, Extranets and the Internet. Companies can choose to use Epicentric’s portal solution as either a hosted service or an enterprise server. Epicentric has also built a prototype of a mobile extension of the portal (http://www.epicentric.com/mobile). They claim partnerships with Palm, AvantGo, Philips, Microsoft and Unwired Planet. Other companies active in the business portal space are Netscape and Portera (http://www.portera.com) which specializes in business portals for the service industry.

Impressive future (3G) stuff

Digital Fountain’s (http://www.dfountain.com) new digital distribution technology which improves reliability and efficiency in broadcast-oriented media delivery. HyperCosm http://www.hypercosm3d.com was probably the biggest sensation of Demo 99. Their revolutionary 3D modelling technology defies the limits of mathematical theories. Jaron Lanier, the father of VR, sits on their board and in order to reach perfection, their street address is Fourier Drive… Interactive Pictures Corp (http://www.ipix.com) launched the IPIX imaging technology for 360 degrees steerable full motion video for web-based “telepresence”. J.Stream (http://www.electrobooks.com) launched a technology to enable fast and secure vending of books with high (upto 30:1) dictionary-based compression and preview functionality enabling “superdistribution” (customers act as marketers by further distributing preview versions).

Knowledge Management was a topic as well

A few new companies to check out. http://www.abuzz.com - http://www.insttinct-soft.com - http://www.inxight.com - http://www.vergesoft.com

Navigating with your handheld - what could improve it?

LexiQuest (http://www.lexiquest.com) introduced linguistic engine to increase the accuracy of text-based searches.