Pointcast Bows To Less Pushy Entrypoint

( 3/30/00; 4:00 PM EST)
By Stuart Glascock, TechWeb

Pointcast will pull the plug on all broadcasting over the Pointcast Network Friday.

Introduced in February 1996, Pointcast initially won praise for automatically delivering news and information over the Internet to users' desktop screens. But the product, which consumed more than 5 megabytes of hard drive space, gained a reputation for clogging corporate networks. The client was so chunky, some system administrators prohibited employees from using it at all.

Pointcast was once the king of push technology -- as many as eight million to 10 million people downloaded Pointcast at its peak. Approximately 1.5 million of those were active users. In recent weeks, the remaining 400,000 users were notified by the company that the services were drawing to a close.

But the "neat idea" that made Pointcast popular is making a comeback in a more polite form.

Last May, Pointcast was acquired for $7 million by Launchpad Technologies, a spinoff of the technology incubator Idealab. Launchpad started a new company, Entrypoint, which has been converting the remaining Pointcast customers with its less-intrusive information delivery service.

"We were always impressed with Pointcast's ability to aggregate desktop attention through desktop notification and delivery, which is what we thought were the great ideas in Pointcast," said Francis Costello, president of Entrypoint, San Diego.

"We see Entrypoint as the long-overdue upgrade, next generation of service to take it forward so it can grow," Costello said. "We've taken care of some know problems, added e-commerce, and really leveraged that great idea to take it to the next level."

Entrypoint 2.0 is a free 1-inch, on-screen toolbar that links customers to the shopping or news sites of their choice. Entrypoint's toolbar combines Launchpad's eWallet e-commerce tool with Pointcast's content delivery.

"Say goodbye to Poincast and say hello to something better," reads a banner atop Entrypoint's website. And many are accepting the offer. More than two million customers have downloaded Entrypoint since it was introduced last October, the company said.

"Entrypoint [a 700K download that runs at about 250K of code] is all about bringing information to your desktop as a very thin, lightweight package," Costellos said. "It sits there unobtrusively while you've got every application open on your machine. It brings small amounts of information to your desktop to highlight the information you are interested in, instead of trying to bring in everything, every morning."

With that philosophy, the indisputable next big thing in "push" content delivery may be less "pushy."

© 1998 CMP Media, Inc.