PointCast

PointCast, RSS feeds, and history

In a conversation with a luminary in Microsoft technologies today, we briefly touched on RSS.

Which led me to think of PointCast and their technology back in the day for delivering news to the desktop.

What seemed to new and esoteric then is now not only commonplace, but in on the verge of having extensions developed for it, by Microsoft no less, that would allow for the same sort of rich content PointCast promised. This time without the fat client and bandwidth hog that PointCast was.

Wow, it has been ten years since the board of PointCast, with the hubris of overawed business neophytes, declined the $450 million USD offer from News Corp for their company, which eventually got sold to an Idealab subsidiary two years later for $7 million USD.

Someone forgot to tell them to take the money and run!

© 2007, John Obeto II for SmallBizVista.com®