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Get the Point!
What’s the point of PointCast, you ask? Well, here at the company, we think the point is about delivering news you can use, without effort on your part. What we provide is a menu of local, national, and increasingly international content that you can pick over and select just the subjects you care about to be updated on throughout the day or however often you wish.
Many people think we’re trying to replace the web by doing this. Why would we want to do that? is my question. The web experience is an active, user involved, experience where the user is drilling down for information in a very active way. Unfortunately, it’s often a very frustrating experience given how slow a lot of web sites are and how out of date some of the content one can find is.
What we’re about is letting you pick what you care about (companies to track, sports you follow, industries you’re involved in, etc.), and then creating a "news channel" just for you. This separates the experience of USING information from the process of FINDING it. We have over a million users every month now because people find this a really useful function, and a lot easier and less time consuming than searching out all that information manually.
Some people find it distracting to have our SmartScreens pop up on their computer while they’re doing something else, however more often we hear of a viewer who found out something important to them by just glancing at the screen during a phone call. The best part is, if you don’t like that effect, you can turn it off and go back to flying toasters or whatever. We have a growing little group of users who wait for the new "screens" to pop up every month (we change them so your screen won’t ever be boring again!). As the "response time" of people to information becomes shorter and shorter and events happen faster every year, it’s really cool to be "plugged in" to the world even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. Many times viewers have written to us to tell us about things they found out about only because they saw it on PointCast. I remember one letter from a viewer who found out about a new medical treatment by seeing a headline on our service, mentioned it to his mother’s doctor who hadn’t yet heard about it, investigated it on his own and started using it to treat mom. We have a whole slew of letters like that from viewers on the walls around our buildings. It sure helps convince us we’re making a difference in people’s lives.
The parallel to TV is very real. We talk about "viewers", "broadcast facilities" and "commercials" and we even use a transmitting tower as our company symbol. TV was a revolutionary new medium at its time. I remember watching the Apollo launches and men walking on the Moon as some of my most memorable childhood experiences. I’m sure that like many people in Silicon Valley today, those events connected me with my career in engineering. Television truly changed our lives and our world.
At PointCast, we think we’ve improved the "TV" experience though, by collecting high quality content like CNN, The Chicago Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News and providing personalization of both content sources and subjects. Content that has links so our viewers can "drill down" to related web sites, or to a web search engine directly from the article they’re viewing. This is a fundamentally new way of using information, like, but different from the web. We’re creating an important new medium for the next century, just like radio and television were in this one. The Internet will come to affect everyone’s lives, not because it’s cool technology (although it is!), but because people find utility in it. That’s why the web was so successful. It *did something* for people, connected them with information. We’re doing that automatically, in the background, providing utility to the vast numbers of people who are coming "online". Obviously, we think this is pretty "wired".
At PointCast, we’re not just building another company, we’re changing the world. Along the way, we’re having a blast. Creating new industries is like that.
by Joseph C. Pistritto (VP of Technology at Pointcast)
This article is a response to last week's j-dom on Push Media
