Will Lanacom Make Headlines?

Lanacom 's HeadLiner digital delivery sofware may be well-positioned for the consumer market. It combats both bandwidth and hard drive issues by providing links to preselected sites, returning predominantly text to the end user. If a story is of interest, a link to the full page is provided using either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. In the long run, consumers may side with HeadLiner's customizable features in comparison to less flexible products currently available in the digital delivery marketplace.

• Lanacom has included a number of features in its product that will appeal to consumers looking for customized control. Lanacom has taken push-based digital delivery to the next step by enabling users to further defme what type of information is delivered using so··called "content agents." This quality of end-user control will be an important arrow in the Lanacom quiver when users are deciding what service to load on their desktops. In the future, Jupiter expects other digital delivery services to move in this direction.

• While Lanacom's anti-advertisement approach to digital delivery may raise some eyebrows, Jupiter believes that content providers will view HeadLiner as a valuable service. One of HeadLiner's standout features is its ability to return only the text from a Web page when a URL is selected. Advertisement-driven Web sites such as CNET, ZDNet, and Pathfinder may initially fear that they will lose their effectiveness to services that enable consumers to leap-frog ad banners.


• Because Lanacom does not need to partner with content providers, it will be able to offer a broad range of information services as quickly as possible. Other personalization services such as PointCast, Marimba, Diffusion, and BackWeb need to license or partner with content providers to build the range of services offered on their proprietary servers. While a proprietary server may give content providers or delivery services more control over the look and feel of the information that is delivered, they lose in swift quantity what they gain in quality. Because Lanacom is simply concerned with providing links to Web sites, it is capable of quickly responding to user demand for additional content.

• Lanacom's product will appeal to the advertisement wary.

According to Jupiter's 1996 Online Advertising Report, online ad spending will double yearly over the rest of the decade, totaling $5 billion by the year 2000. Translation: the average consumer can expect to be bombarded by advertisements every time a heavily trafficked page is downloaded. Lanacom enables consumers to minimize the amount of advertisements that they are unnecessarily subjected to by opening up a window with a text-based description of the page once the URL is selected. Users can then determine if they want to download the full page or not. HeadLiner's highly customizable controls will appeal to consumers looking for more flexibility than current digital delivery services provide. Features, such as information alerts, customizable caching, filtering, a screen saver, and a desktop URL ticker (also available on the top of an open window), provide consumers with a range of choices that clearly help to make this personalization software personal.

• Lanacom's support for ActiveX controls will make its easier for the company to adapt to Microsoft's Active Platform. With the impending roll-out of Internet Explorer 4.0, Microsoft is promising a desktop that will use HTML, scripting, and ActiveX to narrow the margins between the World Wide Web and Windows. Redmond's Active Server and Active Desktop, similar to most digital delivery services, will interoperate to dynamically deliver and update information. Because Microsoft is the current 400 pound gorilla in the PC jungle, Lanacom's decision to develop ActiveX controls that will enable it to run HeadLiner in Microsoft's new active environment is wise.