Perhaps you're telling the truth, other posters have accused you before of being ains & that post does looks suspicious, 'IF' I'm wrong my apologies to you.
....but would you deny he uses multiple aliases ??

IE: Runwiththebulls, LSimpson, Jason Nichole, colowe....etc...

As this is a new BB, with novice investors joining from 'Shares magazine', I think they have a right to know about ainsoph and his deceitful ploys to ramp his shares to the unwary....

....don't you ?

It is an amazing coincidence that you've suddenly appeared on this site superrod !!

I can only assume ains has asked you to post to distract people from his deceitful games.

I'll leave it there for now, let's see what develops.

no point in posting the same reply on all the threads i visit

Just for the sake of fairness.
I was not entirely happy about this, but there you go!

M

RNS Number:7286H
Tadpole Technology PLC
19 February 2003

Tadpole Technology plc ( "Company")

Issue of Equity - Additional Listing


The Company today announced the issue of 10,193,680 New Ordinary Shares at a
price of 4.905p to GEM Global Yield Fund Limited, pursuant to the equity line of
credit provided to the Company by GEM Global Yield Fund Limited and GEM Advisors
Inc., details of which were contained in a circular to shareholders dated 31
January 2002.

This current draw down takes the total of Ordinary Shares issued by the Company
to GEM Global Yield Fund Limited pursuant to the Subscription Agreement, as
varied by the Supplemental Agreements, to 14.34 per cent of the issued share
capital of the Company as at 18 February 2003 (the latest practicable date prior
to the issue of this announcement) and as such necessitates the production of
Listing Particulars. The Company has today therefore issued an Issue Note which,
together with the Shelf Document published on the UK Listing Authority's website
on 4 April 2002, will constitute Listing Particulars.

Application has been made to the UK Listing Authority for the 10,193,680 New
Ordinary Shares to be admitted to the Official List of the UK Listing Authority,
and to the London Stock Exchange for these shares to be admitted to trading.
These shares will rank pari passu with the existing ordinary shares of the
Company and dealings are expected to commence on 24 February 2003.

The draw down is consistent with Tadpole's stated strategy, as indicated in the
preliminary announcement, that it will use the GEM facility to support business
progress in its software companies.

Terms and definitions included in this announcement have the same meaning as in
the Issue Note dated 19 February 2003. Copies of the Shelf Document and the
Issue Note are available free of charge at the registered office of the Company
at Trinity House, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0WZ and at the offices of Denton
Wilde Sapte at One Fleet Place, London EC4M 7WS during normal business hours on
any weekday (Saturday, Sundays and public holidays excepted) following the date
of this announcement. In addition to this the Shelf Document is available on the
UK Listing Authority website at http://www.fsa.gov.uk/ukla.

19 February 2003

ML.. at least its out the way now and I expect the news flow to restart.
Gem is there to be used as and whenstill the question of why only 500k?.all will be revealed no doubt.
Tris

maybe all they need, Maybe enough to get them to a news release that will hike the price up hence less dilution when called on later, time will tell my little 1

Posted by nk156 on 3i's


From a Gartner Paper on ODADS (Sept 2002)

[Square brackets are my comments]

[The Gartner report is generic on the subject of ODADS and makes reference to a couple of our competitors (only because the report was written back in September. No doubt this will change after our recent seminar). However it does give a very positive insight into the potential of this technology.]


[Gartner some good early user experience]
...For example, a large financial services company uses an ODADS platform to allow its customers to access their primary trading application. Without ODADS, users had to download the entire Java applet (almost 2MB) every time they needed to use the application. This approach was impractical for remote use, and unusable during peak trading hours when simultaneous access saturated network bandwidth. More than 3,000 investors currently use the trading application with the ODADS, streaming bits of runtime code to local cache over 50K dial-up without any performance issues. Prior to using the ODADS, the application download took three to five minutes or longer during non-peak hours. The installation and deployment was quick and relatively painless, as the pilot took only four weeks. Another example is a service company with a large reservations system that has a Java-based front-end application (with a feature-rich graphical user interface; the applet is more than 3 MB). The company expects the number of users to grow to more than 100,000 during the next two years. The application is updated frequently. Deployment of the ODADS has resulted in positive user satisfaction and reduction of help desk calls, and has freed up network bandwidth for other applications. The agents are satisfied because they can work from home over slow networks with the same rich user interface to which they are accustomed. IS organization management is satisfied because no changes to the software were needed, and new features and enhancements are streamed to users automatically the next time they connect to the network...
[100,000 users now that would be nice]


..Softricity and Microsoft announced a three-year joint marketing agreement in May 2002. There are no licensing or financial terms. This agreement is purely a marketing agreement to promote .NET solutions. It is not a product development agreement and does not involve Microsoft product groups...
[ETI and Microsoft agreement is different. MS is paying ETI to move to .NET framework. Microsoft is also helping in product development access to MS labs and technicians]

...- Vendor viability: AppStream and Softricity are small startups with no guarantee of survival beyond the next 12 to 18 months. Enterprises will not invest in ODADS technology for large production rollouts until they feel the vendors are viable and can support them on a 24x7, quick-response-time basis...
[Could it be that we have a major potential clients that require 24x7 support hence the GEM drawdown to expand this area?]

...- ODADS platforms must have proven scalability to support enterprises with 30,000 to 50,000 desktops...
[AppExpress scales to 100,000 users]

...Through 2007, provided that they are acquired by or actively promoted and supported by some major vendors, more than 40 percent of enterprises will use ODADSs for targeted applications (0.6 probability)...
[ETI is being actively promoted and supported by MS and HP]

Tadpole's new web page is here.

http://www.tadpole.com/html/

M

YOL = Yawning out loud.

F

Fugitive
How long did it take to work that one out?
Have you been working on it all day?
Well worth the wait.
Guru

Oz link!

Must be revenue producing, that we didnt know about.

http://www.geis.com.au/browsers/ie/

M

IM Needs to Build a Community
February 25, 2003
By Colin C. Haley



BOSTON -- Despite their enormous clout, the Big 3 of instant messaging service providers (Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo!) can't make the technology a success among enterprise customers on their own.

Systems integrators, software developers and consultants, need to help convince corporate decision makers that the technology is compelling and workable.

"Currently, there is no ecosystem to take existing enterprise infrastructure and integrate it with IM infrastructure," Microsoft executive David Gurle said in his keynote address here at Instant Messaging Planet Conference and Expo this morning.

Another key is investment. Unlike some technology giants, Microsoft does not have a dedicated investment fund, prefering to get involved with companies later in their development, Gurle said. For example, Microsoft recently pumped $51 million into peer-to-peer player Groove Networks.

The Redmond, Wash., firm does, however, regularly consult with venture capitalists to express what applications they would like to see used in conjuction with its new enterprise IM product, Greenwich, due out later this year.

"Startups have agility that a company the size of Microsoft or IBM doesn't have," said Gurle, whose group is readying Microsoft's Enterprise IM offering, Greenwich, for later this year. AOL and Yahoo are working on their own enterprise products.

Jeff Crown, former head of Lycos' venture arm, and currently managing parter of Aqueduct Partners, said the IM space is similar to the Internet in 1995.

"It's still wide open, it's still the wild wild West," said Crown, now managing partner at Aqueduct Partners, a Wellesley, Mass., consulting firm serving small and medium businesses.

So far, the flow of capital hasn't come anywhere near the amount pumped into the Internet space in its early days. This is due partially because some funds have eschewed technology investments after being burned by the Internet bubble as well as a more anemic economy in general.

Crown thinks investors would also like to see some harder numbers about the market potential and ROI of enterprise IM.

To be sure, there are other impediments to the ubiquitous adoption of IM in the enterprise, including a business model that will allow users of the Big 3 to communicate with each other. Gurle, a former executive with a French telecom, said the fear is customer churn, a problem experience by European wireless carriers where interoperability reigns.

A consistent name space, enhanced security protections and standards for authenticating users, are other problems that have been repeatedly voiced at the show.

An encouraging sign, Gurle believes, is that large customers, like pharmaceutical companies to financial services firms, are starting to ask some hard questions about the practical integration of IM.

If these growing pains are overcome, then IM's potential is enormous. The Big 3 know it will go faster and smoother if they don't have to go it alone.

Unite and Federate!
February 26, 2003
By Christopher Saunders


If it isn't already clear by now, there's little standing in the way of a technical impediment to interoperability (despite what some major players in the space have indicated.) Instead, it's all a matter of hammering out a serviceable business model for cross-network consumer IM.

Of course, this isn't necessarily an easy pill to swallow. Microsoft's David Gurle pointed out quite rightly that his coworkers over in the MSN group, as well as their rivals at AOL and Yahoo!, fear the user churn that will result if interoperability is established among the consumer networks.

Still, it's not a problem if the common service -- that is, presence -- is wide enough to accommodate a variety of add-on applications. Instead, it then becomes an issue of which provider has the best presence-leveraging applications.

That's going to be essential, since presence -- as speaker after speaker attested -- is the most important feature to emerge from instant messaging: for one thing, as Gurle noted, IM-based presence will finally realize the decades-old dream of "intelligent" telephone networks. And, of course, a whole lot more.

Fortunately, we're reasonably close to achieving interconnecting networks in the enterprise market.

"Interoperability is not as dire as it seems," said Lotus' Jeremy Dies during a panel discussion. "IBM and Microsoft own 90 percent of the enterprise application market and both are building platforms on SIP/SIMPLE."

What then? Here we touch on "federation" -- the show's third-most common concept, and the glue tying enterprise IM interoperability to those meaty, presence-based applications.

Of course, that's "federated" as in federated authorization and authentication, which seems a necessity once (if?) interoperability is achieved among business-class IM networks. After all, as IMLogic's Francis deSouza said, it's not hard to consider the myriad problems with which a business has to contend should one of their employees be using the public IM handle "Biceps2Big" to interact with clients.

Indeed, Gurle contended that interoperability "will impact the shift of power in the IM market" by giving the authority for administering their users' identities to businesses. As a result, IT managers and compliance officers will dictate how employees represent and conduct themselves online, while at the same time, can safely assume that their clients and colleagues on other networks are who they claim to be.

This shift may make the opening up of consumer IM easier to swallow, as the major networks are or will soon roll out enterprise-class products to handle namespaces and federated authentication. That's one way Boom said Yahoo! has already been preparing for interoperability.

Gurle said a third-party would have to serve as a "clearinghouse" for networks' presence information, enabling businesses to connect and share information from their presence-based communications networks with each other. (He declined to discuss Microsoft's plans during his talk, but it should go without saying that Microsoft's .NET Service is a likely contender for the role.)

In any case, federated authentication also carries a number of crucial auxiliary benefits. For one thing, Gurle noted that unlike in the current e-mail space, instant messaging "cannot have spam by definition ... with an end-to-end authorization and authentication model." In other words, you still can get unwanted messages -- but only from identifiable, blockable senders and domains; or not at all, if you block messages from users not on your contacts list.

But most importantly, the establishment of local nodes where users are authenticated sets the foundation for enterprises' more comprehensive use of presence -- in VoIP, videoconferencing, collaborative software development, and so on.

"IM created a connection infrastructure -- IM connects people, and it's hard to stop there ... to not escalate that scenario to other communication modes," Gurle said. "If we get all this right, the sky is our limit. A whole new telecom network -- that's going to be the nirvana. There are going to be opportunities for companies to make money off of it."

Which means that we can't rule out the public network giants' commitment to interoperability. After all, income from selling advanced presence-based services -- nesting on top of the authentication services they also plan to sell -- would be a considerable improvement for the IM networks over the current state of free public messaging.

This fact, of course, isn't lost on them. During the show, Boom hinted that Yahoo! is quite aware of the potential to be had in presence-enabled services for businesses.

"We have a big presence network," he said. "The development of presence and how that's used by the enterprise is going to be one of the key focuses for us."

08:39 Thursday 27th February 2003
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com


Microsoft has unveiled additions to Windows XP and a software development kit designed to help desktop users allow individual desktop PC users share information directly, instead of going through a centralized server to disseminate data
Microsoft is introducing additions to Windows XP designed to make the operating system better tuned for peer-to-peer applications.

The software giant on Wednesday unveiled a beta, or testing version, of the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Software Development Kit. The programming tools are designed to let software providers or corporate developers more easily build peer-to-peer applications on top of Windows XP.

Peer-to-peer applications, popularized by file-swapping services such as Napster and Kazaa, allow individual desktop PC users to share information directly, instead of going through a centralized server to disseminate data.

Microsoft also plans to build peer-to-peer application programming interfaces (APIs) into Windows XP. For example, with the planned APIs, Windows XP will allow devices on a peer network to find and interact with each other automatically.

Microsoft, in the development kit, has also improved the underlying data transportation protocol, Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6, in Windows XP. The enhancements to the IPv6 software will help programmers create peer-to-peer applications across company firewalls or for mobile devices, according to Microsoft.

A final release of the software development kit and the update to Windows XP will be available later this year, according to Microsoft.

With Microsoft's strength in desktop software, it has an interest in promoting the creation of peer-to-peer applications that rely on powerful PCs, and on its Windows operating system. Last year, Microsoft purchased XDegrees, a peer-to-peer start-up, and indicated plans to use XDegrees technology in its storage products.

"The core of Microsoft's growth is based on distributed computing, what's becoming known as horizontal scaling, where lots of machines cooperate together to complete work," said John Rymer, an analyst at Giga Information Group. "Anything they can do to ease that cooperation is goodness."

Sun Microsystems is also pursuing a peer-to-peer development initiative to build up the underlying "plumbing" required for distributed applications. It's doing this through an open-source project called Jxta.

Peer-to-peer application developer Groove Networks, which received a $51m investment from Microsoft in 2001, said the low-level additions to Windows XP have the potential to make it easier for developers to build decentralized applications.

Consulting company Cap Gemini Ernst & Young also intends to exploit the forthcoming peer-to-peer features in Windows XP.

"In the past, the discussion has been about how computers can do a better job of talking to other computers. Yet the future of business is about how people interact widely with many people around shared information, knowledge and content," Andy Mulholland, chief technology officer at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, said in a statement.

At last year's AGM, BH stated that XDegrees were TAD's biggest competitor in the p2p arena. I wasn't aware that MS had bought them. Looks like another nail in TADs coffin to me.

I wonder if there is anything here for Tads ?

ains




Text/SMS messaging totally insecure

Canary sings, "I can read your texts"

By Tony Dennis: Friday 28 February 2003, 10:41


A LITTLE BIRD working for one of the major British GSM operators has revealed to us just how insecure the whole text/SMS messaging service really is.
In order to offer SMS (Short Message Service) - otherwise known as texting - operators install an SMSC (Short Message Service Centre). Many of these SMSCs come from software specialists such as LogicaCMG or Schlumberger SEMA.

In essence, an SMSC is like a giant store-and-forward email server.

Our canary maintains that the typical time a text message stays stored on the SMSC is around 15 days. Worryingly our bird says that text messages can actually be viewed by ANY customer services advisor. " There's no password or permissions or anything," the canary adds.

"Many advisors amuse themselves on slow days by picking numbers at random and reading the messages, and then following the trail to the sender and jumping from person to person like this. It's also possible to spoof text messages through the [SMSC], and make them look like they've come from anywhere or anyone, just like with email."

More to the point if a member of the public does want to take some sort of action regarding a nuisance SMS, the operator does genuinely possess the ability to interrogate the SMSC and discover all the requisite information.

Most operators won't actually admit this to the public, as it could easily generate masses of customer complaints which would be unprofitable to pursue. The good news, however, is that if you ask the customer services department of your mobile phone company very nicely indeed, they will reveal the number for a nuisance calls bureau which can investigate SMS complaints too. So now you know.

Sun rises on corporate IM
12:47 Thursday 27th February 2003
Evan Hansen, CNET News.com


Sun's plans for a new IM server product increases the attention on instant-messaging for corporate customers
Sun Microsystems plans to release a standalone instant messaging server product within the next few months, the company confirmed this week, in the latest sign of booming demand for corporate IM services.

Sun has long offered IM with its Sun ONE (One Network Environment) Portal Server suite, formerly marketed under the iPlanet brand.

A new standalone Sun ONE Instant Messaging server product is expected to arrive sometime this spring, a company representative said on Tuesday, although a formal release date has not yet been announced.

The new IM server will add support for Linux -- currently Sun ONE Portal Server runs on Sun's Solaris OS and Windows.

The new standalone server product comes as demand for enterprise IM is heating up amid a growing recognition of unauthorised IM usage in the workplace. "There's a battle under way for the hearts and minds of business IT managers for IM in the workplace," said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research.

IBM's Lotus Sametime product dominates the official business IM market, according to analysts. But it has been illicit office use of consumer IM services such as AOL's ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) that has recently thrust the technology into the spotlight for corporate information technology managers.

Companies, including top Wall Street brokerages, have banned popular consumer IM products in the workplace and have begun testing services from IM providers that offer security and other features, such as message archiving. These features are designed to bring the technology into compliance with regulations governing brokerage customer communications.

That could create a big opportunity for companies such as Sun to steal the march from the three giants of the consumer IM marketplace: AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Sun's decision to break out a standalone corporate IM server dovetails with plans initiated last summer to open its portal product for use with rival operating systems, and to compete on a product-by-product basis in addition to positioning the products as part of an integrated suite.

Patrick Dorsey, group manager for Sun ONE communications products, said the standalone IM server will continue to offer a high level of integration with the portal platform, although he said it could help open doors to customers seeking to add IM to an existing system built on products from Sun rivals such as BEA Systems and IBM. He said Sun has about 1,000 customers of its collaboration platform, which include IM, calendaring, e-mail, scheduling and task management. He added that customers looking to use IM have increased significantly over the past six months.

"The trend in the market is for customers to look for well-integrated products that can also leverage third-party products," he said. "To the extent that customers need a targeted solution, we'll serve that."

Jupiter's Gartenberg said Sun could still have its work cut out for it competing for business IM customers with the three consumer IM giants. Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo have all announced plans in the past six months to develop corporate IM products, adding features sought by businesses such as security, archiving and authentication.

"This represents the fact that IM is a growing business application that enterprises want to employ throughout their businesses," he said. "But it will be a challenge for Sun to convince business customers that they understand the IM market as well as players that have established themselves in the consumer market."

Sun and AOL began interoperability tests between their IM products in late 2001, although no compatible products have yet been announced. Sun and AOL Time Warner's Netscape division had previously partnered to create Web applications for businesses under the iPlanet umbrella. Sun took sole control of the project at the end of the initial three-year partnership deal, renaming the products using the Sun ONE brand.

Sun's IM server plans were disclosed at the Instant Messaging Planet conference in Boston this week, and first reported in Computer Reseller News.

http://www.directionsmag.com/pressreleases.php?press_id=6590

Mar 03, 2003

Endeavors Technology Teams With SunGard At Information Availability Conference For Britain's Financial Services Institutions

Worldwide organization serving 20,000 financial services institutions invites Endeavors Technology to showcase its secure network messaging, collaboration and on-demand application delivery products at the SunGard Information Availability Conference - Connections 2003 (March 25-26, 2003, London)

fyi


Tuesday 4 March 2003

HP creates Web services management unit



HP has formed a web services management team that will oversee its work with both J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) applications and Microsoft's .net-based software.
HP's chairman and chief executive officer Carly Fiorina made the announcement in a keynote speech at the BEA eWorld conference in Orlando.

One of the major goals for the new group will be making sure HP's OpenView management software works well with J2EE and .net software from various suppliers.

"HP is committed to working with BEA, other partners and many of you to make Web services a reality," Fiorina said during her speech.

"It is not something we are doing because it's the next big thing. It's something we are doing because it will help our customers achieve more cost-efficient IT, more responsive IT and more integrated IT."

HP wants to make it possible for both J2EE-based applications and .net-based applications to work together, Fiorina added. The company shelved much of its own Internet infrastructure software or middleware last year, deciding that partnerships with BEA and Microsoft would be a better option.

HP has also created a services practice dedicated to J2EE-based software, Fiorina said, which will have 1,000 staff by the end of the year.

Software Development Meets Presence and Collaboration
March 4, 2003
By Christopher Saunders


With a growing number of players working to embed instant messaging and availability-detection into enterprise applications, the concept of presence continues to make headway into business applications. Ironically, however, little has been done to spread the trend to the software development industry. Instead, collaboration in the development space generally consists of tools to organize project workflow.

That could change as a result of efforts by firms like Internet Access Methods. Late last year, the company unveiled a new version of its IAM-Developing collaborative environment, which enables C++/Java programmers to work together. In connection with its presence and authentication servers (which glean user permissions from corporate LDAP directories), the system provides a real-time link to others that's a step beyond most of the collaboration tools now being targeted to developers.

"E-mail isn't ... concurrent collaboration, the kind you do on the telephone," said Internet Access Methods President and Chief Technology Officer Gerry Seidman. "Say I'm working on my code and I don't know why it doesn't work. Say Christine used to work on this project, but she's three floors down, or maybe at home, or maybe working from India. I'd like to work with her ... but [not using Symantec's] PCAnywhere, [Netopia's] Timbuktu, [or] screen-sharing ... Our take on this is very different."

Not your father's SourceForge

It's a pretty radical departure from the collaboration tools commonplace in the space, since developers can use the product to collaborate in ways beyond simply viewing a colleague's submitted code, or seeing what's on another person's screen using a tool like WebEx or PCAnywhere. IAM-Developing uses peer-to-peer technology to link development environments on different users' PCs -- allowing one user to view, edit and compile code on another's machine, even behind firewalls.

After locating an online colleague and initiating a connection, users can watch as the other scrolls and edits -- in real-time. Participants in the collaboration session hand over control of the code for the other to edit, ensuring that only one developer has "write" privileges. Coworkers can even decouple their systems, so that editing can continue in one section of the code while a second user views another area. In that case, the interface keeps pace, showing each participant where the other is working in a file.

Because the code under construction never leaves the collaboration session originator's machine, it also solves issues that might arise in different development environments, and surrounding intellectual property protection.

"Imagine that I'm a programmer at a financial services firm," Seidman said. "I have a question and am looking at some code. But I don't want to e-mail a consultant source files: it might not be the code, it might be the [operating] environment [that is the problem] -- or I might not be allowed to show others code."

Additionally, the system can support opening other files on the host user's machine/network -- so that with the proper permission, two coworkers could be working on two different files in full view of each other. The system also supports running a number of Unix apps from the command-line, such as emacs and vi.

"The power of this is in terms of remote team development, in system administration, and in support," Seidman said. "We have these frameworks of technology for building collaborative applications."

Future directions

While the collaboration capabilities open new doors for working with peers on a project, Seidman also envisions licensing the core technology behind IAM-Developing as a platform for outsourced services and tech support contracts -- where initiating a collaborative session can link a user to not just a fellow employee, but to a paid consultant or support personnel.

In this scenario, a developer using IAM-Developing can click a button to be connected to outside support, with request routing, tracking and billing handled invisibly by Internet Access Method's presence servers.

Development software is "a terrible market, but this can turn it into a portal for selling professional services," Seidman said. "There's no upsell on a 5-day Java course that I run. But now I can sell [students] a service contract. How do you sell professional services from software -- like a deeply collaborative [Intuit] TurboTax, where you can go over your returns with an accountant? Businesses can use real-time collaboration to find new revenue options."

A word-processing variant of the core software borrows the same functions. While it's available separately, or as part of the company's proprietary instant messaging and presence client, Seidman imagines eventually packaging the word processor application as an add-on for Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) Word or Sun Microsystems' (Quote, Company Info) StarOffice.

Combined with an add-on module supporting screen-sharing of PowerPoint slides and other applications, the technology gains still more applications.

"There, the idea of remote classes now becomes more pragmatic," Seidman said.

Already, the technology behind IAM-Developing is being tested at a number of educational instructions, in several consultancies, an auto manufacturer, and in the military.

With such a wide range of target markets for the technology, however, Internet Access Methods is likely to run up against larger, more established players in the field of collaboration platform vendors -- which itself is growing in scope. For instance, Groove Networks last month began efforts to syndicate its presence and collaboration tools into other applications through APIs.

And earlier in the year, Microsoft snapped up Web conferencing player PlaceWare, in addition to having a number of hotly anticipated collaborative offerings in the pipeline for this year, such as a new version of SharePoint Team Services.

Yet Seidman waves away the competitive threat to the firm's platform.

"Microsoft doesn't scare me outside of areas where they have a monopoly ... [because] the model of collaboration we have is very different than screen-sharing -- Excel doesn't know anything about collaboration. It has to be designed in the application, and cannot be layered on. And the PlaceWares, the WebExes, the Grooves, and the PCAnywheres are all based on 'how can I take legacy apps and make them collaborative' -- versus, 'how do I make collaborative applications?' Collaboration is about working together -- not co-presentation."

Still, a number of smaller players on the horizon are also treading on the area that Seidman hopes to carve out for Internet Access Methods. InfoBuild Networks, for instance, is coming to market with its own solution for coupling collaboration to development applications.

It's quite a different approach -- the Point Roberts, Wash.-based firm's Bsmarter product delivers IM, desktop and file sharing, along with a call-center-like queue. But already, the technique has found converts like units of Reuters, which use Bsmarter to create a collaborative environment for HTML-based in-house education projects. In one recent project, Reuters employees could click on a button to be queued up with questions for instructors, who can see users' desktops and respond to their queries via IM.

The promise of JXTA

In addition to broadening the platform's applications, Internet Access Methods is also hoping to boost its chances with a consolidation -- that is, onto JXTA (define) as its peer-to-peer foundation. The firm is a big supporter of the open, Sun-backed P2P protocol -- Seidman is president of the New York JXTA special interest group -- and includes support for it in the latest version of IAM-Developing alongside IAM's proprietary protocol.

The next update to the product, due out within weeks, will abandon Internet Access Method's proprietary protocol entirely. The move to pure JXTA support, Seidman said, cuts down on development costs and could also prove a selling point for clients.

"It's very expensive for us to write proprietary technology, and we don't want to maintain it anymore," he said. "It's also a very hard sell to walk into a corporation and say 'I run this proprietary technology behind the corporate firewall and oh, it pierces your firewall' ... that's one way to make a bad introduction."

Support for JXTA is growing in its own right, with followers attracted to the protocol because of its thinness and its support for multiple platforms, devices and transport protocols -- including non-IP-based protocols like Bluetooth. Sun said today that users have downloaded a million files from its open-source Project JXTA site to date.

But like IAM-Developing, JXTA itself faces a threat from Microsoft, which is busily promoting its .NET technology as the basis for P2P applications. Later this year, the Redmond, Wash. software giant is expected to ship its Greenwich server, which provides low-level support for advanced collaboration functions.

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.