Consumer Content - Rapid VS. Vapid

"With our business model, we sell to content providers. Once [website visitors] have the client, they can go to any of the sites that have been 'RAPIDized.' It's universal and transparent." --Blake Whitney, president, COO and board member, Datagistics Corp.

Consumers who don't have a cable modem or who are too far away from a CO to get DSL service, don't despair. There's a solution coming down the pike that will let you download graphic-intensive websites and data-laden documents in a blink of an eye compared to the time it takes over a standard dial-up connection. And the best news of all ... it's not going to cost end users a cent.

Datagistics Corp. (www.datagistics.com), an Atlanta- based Internet infrastructure software company, has developed software that does data engineering and significantly reduces the amount of data within the packet. The company's RAPID (Random Access Para-Integrated Data) software intelligently restructures data to free up bandwidth and results in the ability to load web pages five to 10 times faster than is usual with dial-up connections.

The company is currently seeking a patent for its RAPID software technology.

"The technology itself is one of the quantum leap steps," says Mike Lalonde, Datagistic's founder, chairman and CEO. "We're a lossless technology, which is most challenging. We use data manipulation to reduce the size of the data substantially."

RAPID works by dramatically reducing the amount of data needed to transmit web content over the Internet. Because it is software driven--rather than reliant on boxes such as DSL or cable modems--any Internet user can benefit from the increased download speeds without the hassle and wait associated with having hardware installed and configured.

RAPID affects the data like a compression technology, but it goes a considerable step further: It works for all digital content, including already-compressed file formats, such as .jpeg and .gif.

Datagistics RAPID software is client/server, similar to existing products such as Real Player or Adobe Acrobat. The server resides on the website, while the client can be downloaded and installed simply and transparently by the end user, or it could even come preinstalled on the users' PCs.

Datagistics first goal is to work with website operators, such as America Online Inc. (www.aol.com, now part of AOL Time Warner Inc., www.aoltimewarner.com), to enhance their sites with RAPID technology and distribute the client software to the sites' frequent visitors.

"This takes the Real Networks price model. Consumers get a free download. With our business model, we sell to content providers," says Blake Whitney, president, COO and board member of Datagistics. "We go to content providers who would like to have high-speed content sent to their visitors. Once [website visitors] have the client, they can go to any of the sites that have been 'RAPIDized.' It's universal and transparent."

"I could see this model working because there's a huge pent-up demand for broadband," says Richard Frazita, vice president of strategic engagements at Access Markets International Partners Inc. (AMI, www.ami-partners.com), a New York-based market research and consulting firm. "Even with broadband in place, connectivity speed is still an issue."

Those people who are unable to get any type of high-speed Internet access at home or in the office aren't the only ones that can benefit from Datagistics' technology. Lalonde says that it can be valuable to those who subscribe to DSL and cable modems as well. "We affect those by 10x," he notes. "DSL restricts throughput to 200 to 300k of bandwidth. [With our technology] it might make it a 1 meg connection."

KPMG Consulting LLC (www.kpmg.com) conducted independent tests of RAPID software recently and reported that it delivered broadband speeds even over a dial-up connection.

During the test, KPMG technicians downloaded web pages ranging from 97kbps (the average for most Internet sites today) to those of more than 1mbps, using a 33.6kbps dial-up connection. Once the sites were "RAPIDized" with Datagistics software, the sites loaded five to 11 times faster than with the plain dial-up connection.

In its report, KPMG said, "The effective transmission speed is comparable to most DSL services with no loss of quality. We felt these performance improvements were significant, given the current speed of dial-up Internet communications services and the allure that graphical content has to most Internet websites."

But RAPID isn't just for downloads to the home PC anymore.

There are also applications for the technology in the wireless realm. Consumers are now restricted to accessing watered-down websites via their PCS phones. However, with so-called RAPIDized sites, it would likely be possible to provide more information and richer text to mobile phones more efficiently and at quicker speeds, Datagistics' executives say.

"There's a lot of talk about the wireless Internet, and the market reaction hasn't been great. It's just plain text, and it's difficult to navigate," says AMI Partners' Frazita. "If you could bring [enhanced] content to devices and enable it by software, you're changing the end-user experience."

Datagistics believes that, in addition to the top 50 most lucrative websites that are developing rich media sites, the company's potential clients would also include ISPs, banks and other businesses seeking to transmit significant amounts of data quickly and efficiently to a variety of end users.

For instance, Whitney says that Datagistics is working with IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com), which has the second-largest intranet in the world. The company expects to make public a number of customers by mid-2001, and says that the customers will be deploying the technology by July.

Datagistics has three offerings designed for specific markets. RAPIDsite is for web-centered businesses that want to give all of their visitors the benefits of high-speed access to rich media pages that might otherwise clog a standard connection. Whitney says the speed enabled by the technology could entice customers to spend more time, and potentially more money, at e-commerce sites.

RAPIDprovider is a similar offering to RAPIDsite, however, it is aimed at ISPs. And RAPIDenterprise is designed for use in corporate networks that require massive amounts of data to go across LANs, WANs, extranets, intranets or the Internet.

For all three segments it's targeting, Datagistics also touts the security and storage benefits its technology offers. Because of the mass compression of data, RAPID is ideal for encrypted web sessions and secure e-commerce transactions, and is compatible with 128-bit secure socket layer (SSL) encryption. The smaller files created through RAPID's data compression logarithms will assist in allowing storage of more data in the same profile.

Test Run