Software Review

PointCast

PointCast allows the intallation of a personalized news service in your computer. News channels selected by you update your hard disk many times a day. ;

Intermedic: A Journal on Internet and Medicine

[ How it Works | Additional Resources ]

An American company called Pointcast (http://www.pointcast.com), has developed a system that allows putting in your computer a personalized Internet news service, using a new technology called "push". It has received this name because it is a point-to-point news transmission, from generator to receptor, as opposed to the unidirectional transmission of standard programs, like in newspapers, TV and radio, which is called "broadcasting". In this way, you are not required to visit often your favorite Internet sites, in order to get the desired information by means of the traditional "pull" technology (the WWW browser).

The PointCast system is not the only product using this technology in the market (there are many others, such as Castanet, BackWeb, etc.), but is one of the best, and it has the largest number of subscribers.

How it Works

PointCast uses a special software, which you can download freely through the Internet and install into your computer. It is a kind of specialized "browser", or Internet "client" software, similar in operation to Netscape or Internet Explorer, with one difference: it receives continuously multimedia material from the transmitter. The transmitter resides in a PointCast server located elsewhere, which establishes periodically connections to all registered clients, and "pushes" the contents (hence the name) to the computers where they are installed. The news then become available for off-line browsing. You have many ways of personalizing the PointCast client, by specifying, for example the periodicity of news updating (two, three or more times a day, in pre-determined hours), your network's speed you want to subscribe to, etc. Communication between server and clients and the storage of news occur automatically, without your intervention, but you can order updates anytime.

The PointCast client's channel selection screen.

One very interesting aspect of pointcasting is the possibility of making a list of subjects and/or news sources you wish to receive. There are many general news sources available in PointCast, such as American newspapers, CNN, etc. Specific subjects news like Internet, stock exchange quotations, companies, health news, metereology, ecology, entertainment, sports, etc. can be selected and added to your personal interests profile. PointCast sends you only the news which fit your topics profile. For example, health news are generated by John Hopkins University Medical School, one of the best in USA, by a service called "InteliHealth", and are subdivided in subtopics (women´s health, men´s health, children´s, etc.)

The PointCast client can be set in such a way that it monitors continuosly your Internet connection. An optional screen saver displays in real time the abstracts of available news.

An example of a PointCast screen saver, created dynamically by the client software

Additional Resources

Another powerful resource provided by the PointCast client is that it can launch Netscape or other general Internet browser in your machine, accessing directly any WWW site that contains additional information. PointCast's health articles from IntelliHealth and CNN, for example contain links to many other related articles and news available on the Web.

PointCast´s software is easy to use, and once installed and personalized, works in a totally automatic way. Updating is relatively fast, but those who access Internet only few hours a day, using dial-up connections, must be careful to avoid connection congestion in the moment of the updating (the ideal situation for those who want to use PointCast is a permanent connectioin to Internet).