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Chris Hassett thinks that searching for news on the Web is a hassle, so he created PointCast, a screen saver that delivers news directly from the Internet to a PC. After this interview was conducted, PointCast Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., announced it had signed an agreement with Cable News Network to add news from CNN's Web site, CNN Interactive, to the PointCast service.
UPSIDE: Why did you start the company? HarsT: I felt that the on-line information industry was not evolving in the proper direction. It was too difficult for the average person to get any benefit from the online space. The original concept of the company was to make it a lot easier to access information in on-line services. Back in 1992, the Internet was just beginning to take off. As it did, we took some of the same principles the company was founded on and applied them to the Internet.
How does PointCast make accessing informa tion easier? PointCast is a software application that replaces your screen saver with up-to-the-minute news. You don't have to do anything. We have a server system that is operating on three T3 lines, which means it's quite busy all day long, and it is sending out current information we pick up through satellite feeds.
How did you come up with the idea? Think of some of the models people have been comfortable with in the past: print, broadcast radio, broadcast television. You could just consume it passively. We thought the same method of communicating was also important to users of the Internet.
I heard you were sitting in a hot tub when you came up with the idea. Actually, I was in a hotel room, about a year into the company's formation. We were talking to on-line services, newspapers, magazine publishers, broadcasters, trying to understand how they felt the Internet could be best used. I was on the phone talking to Jim Reilly, my vice president of strategy, and we collectively said, "You know, there's a period of time that's fairly frequent throughout the day that we can turn your computer into a broadcast receiver, and that's what we're going to do."
So the hot tub story isn't true? I know hot tubs are involved...