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You said what?!
ENow wants to track every word you type in a chat room and peruse the results to divine the "global collective consciousness."
By Janelle Brown
[02/25/00]

Linux in every lap
Stars of the original Mac development team try to solve one of the hottest puzzles in technology today: How to make the Linux desktop user-friendly.
By Lydia Lee
[02/24/00]

Books
The essence of geekdom
Can you create an accurate dissertation on nerd subculture by studying two young Idahoans? Jon Katz gives it a try in "Geeks."
By Thomas Scoville
[02/23/00]

Technology: View from the top
It's about relationships
Do women have a natural edge in tech-support innovation? That's the word from Support.com CEO Radha Basu.
By Mark Compton
[02/22/00]

Column
Lonesome Internet blues, take 2
Another day, another dubious study finds that the Net makes you lonely -- and the press goes nuts.
By Scott Rosenberg
[02/18/00]

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But the regional indifference of the Web is a quality some entrepreneurs and technologists are eager to upend. Several firms are developing software that could create "borders" on the Net -- allowing sites to serve different content to different regions. Even the brash founder of iCraveTV, Bill Craig, says he's developing technology that will show sites where you are when you log on, so they can build pages targeted to people in that region. If MTV, for example, decided to use such technology, it could mean that when I typed in www.mtv.com from Latin America I'd be sent to www.mtvla.com -- "La Vida Loca" and all.

"It would be a huge breakthrough for the Internet and for copyright holders," Craig says. Of course, he, too, stands to benefit: He'd like to segment the Web into regions in order to stream U.S. television broadcasts to online viewers abroad. He launched iCraveTV in November, offering free Web access to live TV programming, with ads framing the picture. A month later, the people who own the broadcast rights to the shows he was intercepting, including the NFL, the NBA and 10 movie studios -- none of which had agreed to the re-broadcasting -- filed suit against iCraveTV for copyright infringement. In January, a judge ordered iCraveTV to stop streaming.

Now, Craig hopes that his version of "geographic intelligence" technology will come to iCraveTV's rescue -- and maybe grow into a more lucrative business than streaming TV. "We want to build a business where we can go to rights holders and say, 'You want it released only in Canada, you've got it; in the U.S., you've got it,'" says Craig, who expects the still unnamed software to be available by summer's end.

Whether Craig, who is a businessman and not a technologist, can pull it off is something only time can tell; but there are technology companies that share his vision. Ad-serving companies like DoubleClick offer services that they say can target ads to users by location. And Digital Island introduced technology last year called TraceWare, which can identify the location of Web site visitors with 96 percent accuracy.

TraceWare works by scanning worldwide traffic as it passes through ISPs, then matching users' IP addresses with a database of IP address locations that Digital Island has built. Before rendering a page, sites, including the Financial Times, can use TraceWare to determine a user's location and load pages with the appropriate language, content and even the right currencies. So far, though, companies like Digital Island are unable to guarantee absolute accuracy; 96 percent is pretty good -- but not always good enough. When eBay considered holding firearm auctions last year, for example, it wanted to know with 100 percent accuracy that sales were being made only to U.S. customers. Neither eBay nor Digital Island could bridge the 4 percent gap, says Neil Henry, the senior product manager who is largely responsible for the TraceWare technology.

Craig thinks he's got it figured out and is collaborating with Digital Island to fill the slim crack in accuracy -- but he was unable to provide any evidence that he has solved the riddle. He wants a patent, he says, before he reveals his secrets. Meanwhile, others are trying to patch that same hole, and could radically change our Web experience.

Next page | Will geographical intelligence allow for the censoring of pro-democracy sites in Indonesia?