Web/E-business /

Digital Harbor on right course

By Paul McNamara
Network World, 10/22/01

Unseemly though it may appear - or be, in certain cases - there's no denying that companies are reaping business benefits from the horror of Sept. 11.

Digital Harbor is among those experiencing such a boon, but it's doing so by virtue of timing and necessity, as opposed to exploitation.

With roots in the secretive defense industry, Digital Harbor is going commercial this fall with its Personal Interactive Information Environment. PiiE is a server-based platform for "blending" a wide variety of wildly different content types and applications into a package that can be streamed over any client device - including a Web-enabled phone - so that the whole becomes greater than the pieces.

Since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it has become clear that mountains of potentially important information about terrorists exist within the intelligence community, but there is no way for that data to be stitched together and shared, says Digital Harbor founder Rohit Agarwal.

"How do you make [a variety of data types and formats] more meaningful and how do you make it more useful" is what PiiE is about, Agarwal says. "It is really made up of blended media and object media. Object media is the engine that defines business [objectives] - a new way to integrate different kinds of data sources, processes and rules. Blended media is a new presentation layer. Not only is it 'hyper-OLE' [Object Linking and Embedding] but it's also Web-enabled. It doesn't sit on your client, it streams to you."

That streaming occurs "just enough, just in time," Agarwal says, so as to make PiiE practical for bandwidth-strapped clients.

"You can customize this whole thing within a matter of 30 minutes; it's totally drag and drop," he boasts.

Digital Harbor is a 5-year-old subsidiary of Eidea Labs that employs about 80 technologists in Provo, Utah, and Annandale, Va. The company has subsisted on Department of Defense contracts that totaled in the mid-seven figures this year and will roughly double next year, Agarwal says.

That funding boost and heightened sense of urgency toward PiiE on the part of the government are directly attributable to the events of Sept. 11, he adds.

PiiE sounds intriguing, but haven't we heard such integration claims before?

"You've heard it from big companies that just continue to repurpose or repackage what they already have," Agarwal says. "Or you've heard it from start-up companies that don't have five years to build 10 million lines of code."

Do the Fandango

The Internet needs more Fandangos: companies that identify common aggravations and apply just enough technology to make them go away.

Fandango lets moviegoers order tickets over the Internet, and, in a growing number of cities, print out a bar code that when scanned by the theater ticket-taker gets one into the movie without having to wait in a line.

How sweet is that?

Last week the company announced it is expanding its print-at-home network into the Boston area, including the General Cinema Framingham Theatre, which is up the road a piece from Network World. (A bit of trivia: This cinema is located at 22 Flutie Pass, the street named in honor of Doug Flutie, who starred at nearby Natick High School before winning the Heisman Trophy at Boston College).

Buzz has yet to try Fandango's print-at-home feature, which means there is no way for me to vouch for the quality of the experience. So if any of you have had occasion to give print-at-home a go, please drop me a line and we'll share your scouting report in a future column.

In the meantime, we need another entrepreneur to do something about those lines at the refreshment counter.

Send ticket-buying tales or general comments to buzz@nww.com.