Digital Fountain is touting a way to avoid the hassle of maintaining large server or cache farms in order to ensure fast Web performance, by using a combination of math algorithms and IP multicasting.
"Our strength is when there's concurrency-many people fetching the same object-that's where the power of multicast comes in," said Cliff Meltzer, president and CEO of start-up Digital Fountain.
Digital Fountain breaks information into packets and sends them over the network. Because of this packet-type delivery, users can turn off their computers or disconnect from the Internet, and, once reconnected, can resume downloading, Meltzer added.
"For very popular stuff or very large objects where there's concurrency, this is a better delivery system [than caching] because latency is improved as the system gets busier," Meltzer said.
Meltzer said the company is also looking at video and audio content delivery as well as software downloads as potential new applications for its technology.
Digital Fountain, in San Francisco, is at www.dfountain.com.
This story from Infoworld.com Copyright © 2000 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
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