Industry Watch: Clients augment the Web experience
November 1, 2009 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Travel reservations. Shopping. Banking. Entertainment. Work. News. All from home, all brought to you by the Internet.
For the most part, we all know how to find what we’re looking for. We can either type in a URL, or go to a search engine and input our request. We can scroll through a list of pages, and if none seem an exact match to our request, we can open them one at a time, going back to the search engine list to find the next one to explore.
Phil Windley, founder and CTO of a company called Kynetx, believes the experience can be made easier and more useful. He’s already talking about the next era of Internet use, something he calls the “purpose-based Web.” And his way of getting there, interestingly enough, is via the client.
You read that right. Windley’s vision, in its simplest terms, involves making the desktop more than a mere renderer of what some HTML writer wanted it to be.
“People go to the Web to accomplish something,” Windley said, “and it’s often the case that you have to go to multiple websites to accomplish this. As soon as you talk about coordinating actions across multiple sites, it makes more sense to do it on the client.”
Kynetx has created a framework for developing client-side applications that enhance the browser experience. And one of the company’s VARs, Azigo, built a tool for the AAA motor club that lets its members see places that offer discounts when they perform Google searches for such places as restaurants, hotels and motels.
The AAA, he said, says the No. 1 determinant of whether people renew their memberships is if they’ve availed themselves of discounts. Most members don’t, he said, because it’s often too difficult to find all the places that offer them.
“By combining data with the [websites] you’re visiting, it eases the experience and makes it more useful,” Windley said. “You can imagine things that are more complex.”
Windley said another partner created an application that lets people searching for movies know if a particular movie can be run with a “ClearPlay” filter. ClearPlay is a technology that can filter objectionable material out of films so the whole family can watch together. Users can choose from a dozen settings categories to customize the filter. So, if a movie buff is on Netflix, for instance, and has the ClearPlay client application, his search through Netflix will tell him which movies have the ClearPlay capability.
Related Search Term(s): Kynetx
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