RELEASE: FALL
Beam Me the Money
The check comes to $22 per person, but everybody's got twenties and the weary cashier is short on singles. Luckily, the whole gang has PayPal accounts, so you pick up the tab and everyone whips out their Palms to pay you back.
What just happened? You've been treated to PayPal, a free, downloadable Palm and Windows CE app that communicates with your bank and credit card accounts so you can exchange money with others in any amount.
Two PayPal-equipped PDAs transfer funds to each other via their IR ports. The actual bank transaction occurs the next time the recipient syncs up. One PDA can install PayPal onto another before "beaming" it a deposit, or it can send money to an email account - the payee receives a message that the money is waiting.
PayPal's maker, Confinity, expects to profit from the free service by collecting interest on PayPal account balances. Poker night will never be the same.
PayPal: free. Confinity: +1 (650) 566 3645, www.paypal.com.
RELEASE: NOVEMBER
Line of Site
Inxight's Site Lensinterface makes a strong first impression: Finally, a Web-site map that lets you see the forest and the trees. Instead of sifting through an interminable listing of bulleted subsections and category bars, you get a stylish, intuitive overview in the form of a "hyperbolic tree." Previously custom-built exclusively for big sites like The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, Inxight's site maps are now within the reach of any PC-based Web designer.
Site Lens makes sites easier to navigate by clearly laying out their entire structure. Simple org-chart-like box-and-line diagrams may work for small sites, but because information trees grow exponentially as you follow links from a homepage, mapping mammoth sites this way makes it hard to find anything.
Instead of simply representing a flat surface, Site Lens puts Web information onto a hyperbolic plane, a surface that displays exponential growth perfectly. The result looks as if it's been mapped onto a mountain seen from above. Details can be viewed up close in the middle, but neighboring parts of the diagram fade into the distance. As you move the map around, it's always easy to keep a sense of the whole. After you run a search, results stick out like bright-parka'd skiers on a fresh slope.
The x in Inxight recalls the company's beginnings at Xerox PARC, birthplace of such great interfaces as the mouse and the pulldown menu. Inxight builds both visualization and extraction tools: As chief technologist Ramana Rao describes it, visualization helps humans understand computer information, while extraction helps computers understand human information. Either way, these interface whizzes have again enhanced the dialogue between man and machine.
Site Lens Studio: $4,995. Inxight Software: (877) 469 4448, www.inxight.com.
RELEASE: OCTOBER
Content Dog Tag
Information may want to be free, but its creators have to get paid. That's the idea behind the Magex service from international bank NatWest.
Starting this month, consumers in the US and Europe can use a Magex ewallet to purchase songs online. Magex handles payment and security for any kind of intellectual property sold over the Internet - not just music - so publishers can charge you a tiny fee each time you listen to a song or read a report online.
Eventually, as the service rolls out, everyone - from authors to the fringiest record-industry hangers-on - will get their piece of the pie right away. Magex encrypts the content in a wrapper that can hold complex royalty-payment rules such as, "Give away a song's first two minutes, then charge full price for it, and discount the cost a week later."
NatWest, the London-based financial group, envisions a day when its service will allow consumers to download a band's audio track, buy the video for a little bit more, obtain the lyrics, and buy tickets to the next concert. And if fans really like what they've bought, they can email it to their friends - who, of course, will pay to view, too.
NatWest: +44 (171) 302 4617, www.magex.com.
STREET CRED
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Get Back to Work
The Law of the Code
Speakers, Medium Rare
Monster Rumble
Email Made Easy
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Mad as Hell
Van vs. Pea
Amphibious Assault
Just Outta Beta
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