Net Sapient
When Levi's wants to know who's taking liberties with its silverTab brand or spreading Web rumors about Engineered Jeans, it turns to Cyveillance (www.cyveillance.com), an Arlington, Virginia-based company cofounded by brothers Brandy and Jason Thomas. Jason helped build Cyveillance's NetSapien search engine, which scours the Net to retrieve and classify uses of a company's name, logo, even its jingle. (Deployed by a roster of Fortune 500 firms, NetSapien technology was recently inducted into the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology.) Brandy, the CEO and chair, triple-majored at Duke - computer science plus biomedical and electrical engineering - and has an MBA from Stanford. He outshines almost everyone but his MIT-educated sibling. Says Brandy, "He's always made me look like a slacker."
Bleu Sky
With studios racing to promote their films online, Shawn Johnson's interactive design house Bleu22 (www.bleu22.com) has never been busier. "We've met with just about every major studio recently," says Johnson, who's more than doubled his staff in less than two years. The onetime Ray Gun magazine designer has created sites for Toy Story and the South Park movie, and is known for his high-voltage destinations (a single page can run 250K). Bleu22 is booked solid through the summer blockbuster season, designing sites ranging from DreamWorks' Gladiator to MGM's Autumn in New York (starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder). The gig Johnson wants next? The Matrix sequels, which he calls "the golden goose of film site design."
Zilla App
Five years and 10 million JavaScript pages ago, Netscape engineer Brendan Eich designed the easy-to-use Web programming language and launched the company's open source initiative. Now Eich is lead architect of Netscape's all-new Mozilla browser (www.mozilla.org), available as a preview release. The software, with an open source license and Eich's JavaScript engine, will go where no browser has gone before: into embedded systems, Windows-based and beyond. Eich is one of the few old-timers still left at Netscape, but as he sees it, all of those Netscapee startups are now part of the expanding Mozilla universe. Says Eich, "Companies I could have gone to are using significant pieces of my baby."
Lit Player
"A small company with big texts" is how Jeffery Triggs describes Global Language Resources (www.global-language.com), his one-man online Modern Library that launches this month. Aimed at academics, college students, librarians, and other lovers of literature, GLR features SGML full-text versions of nearly 600 lit classics, and a custom search engine to help wordnerds navigate these texts and the rest of the Web-enabled canon. Triggs, a former Rutgers English professor, is no stranger to big texts: He developed the working prototype of the recently launched Oxford English Dictionary online (www.oed.com). GLR has an equally geeky digital dictionary, the D++, available to subscribers for considerably less than the OED's $550 a year. "I'm not trying to be as big as Yahoo!" says Triggs. "I'm hoping to create something people will read and use."
MUST READ
The Micro Browser War
The Tax Man Dot-Cometh
The Net Addiction Addiction
Ask Dr. Bob
Ethernet Unbound
Engage Holographic Drive Now
Beam Me Up, Voxar
People
Jargon Watch
The Longest Yard
Net Softwear
You-Boat
Serf Engine
Making the Waves
Raw Data
