Departments
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2 July 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 1 |
Feature
Article
BU Internet start-up offers Web access at net speed
By David J. Craig
If you've ever waited aeons for your office computer to download a Web site or deliver an anticipated e-mail message, you are not alone. But many Internet users soon will spend less time waiting on the Web and have more time to surf it, thanks to "caching" devices that store Web content close to users so it can be accessed without a browser connecting to the original site.
And as a result of the entrepreneurship of two CAS professors, BU has a prime stake in the emerging market for caching products, which one industry expert predicts will grow to close to $3 billion in the next two to three years.
DynaCache, created by InfoLibria, Inc., a Waltham-based company started by CAS Associate Professor Abdelsalam Heddaya and CAS Assistant Professor David Yates with financial backing from the University, allows Web content such as graphics, audio, and video to be stored, or "cached," on a company's intranet for easy access.
Composed of a Pentium II-based server and a storage device called a cache, DynaCache detects Web sites viewed most frequently in an office and copies them in order to speed future access.
"A typical Web page has some objects on it that rarely change, like a company logo, and some objects that change all the time and shouldn't be stored locally at all," explains John Katsaros, president of Collaborative Research, a Los Altos, Calif., analysis firm that specializes in caching. "Caching is a process that negotiates those decisions. These systems figure out what can be stored locally and what must be updated."
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Ashley Stevens, director of the Office of Technology Transfer in the BU Community Technology Fund, calls InfoLibria, Inc. a "model spin-out company." Photo by Fred Sway |
InfoLibria is now aiming to solidify its ground in the high-tech marketplace by applying the caching technology Heddaya and Yates developed at BU to other uses, such as sending feature films over the Internet.
"What we've done is bought a ticket into the market," says Heddaya. "The test in the next few months will be in engineering and creativity, in the sense that there is an opportunity to apply the caching technology to do other things. That is where our academic heritage will be leveraged most."
Traditionally, a company's browser can store previously viewed Web pages on a personal computer or on a server. But industry experts say caching devices such as DynaCache -- which itself costs between $10,000 and $120,000, depending on the size of the network it is designed to support -- are the most efficient way to store Web content.
And because DynaCache is separate from a company's server, in addition to speeding Web access it also avoids overloading the congested Internet backbone, thereby decreasing bandwidth consumption and freeing the server to handle other online transactions.
"A caching device can save a company money [by decreasing bandwidth consumption], but in North America what really drives the Internet economy is speed," continues Katsaros. "The Web has gotten faster in the last two or three years because there is a lot of caching already in place. It's going to be a $2 billion to $3 billion dollar business by 2002. DynaCache is an important product in that area."
InfoLibria was founded in 1997 by Heddaya and Yates, who along with Ph.D student Sulaiman Murdad discovered in 1994 that Internet connection rates could be speeded up by storing information directly on a network.
After licensing the patent BU received for their work, Heddaya and Yates took a leave of absence to start their business. BU's Community Technology Fund (CTF), which protects patents based on research conducted at BU, gave the professors permission to use the patent and helped them obtain venture capital from outside sources in exchange for stock in InfoLibria and a share of royalties from sales.
The agreement between CTF and InfoLibria also mandated that the company must make its first commercial sale by July 31, 1999, a deadline the company beat by nearly six months, according to Ashley Stevens, director of CTF's technology transfer office. Recently, InfoLibria issued BU its first royalty check.
"Usually it takes a very long time to develop an academic invention to be sold commercially," explains Stevens, adding that it has taken 6 to 10 years for CTF to see any return on some of its investments, which mostly have been ventures in the biomedical industry. "That the University saw a return from this in less than two years is incredible. And this is one of the first CTF-financed companies to come out of the computer science department. That's another one of the attractions with this product."
But the heat is still on InfoLibria, as at least 25 other caching products have hit the market recently. "The next 24 months is going to be like the Indy 500," says Katsaros. "There are a lot of caching solutions out there."
While InfoLibria has not made public any sales figures or its financial report for fiscal 1999, the company recently raised $15 million in a second round of financing and will launch its second product within weeks, according to Sarah Lawson, director of marketing and communications at InfoLibria.
MediaMall, a multimedia-delivery appliance that improves the quality of multimedia on the Internet, should deliver TV-quality video and stereo-quality audio over the Internet, Lawson says.
"In three years, you might not have to go down to Blockbuster to see a movie," says Katsaros. "To me, the thing that's great about InfoLibria is they're breaking new ground for streaming media with MediaMall, taking the technology the closest we have to allowing video on demand. Not a lot of people are doing that."
For more information about caching, locate the Web site of Collaborative Research at www.caching.com or visit InfoLibria's at www.InfoLibria.com.