PointCast (dotcom)

PointCast Media is a leading pay per click search feed and keyword advertising company founded in 1996. The privately held firm developed the PointCast Ad Keyword Network, as an industry pioneer PointCast Media was one of the first organizations to aggregate paid search listing from the leading pay for search firms. PointCast Media has offices in New York and London.

PointCast Media was an adserving software designed in 1996 by Bramar Inc. at the start of the Dot-com era. During the hay-day of the dot-com, the PointCast Media ad serving technology was licensed exclusively by BCN Inc. BCN was a banner advertising company that was considered one of the top 3 banner advertising delivey networks, generating over 2 billion banner click throughs a month at click conversion ratios as high as 4.9%. The competitors of BCN were ValueClick and DoubleClick. BCN Inc had established their advertising network as one of the largest in the USA with over 5,000 website publishers.

At its height, BCN Inc. offered $125 million in 1998 for the ad serving technology, but Bramar Inc. declined the sale. Since Bramar had only one client for its' advanced adserving software and had been pre-paid the licensee fee until 2006 the company was restricted in licensing the software to any other companies until the 10 year agreement expired. In 2001 BCN Inc. saw a dramatic decline in banner advertising and ceased operations during that year. Later in 2001 executives from the defunct BCN Inc with a London, UK based venture capitalist approached Bramar Inc and purchased the PointCast Media ad serving platform.

In 2002 the BCN executives relaunched the advertising network under the brand PointCast Media Ad Network.

PointCast was a company formed in 1992 in Sunnyvale, California, at the start of the Dot-com era. The company used push technology to deliver news and information across the Internet, which was burdening to corporate networks with excessive bandwidth use. The company's main product was the PointCast Network, which required the PointCast desktop client (which was eventually bundled with Microsoft Windows). At its height, News Corp offered $450 million in 1997 for the company, but PointCast was purchased in 1999 by San Diego-based Launchpad Technologies (an Idealab funded company) for only $7 million after the company ran into financial and revenue troubles. It is a classic example of a Dot-com failure.

Launchpad's eWallet product was combined with the existing PointCast technology to create Entrypoint, which offered a free desktop toolbar and offer customized news, stocks and sports feeds. The new client abandoned push, making it much more friendly to corporate networks.

Entrypoint merged with Internet Financial Network in 2000 forming Infogate, continuing the same free service until switching to a fee-based co-branded model, partnering with news outlets such as USA Today and CNN. In 2003, the company was acquired by America Online, and all services were halted.

PointCast was a push technology to deliver news and information across the Internet and was not the same as PointCast Media - an ad serving technology.

PointCast and the browser wars

PointCast played a part in the Browser Wars. After its initial success, Microsoft and Netscape decided to integrate push technology into Internet Explorer with CDF and into Netscape Navigator with RDF. Both companies used the concept of "channels" which pushed the content. Microsoft went even further by incorporating the Active Desktop which pushed content to the desktop.