It's an intranet world

ANY remaining doubts that the Internet's real market is business were swept away under the smoggy skies and palm trees of Los Angeles recently as exhibitors at the world's largest Internet show focused most of their energies on the corporate customer.

Internet World, born and bred 350 miles north in San Jose, outgrew its hometown this year and has headed south to the angular glass and steel of the Los Angeles Convention Center. And the symbolism is apt wrenched out of the geek and techie world of Silicon Valley, the show has lost much of its former quirkiness and sense of fun, opting instead for slick floor emporiums from the big computer companies.

Last year's keynote speakers featured big names - Microsoft's Bill Gates, NeXT/Pixar's Steve Jobs, Oracle's Larry Ellison - speaking about computing and the Internet in general, in talks aimed equally at the home and business user. But this year, the opening keynote by Digital's chief executive Bob Palmer was squarely aimed at the enterprise, and other keynotes featured vice presidents of the Internet business divisions of companies such as IBM.

However, the business market does not primarily mean companies interested in trading over the Net, although there were plenty of exhibitors showing applications for electronic commerce, and Visa was there to make a pitch for its SET standards for safe credit card transactions over the Internet, developed with MasterCard.

Now the focus is on the massive appetite for intranets, internal corporate Internet style networks which are sealed off from the outside world with protective firewalls.

"The intranet market is the biggest market," said Digital's Richard Mace. "Last year at Internet World, it was mostly hot web sites and content development - it was the Internet that was sizzling. This year, the intranet is really what this industry's about," he said. "It's where the big investment is going."

Digital is working hard to redefine itself as an Internet/intranet focused company. After a tentative start it has rebranded all its Net oriented products under the AltaVista name, capitalising on the popularity of its showcase Internet search engine, which currently handles 30 million queries a day.

The bizarre display of the show belonged to Hewlett Packard, which built a mini Tudor style village complete with vine entwined buildings and fairyland banners, all of which looked as if it had been imported from Disneyland a few miles away. A number of puzzled attendees tried to decipher the intended metaphor; eventually someone hazarded a guess that it might portray. .. a global village?

It was the little booths on the periphery which were the most fun. Webcasting is big: Black Diamond had an impressive set up for authoring and viewing "surround video", which offered 360 panoramas, while Personal Web Cast from Galacticomm offered a consumer level product which enables home users to broadcast video and audio from their own web sites. All that's needed is a digital camera and a PC.

If that makes you nervous, you could opt instead for Israeli company Geo's Emblaze, a multimedia authoring tool specifically for the web; they claim a 400 per cent improvement in data compression rates and the ability to author once and play back on any platform. Their demo, "broadcast on a 28.8 connection rather than the hall's lSDN lines, was impressive and drew crowds.

The funky German company Black Sun showed off its server and plug in which transform web sites into 2-D and 3-D worlds; its chatroom "avatars" - 3-D characters users can adopt when they enter a 3-D chatroom - change the whole nature of online chat by giving participants a surreal "body".

But if, at the end of the day, you felt completely Netted out "and ready to inflict a little HTML violence, SegaSoft understood. Web Vengeance, downloadable from its web site, features an arsenal of pies, eggs, AK47s, shotguns and other arms that web surfers can fire at their most hated web sites. The resultant splats and bullet holes appear only on the user's screen they don't actually damage the real site - but users can save the screen to be posted to SegaSoft's Hall of Shame.