|
|
| |
| Main | Digital Article | ||
Page 2 Search Center Past Editions
News Business Features Opinion Columns Culture Jewish World Good Food Sports Books Tourism Real Estate Digital Israel Health This Day Looking Back Shabbat Center Weather
JerusaleMail Personals Readers' Letters Feedback
Study in Israel Tourism 2000 Charities
New: Palm Post Subscriptions E-mail Edition Classifieds Shopping Software Travel JPost CD-Rom
Media Kit Sales Staff Emails About Us Links
Papal Visit Purim Millennium Snow in Jer. Elections99
JRep.com Bank Leumi Bank Discount Eretz Mag IASPS ShoutMail Babylon |
|||||||||
 |
| Monday, July 31 2000 01:20 28 Tammuz 5760 |
|
BmyPC, or be without By Buzzy Gordon (July 30) -- The world is your own digital oyster, in the vision of Israeli start-up BmyPC, which allows users to take their private or business virtual environments anywhere and everywhere the Internet reaches -- Be everywhere, or you might as well not be. That seems to be the message the hi-tech world is sending us today, with all the emphasis on wireless communication, cellphones, location-based services, etc. And consumers are buying it: the message as well as the medium. The explosion of Web-based e-mail hosts (such as Hotmail, Mail.com, Yahoo, The Jerusalem Post's Jerusalemail, etc. - all offering free e-mail service) means that people want to be able to access their e-mail wherever they might be: at home, in school, at the office, traveling, virtually anywhere. The proliferation of virtual hard drives is an extension of the same phenomenon. When you store files on I-drive, x-drive, Freedrive and the like, you can retrieve them from anywhere you can log on to the Internet. (Note: They are also great for backing up valuable material, in addition to on floppy disks.) And you can share files with colleagues traveling on the road, or with family overseas, by letting them in on the password. Application service provider (ASP) BmyPC is the logical extension of this trend. "We allow you to access your own desktop from anywhere in the world," says Yuval Eyal, president and co-founder of the Tel Aviv-based company that was founded just one year ago and already employs 30 people: 27 in Israel (about half of whom toil in R&D) and three in a Silicon Valley office. "From your own favorite wallpaper, to all the files and Internet bookmarks that you have created in your home or back at the office, your personal, comfortable environment follows you on the Internet, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Eyal explains. "BmyPC not only replicates your own familiar digital world but adds enhancements as well. Naturally, we offer the basics, like Web-based e-mail, in conjunction with Commtouch, and network storage solutions, powered by Nasdaq-listed Network Appliance. But BmyPC comprises many other features as well, including a fully customizable interface, file-sharing, calendaring, third party applications, file mirroring, search engines, Internet telephony, reference works (like a dictionary), content management and more. All this on a platform that possesses multi-lingual capability (nine languages), effective security and authentication procedures, and works equally well with all the major operating systems: Windows, Macintosh and Unix." ACCORDING TO Eyal, who also serves as the company's business development manager, this international, secure and universal platform is what gives BmyPC the qualitative advantage over would-be competitors like Desktop.com and WebOS. "Neither of them can match us in performance, speed, versatility or range of services," he claims. Fortunately for BmyPC, Eyal and the company's management team - co-founder and CTO Dror Shalev, VP Marketing and Sales Eran Pfeffer and CEO Yossi Cohen - were able to convince important investors and backers of their product's uniqueness. Among the leading Israeli businessman affiliated as private investors and shareholders in, and advisors to, BmyPC are Doron Steiger, former CEO of the Israel Corporation, Meir Laser, current chairman of Barak, and Danny Gilboa, former VP of sales for IBM Israel. The venture capital funding for BmyPC has come from Ramat Gan-based Technoplast Techno logies, in the form of $350,000 in seed money, and more recently from Start-Up Station (SRS), a publicly traded venture capital firm from London that made its debut investment in Israel when it injected $2 million into the company in May of this year. "SRS has given us more than working capital," Eyal notes. "They have placed three business development professionals at our disposal, and they have been instrumental in securing us our first customers, who are located in Europe. "Foremost among them is the French student portal ICICampus, which has a pan-European reach. We believe that students and university faculty will be an important market for us, since BmyPC will provide seamless integration for students and lecturers between their computers at home, on campus, in libraries or while studying with friends." Pierre Chaker, president of ICICampus, agrees. "The alliance between BmyPC and ICICampus empowers our site by providing our users a unique set of services. In France, 50% of students own computers; and those who do not will be able to use the PC's of their university on an ongoing basis, without being dependent on their hardware." STILL, THE PRIMARY target market for BmyPC is the corporate world. "We offer our services to individuals free of charge, from our website (www.bmypc.com)," Eyal discloses. "But our revenues will come from partnering and co-branding with ISPs (Internet service providers), ASPs, portals, vertical markets, communities - especially geared to the professions, such as lawyers, doctors, etc. - and large and small businesses, including SoHo (small office, home office). "For example," he continues, "BmyPC offers a significant advantage over the traditional way of networking computers in an enterprise. For a large corporation, we integrate their Intranet into each executive's, salesperson's or secretary's personally tailored and familiar working environment. This is especially important when you have a mobile workforce, with personnel on the road or even overseas calling on clients and customers. "For a small company, particularly one which may have one or two remote branch offices, we provide a much less expensive, quicker and more convenient networking solution than contracting an IT (information technology) company to set up a WAN or LAN operation." Eyal reveals that the BmyPC website is undergoing a facelift to reflect the upgraded business-to-business (B2B) focus. "We have a distinct, value-added proposition for businesses, ISPs, ASPs, and communities that each have hundreds, thousands, or maybe millions of users. That is why it makes more sense for us to target these sectors rather than go after individual end-users one by one. "We will charge organizations on a per-user, per year basis, with the cost ranging from $5-$50 depending on the number of services or in-house solutions they select, as well as on the number of end-users registered. From then on, however, all extra revenue streams belong not to BmyPC but rather to our client. If they wish to put advertising on the virtual desktop, for example, they will be free to do so, and collect the revenues accordingly." Another potentially lucrative client-base for BmyPC is hardware vendors. "We are negotiating with a major computer manufacturer to include our package in their product, much like word-processing and other software is already bundled into the purchase price of computers systems today," Eyal says. Finally, the driving force behind all the demand
for fingertip convenience while on the move is not being forgotten. "BmyPC
will be riding the wireless revolution like everyone else," Eyal notes.
"We are already testing our platform on WAP-enabled menu mobile phones and
the newer generation of Internet-connected cellular phones, although it
will take us longer to be fully functional on PDA's, like the Palm.
Naturally, the range of services will be more limited, due to memory
constraints; but we will still be out in front with such critical features
as being able to send files as e-mails from wherever users' cellular
phones keep them in contact." Previous Next Digital
|
|
|
|
|
.gif){kind=small} |
|
| News,
Business, Features, Opinion, Columns, Culture,
Food, Sports, Books, Tourism, Real Estate,
Digital, Health This Day, Looking Back, Shabbat Center, Dry Bones, Weather, Readers' Letters Front Page, Page 2, Center, Past Editions, JerusaleMail, Shopping, Personals, Classifieds, Palm Post |
Palm Post Edition sponsored by Davka Corporation. |
.gif){kind=small}
.gif){kind=small}
.gif){kind=small}