------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTERVIEW WITH ????? | Weekly Interviews with the Movers and Shakers! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I read a bunch of weekly computer magazines. InfoWorld is my favorite. I like their balanced look at things and I like the freedom they give their columnists. Anyway, Bob Metcalfe, the FATHER of Ethernet, writes a column for them called From the Ether. He happened to mention news services a few weeks back. One caught my eye -- Farcast. Farcast is a news service that will send you email news updates from multiple sources throughout the day. In addition, you can have up to 15 droids working for you combing through the news looking for a rules based topic that you setup. THIS SERVICE IS WORTH IT! You can check them out at WWW.FARCAST.COM or send an email to INFO@FARCAST.COM. Wanting to learn more, we invited the CEO, Jim Opfer (jim@farcast.com), to an electronic interview. He agreed, so here it is: PG: Where did Farcast come from? What was the inspiration? JO: Farcast was conceived in concept in the late '80s by Jayson Adams and Scott Love who had a vision of electronic "customized news for the masses" and not the high prices that people like Dow Jones and others were charging. Jim Opfer was a Colonel in the Air Force at the time, and became friends of both Scott Love and Jayson Adams when they worked at NeXT computers. Jim built large networks for the intelligence community and in his earlier Air Force days he spent almost five years working for President Reagan in White House Communications. In a roundabout way, Jim is actually the seed investor in Farcast. Right after Scott and Jayson left NeXT computers and started Millennuim Software Labs, Jim gave Scott and Jayson Air Force Research and Development money to develop a product for the desktop NeXT computers that the Air Force had several thousand of. Scott and Jayson subsequently delivered a product from that R&D project and used the proceeds from the product's revenue to build Farcast. By the time farcast was in design, Jim had retired from the Air Force and was running his own consulting company in mobile and wireless communications. Jim quickly became customer number 4 of farcast and guided Scott and Jayson through the design based on his experience with delivering near-real time critical information to people, both in the White House and the Intelligence Community. In December 1994, Jim and his partner Alan Beringsmith purchased Farcast, recapitalized the company and brought in a subsequent round of private financing to grow the business. In a roundabout way you could say that Jim had the vision since his early days in the White House and implanted as much of it as possible into farcast before he seized the opportunity to purchase Farcast and execute the vision. PG: Why was the decision made to bring the information via email instead of HTML? JO: Farcast launched its service in July 1994. At that time there was no such thing as any critical mass in HTML and the web was still an R&D toy. The founders chose e-mail because e-mail is fairly ubiquitous, inexpensive and easily understood. Even today, estimates are that there are 10-12 million regular web users but over 35 million internet email users. Text e-mail is still the least common denominator. HTML delivery is surely in the plans. PG: How many different feeds does Farcast have to search through? JO: Today, Farcast searches through the following: AP UPI PRNewswire BusinessWire Newsbytes Stocks and mutual funds (15 minutes delayed) Hoover's reference Library of Corporate profiles PG: Without risking any proprietary secrets? How does the system work? What is the flow? JO: (Left blank due to secret information), PG . . . PG: What is Farcast's target audience? Why? JO: Farcast's target audience today is the business person. The number one reason people buy Farcast is as a Corporate Business Intelligence tool. Business people can track their own company, track their competition, track their industry, etc in order to make more timely, smarter decisions and to be better informed in less time. PG: What equipment do you run the Farcast system on? Describe the setup, etc. JO: Farcast runs on a mix of SUN Sparcs and Pentium PCs. PG: What did you do as an occupation before Faracst? How did that prepare you for the Farcast challenge? JO: Answered in 1 above PG: Who are your competitors and why/ JO: Our closest competitors today are Individual Inc, Mercury NewsHound, and IBM InfoSage as all three of these services deliver news to e-mail boxes and offer some form of two-way control over the individual profiles. PG: What does the future of Farcast hold? New developments, etc? JO: Obviously, we can't comment on unannounced services or alliances, etc. But you can expect to see additional content feeds, several corporate partners and alliances, and more powerful droids. PG: What do you do for fun when you aren't computing? JO: Well clearly running a startup allows little time for fun and when not working I like to drink fine wine, especially in Napa, bicycle, relax and read on the beach or read wherever (including Starbucks where I can be seen pushing Farcast and sales). I also am a private pilot, but have had no time to do that sport lately. þ