Pushing Air

August 1997 / Features / The Pull of Push / Pushing Air

AirMedia has a unique solution to avoiding the network congestion that hundreds of users accessing the Web simultaneously can cause. AirMedia gets its push programming from wireless receivers, bypassing the wiring entirely.
The AirMedia Live Internet Broadcast Network can carry publicly available news, scores, and reports, along with more private corporate information and even individually addressed messages, in case you can' t bear to be parted from your stock portfolio prices. All without conventional wired access to the Web.
A pyramidal NewsCatcher wireless receiver (made by Global Village Communication) sits on your desktop and receives the broadcasts (or narrowcasts or unicasts, as the case may be). This information then passes to your PC through a serial cable.
On screen, the information can appear in several ways, including a scrolling banner or a small headline display. You can also receive information as e-mail notification.
You must subscribe to the AirMedia service and must buy the receiver. But this may be a small price to pay for near-real-time news without any impact on your network.
AirMedia has recently established a hardware platform for mobile use. This allows push technology to notebooks and hand-helds away from the office. It may also be the only practical way to address the needs of mobile users.

Go to previous article: The Pull of Push

Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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