EOLAS ACQUIRES COMMERCIAL RIGHTS TO KEY WORLD WIDE WEB PATENT
8/21/95 CHICAGO: Eolas Technologies Inc. announced today that it has
completed a licensing agreement with the University of California for the
exclusive rights to a pending patent covering the use of embedded program
objects, or "applets," within World Wide Web documents.
Also covered is the use of any algorithm which implements dynamic
bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications.
This development will have a major impact on the ability of Internet content
providers to exploit the expanding interactive capabilities of the Web to
gain advantage in the highly competitive online market.
Currently, various combinations of embedded applets and software development
APIs (application development interfaces) are major features of Web browsers
from Netscape, Spyglass, Microsoft, AOL/Navisoft, NeXT, and Sun Microsystems
(especially Sun's new Java language. A quote from the current Forbes ASAP
states "Browsers and servers may come and go, but Sun's breakthrough Java
language, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT, will be the key to a truly interactive
Internet..."). Talks have been going on for several months between Eolas
and several of these companies regarding both the licensing of the
underlying technology and associated products.
The licensed technology was invented in 1993 by a team led by Eolas CEO, Dr.
Michael Doyle, a UCSF faculty member and past Director of the university's
academic computing center. Prior to joining UCSF, Dr. Doyle was Director of
the Biomedical Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where he was active in the area of scientific informatics and collaborated
with several members of National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the
birthplace of Mosaic.
According to Dr. Doyle,"We recognized early on that the Web could be
expanded beyond the limits of plain vanilla HTML document browsing to become
an all-encompassing environment for interactive applications. We then
developed an enhanced version of the recently-announced NCSA Mosaic program
that added technology which enabled Web documents to contain
fully-interactive "inline" program objects, called Weblets (by Eolas), which
one could manipulate in place using the enhanced Mosaic program."
The first Weblet created was an interactive 3D medical visualization
application which employed a three-tier distributed object architecture over
the Internet to allow a "farm" of powerful remote computers to generate
images of internal human anatomy in response to the Mosaic user's
interactive commands, all from within Mosaic. This allowed a user with
nothing but a low-end networked workstation and the Eolas browser to
transparently access supercomputer-level power and interactively look inside
an MRI scan of the human body which was embedded within a Web page.
The Eolas technology will soon be available for licensing. Information and
demonstrations are available at the Eolas World Wide Web home page
(http://www.eolas.com). Further information can be obtained by sending
email to [email protected].
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Eolas(TM) and Weblets(TM) are trademarks of Eolas Technologies Incorporated.
Other trademarks mentioned are property of other companies.
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