The Return Of Pointcast
from the rising-from-the-dead dept
Many many years ago I was a big fan of Pointcast in all of its buggy glory. I outgrew the obsession pretty quickly, though. So, last week I was very surprised to get an email from Infogate (which at least I knew was the remnants of Pointcast) telling me about their new CNN push service. For $5 bucks a month I could have CNN pushed to my desktop (free or fake NYTimes registration required). My first question was actually what is the statute of limitations on opt-in spam? If you haven't emailed me in five years, (even if I opted-in five years ago) can you suddenly send me a new email? Then, I started to look at the Infogate/CNN product and began to wonder why anyone would pay for it. It's basically CNN.com, which is offered for free on their website, pushed to your desktop. Sure, I could see a few people finding that useful, but not many. Certainly not enough to let the company breakeven.
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