• by Bill McCloskey , August 28, 2001

Last week I reviewed my last year's predictions for 2001. While I'm not ready for my 2002 predictions yet, I do want to spotlight four companies that I think will be ones to watch in the coming year. They cover the range: all the way from well established public companies that have been around for nearly a decade to the newest startup that just closed their first round of financing a few weeks ago. But all of them have one thing in common, they have moved beyond the one-trick pony stage that many companies have been floundering in. They have taken a fresh look at the marketplace, and have come up with something fresh, new, and original. Let's start with the oldest first:

Viewpoint: Viewpoint is a public company that, at least in name, has been around for over a decade. The real guts of the company, though, had its start around 1995 with two companies: Fractal Design and Metatools, which joined forces in 1997 to form MetaCreations. Last year, MetaCreations combined with the old 3D geometry and modeling company Viewpoint, taking that companies name for the combined company when they moved their headquarters to New York. In a nutshell, Viewpoint has paid their dues.

All that dues paying has paid off this year with a publicly announced investment and bundling deal from AOL. But more than that, Viewpoint has been able to take advantage of their substantial experience as a graphics tool company to really think through the problem of real-time vector graphics and have developed an inclusive approach to their proprietary plug-in. Flash can be combined with real-time 3D, panoramas can be included with zoom views, all of which create a truly rich "rich media" experience. A free integration tools can be used with off-the-shelf software packages for content creation, and a specialized watermark technology insures Viewpoint gets paid whenever commercial content plays.

BlueStreak: A veteran of the rich media wars, BlueStreak has emerged a winner through good old fashion hard work and brilliant problem solving. Bluestreak has truly expanded beyond the moniker of "rich media technology vendor" by developing a robust ad-serving and optimization system. Interestingly enough, they have also penned a deal with the AOL machine, which should pay off nicely in 2002.

Bluestreak has re-examined the notion of ad serving from the vantage point of 20-20 hindsight and has developed a solution that departs significantly from other solutions. The system they have come up represents a next generation product that is truly revolutionary both in its scope and the depth with which they have examined the problem. Look for this company to redefine the space in 2002.

Poindexter: Carving out the field of personalized advertising, Poindexter (formerly Ru4) has developed a system that allows banner ads to be customized based on viewer profiles. An automobile ad, for instance, can be run nationally with each viewer receiving their own individualized geo-targeted information on local dealerships or specials. The Street used Poindexter to deliver up to date news headlines scraped from the front page of their site. Language localization can also achieved to make sure that Spanish, Japanese, or French versions of the ad appear depending on user demographic information.

The real-time intelligent parsing of ad creative based on demographic and psychographic information is an area that is just beginning to be explored and, for now, Poindexter is leading the pack in examining this important new field.

Netomat: We end with the newest member in the rich media firmament. Netomat approaches software design as an art form. While many companies say this, netomat is serious: their first product began life as art gallery exhibition that has been displayed in places like the Whitney Museum.

Their next step was to see if they could develop a successful business as an art project. And so far, they are capturing the imagination of the ad industry. Like the Tao, the netomat that can be explained is not the true netomat: email, instant messaging, personal rich media creation tool, all get blended, mixed, and re-defined in the netomat vision of software as art. As most of their products are still in beta stage, don't look for too much from this company for a while, but towards the middle of 2002, we might all be wondering how we communicated before we got netomated.

Of course these four companies don't represent the totality of the cool stuff coming out in 2002. But they do indicate that, for those that think Internet advertising innovation is dead...they need to think again.