PointCast was a company founded in 1992 by Christopher R. Hassett in Sunnyvale

Sunnyvale, California

Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

.

PointCast Network

The company's initial product amounted to a screensaver

Screensaver

A screensaver is a type of computer program initially designed to prevent phosphor burn-in on CRT and plasma computer monitors by blanking the screen or filling it with moving images or patterns when the computer is not in use...

 that displayed news and other information, delivered live over the Internet. The PointCast Network used push technology

Push technology

Push technology, or server push, describes a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server...

, which was a hot concept at the time, and received enormous press coverage when it launched in beta form on February 13, 1996.
The product did not perform as well as expected, in part because its traffic burdened corporate networks with excessive bandwidth

Bandwidth (computing)

In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

 use, and was banned in many places. It demanded more bandwidth than the home dial-up Internet connections of the day could provide, and people objected to the large number of advertisements that were pushed over the service as well.

News Corporation Purchase Offer and Change of CEO

At its height in January 1997, News Corporation

News Corporation

News Corporation or News Corp. is an American multinational media conglomerate. It is the world's second-largest media conglomerate as of 2011 in terms of revenue, and the world's third largest in entertainment as of 2009, although the BBC remains the world's largest broadcaster...

 made an offer of $450 million to purchase the company. However, the offer was withdrawn in March. While there were rumors that it was withdrawn due to issues with the price and revenue projections, James Murdoch

James Murdoch (media executive)

James Rupert Jacob Murdoch is the younger son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and currently serves as chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, Europe, and Asia, overseeing assets such as News International , SKY Italia , Sky Deutschland, and STAR TV .He sits on the News...

 said it was due to PointCast's inaction.

Shortly after not accepting the purchase offer, the board of directors decided to replace Christopher Hassett as the CEO. Some reasons included turning down the recent purchase offer, software performance problems (using too much corporate bandwidth) and declining market share (lost to the, then emerging Web portal

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

 sites.) After five months, David Dorman

David Dorman

David W. Dorman is an American Telecommunications executive and is currently the non-executive chairman of Motorola....

 was chosen as the new CEO. In an effort to raise more capital, Dorman planned to take the company public. A filing was made in May 1998 with a valuation of $250 million. This plan was abandoned after two months in favor of looking for a company with whom to partner or be acquired.

Project Newnet

In August 1998, PointCast found such a partner. In order to compete with @Home

@Home Network

@Home Network was a high-speed cable Internet service provider from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies TCI, Comcast, and Cox Communications, and William Randolph Hearst III, who was their first CEO, as a joint venture to produce high-speed cable Internet service through...

, a consortium of telephone companies and Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 put together a project designed to promote use of DSL in preference to cable modems. The project was dubbed "Newnet" and the plan was to use PointCast's software as a portal for the service. The consortium planned to buy PointCast for $100 million as part of the deal. The deal was signed in December 1998 with the intent of launching the service in April 1999.

Due to delays in the project, Dorman resigned as CEO in March 1999. Two weeks later PointCast were informed that their planned acquisition had been scrapped. In the reorganization that followed, 75 of the 220 employees were let go in an effort to reduce costs. A number of bids were made to buy the company including two from former CEO Christopher Hassett, which were rejected.

Instead, they sold out for about $7 million in May 1999 to Launchpad Technologies, Inc., a San Diego company founded and backed by Idealab

Idealab

Idealab is a business incubator based in Pasadena, California.-History:Idealab was founded by Bill Gross in March 1996...

, and the PointCast network was shut down the next year.

EntryPoint

Launchpad's eWallet product was combined with the existing PointCast technology to create EntryPoint, which had a free desktop toolbar and offered customized news, stocks and sports feeds.
The new client abandoned push technology

Push technology

Push technology, or server push, describes a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server...

, resulting in much more economical use of network bandwidth.

Infogate

EntryPoint merged with Internet Financial Network in 2000 forming Infogate, continuing the same free service until switching to a fee-based co-branded model, partnering with news outlets such as USA Today

USA Today

USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...

 and CNN

CNN

Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

. Infogate was sold to AOL Time Warner in March 2003. Infogate's senior executives — Cliff Boro, Vidar Vignisson, and Tom Broadhead – formed CVT Ventures, LLC, a venture-development group dedicated to accelerating technology startups.

pointcast.com Today

The site pointcast.com is a one-page site consisting of slots for Google Ads, widgets from Widgetbox

Widgetbox

Widgetbox is a San Francisco, California based company that enables businesses to create and deliver applications to their customers.Widgetbox products include:Widgetbox Mobile: build and distribute mobile web applications for iPhone and Android....

displaying content from other sites, and prominent links to several sites run by the current owners of the pointcast.com domain name, NetworkMedia.com, which is an advertising firm "catering to the female demographic". The site pointcast.com seems to consist of no other, nor any original, content.