While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are busy building legions of data centers to capture the contents of the Web, a fledgling company has decided that it will squeeze the essential Internet onto a single laptop.
The company, Webaroo, planned to announce yesterday that Acer, the Taiwan-based leading maker of personal computers, will begin selling laptops furnished with 40 gigabytes of data, representing a snapshot of the Web.
While the full Internet is a million gigabytes or larger, Webaroo's founders contend that they have created a way to provide offline Web searchers with a useful subset of the Internet's vast storehouse of data and knowledge.
"People are addicted to search," said Brad Husick, Webaroo's president and one of its founders, and "there are lots of times when Internet access is inconvenient."
Underlying the Webaroo system is a software technology that is optimized for what the company refers to as "content density." This means that Webaroo has captured and compressed information that will give searchers a reasonable sample of the information that might otherwise yield thousands or millions of answers in a Google or Yahoo search.
The company, which has offices in Seattle and Santa Clara, California, as well as in New Delhi and Mumbai, India, says it scans the Internet and analyze Web pages in terms of quality, coverage and size.
The Webaroo designers note that most Web searchers never make it farther than the first page or two of results from a query.
"There is a lot of junk and a lot of redundancy on the Web," said Rakesh Mathur, the chief executive and a founder of Webaroo. Even so, the company said, its system would strive to deliver sites intact, including their ads, to avoid the frustration of dead ends.
In addition to offering subsets of relatively permanent Internet information, the system will update itself when the laptop is connected to the Internet, so that the user can use Webaroo to capture recent information from a Web site that changes frequently, like a news site, for later viewing offline.
The company said it was not concerned that Web sites might see the service as extracting their content without delivering measurable traffic. Web pages delivered to the database when a user updates it will register on a site's servers as viewed even if the pages are actually read offline later, if ever.
The service will also offer slices of Web information on special subjects, like news, sports or about such major cities as New York, London and Mumbai. Webaroo refers to these as Web packs and plans to offer them as free downloadable content.
Like many Internet startup companies, Webaroo hopes to sell advertising. The idea is that the company will make it possible for advertisers to reach customers on their laptops and eventually on other mobile devices when they are not connected to the Internet.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique