Satellite Based BBS Network Speeds onto the Infobahn [Cyberspace]-Employing advanced satellite uplink technology and the latest data compression techniques, a new national online service expects to network more than 200 major U.S. cities into the world's first custom business knowledge serving utility by early 1996. Built around established local multiline BBS systems using a common graphical user interface, Time Domain & Company has launched an ambitious national acquisitions campaign to assemble a business oriented, competitive alternative to mass market information retrieval services such as Prodigy, Compuserve, Dialog, LEXIS/NEXIS, and others over the next 18 months. Abandoning the prevailing architecture of leased T-1 lines, public access data networks, and the major long distance carriers, the Time Domain Business Knowledge Serving Utility will utilize a state-of-the-art private satellite data network to provide interactive multimedia communication between its network hub and metro area servers in each community. By incorporating unique software-based image compression technology, the system will be able to deliver more robust broadband applications bidirectionally than today's online services, whose ground based telephone service costs can be up to two orders of magnitude (one hundred times) higher. Coupled over the satellite link to a high speed memory archive equivalent to that of hundreds of thousands of desktop computers, measured in terrabytes, each local node becomes capable of capturing and storing billions of pages of information at a tenth the cost of conventional magnetic media or optical disk drives. The Orlando-based company hopes to offer the remote electronic archiving of business documents, scanned or faxed in by online users nationwide, in addition to a host of custom knowledge engineering functions to be unveiled in coming months. "Withing the last few months, several key tchnologies - among them very small apperture terminals, symetric multiprocessing, universal multitasking operating systems, and rotary transverse helical scanning have matured concurrently to make a true fourth generation online service feasible," remarked Stephen A. Levin, President of Time Domain, "the economic changes they're bringing about in our industry are staggering." Up against the multibillion dollar conglomerates of the telephone and cable industries, Time Domain's $30 Million budget for hardware and software pales by comparison. But the ambitious technology concern believes that it has time on its side; says Levin "Before the dust settles in the chip wars, and the WindowsNT vs. Unix confrontation, and long before anyone else in our industry has time to react, we can penetrate the business market nationwide, with better, faster, cheaper, and more powerful information technology than our users can afford individually, or than our competition can afford to uproot its present infrastructure to implement". His vision may be right on the mark. The prospect of distributed 64-bit knowledge recognition, assimilation, and engineering is formidable. It would mean, for example, that an inventor in Salt Lake City, a scientist in Tuscon, an engineer in Seattle, a designer in Chicago, and a marketeer in Houston could collaborate on the computer aided design of a new product in near real time. The result of which could then be converted to programming for automated manufacturing equipment and downloaded to a precision machine shop in Philadelphia, to the specification of a customer in Miami, all without meetings, airline reservations, or other travel expenses, and literally at the speed of light. This is just the sort of industrial competitiveness envisioned by the administration's National Information Infrastructure intiative which is still in its infancy, the technology base for which has yet to be determined. By contrast, the Time Domain network will be able to assimilate and manage both system captured and user supplied information, incorporating a high degree of artificial intelligence. This can be applied to industrial/engineering, financial services, sales and marketing, organization, and management applications. In the Time Domain, the cable and phone companies are whittled down to size, according to David Wenbert, the venture's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer "You can't do interactive knowledge management over the 'boob tube'; multimedia is more than 500 channels of mud wrestling on demand, and you have to deliver it somewhere. The PC is the only end user interface mechanism that works. Once you get over that hurdle, you have to look at the delivery conduit itself - less than 10% of the destinations you would communicate with have bidirectional cable, nor will most of them get it before the turn of the century. So let's get real: 'Who really has a better shot at opening a lane on the Information Superhighway, John Malone (Chairman of TeleCommunications, Inc., the nation's largest cable system operator), or me?" Levin and Wenbert are banking on the unprecedented growth of the online industry [already a $10+ Billion market annually] to bouy them over any uncertainties in specific user applications. Says Levin, "The market for commercial online services is growing at almost 30% per year, not counting the Internet, which has experienced individual months of 20% growth. We don't have to do everything right, when the numbers are all on our side." Adds Wenbert, "With our fifty-cent distribution disk you can tie into a metro supercomputer that costs us less than a quarter million dollars and telecompute collaboratively with anyone on the planet; with their (TCI's) $500 cable decoder box, you can call up "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" any time you want to watch it, form their $2 Million metro area server...Let's just say good things come in small packages, where the technology is concerned". If they are right in their assessment, whole platoons of Wall Street communications and information industry analysts may have to go back to the drawing board. The one element of infrastructure that covers both of these previously isolated industries is the local computer Bulletin Board System. Considered the province of hackers, 'computer nerds' and a 'cyberpunk' subculture, such Boards have exploded into a vast underground, with a user base of more than 10 Million people - larger than all of the existing commercial online services combined. To the analysts, they are invisible because few BBS operators even cover their expenses, let alone market their service for a profit. To Wenbert, they are the [information] Highway Department. After recruiting Levin, a 10-year veteran BBS Sysop (System Operator) and million-dollar producer in the direct business sales department of a major computer superstore chain, to orchestrate the implementation of the company's grand vision, he passed up opportunities to announce Time Domain at the prestigous COMDEX and SIGGRAPH computer industry trade shows, preferring to wait for ONEBBSCON, an annual elite gathering of local board sysops which garners a mere fraction of the broader, more influential audience of the others. This was a strategic decision; the company is soliciting the sysops whose boards it wants to acquire, and convert into its local nodes. "These guys [sysops] have built several independent national and even international data communication networks, with broadly distributed, locally intelligent processing nodes, dynamically managed in real time by self-taught knowledge engineers who have developed great skill in the art of doing so" says Wenbert, "to BellSouth or MCI, they are literally just numbers, but to Time Domain, they are the Toll Collectors on the On-Ramps of the Infobahn." Time Domain & Company Technology Consulting Center Suite 2000 822 East Wallace Street Orlando, Florida 32809