General Magic Working to Standardize Intelligent Agents

Ever since General Magic announced the Open Telescript Initiative at its Developers Conference last October, it’s been clear that the company does not intend to let any opportunities slip by, especially in the burgeoning world of Internet-based commerce and communication. According to many, General Magic’s intelligent agent technology, Telescript, seems to be a perfect fit with the increasingly unmanageable explosion of information and services coming online each day. Now the company wants to make sure that it plays an active role in any developing standard for such technology by joining the International World Wide Web Consortium.

The Consortium is the principal international organization entrusted with the task of developing open WWW software specifications along with reference implementations. Leading the General Magic effort will be Tony Rutowski, Vice President of Internet Business Development, who has been named the company’s representative to serve on the W3C Advisory Committee. As you’ll recall, General Magic’s Telescript technology is designed to enable people to deploy electronic surrogates that are capable of performing useful work such as searching for information, providing a notification service, or negotiating transactions for its owner. These surrogates, called agents in General Magic parlance, are programmed using the extensible, object-oriented Telescript language. Earlier this year, General Magic made freely available its first version of Active Web Tools enabling developers to create Telescript-based services on the World Wide Web.

While much of the early excitement seems to be centered around the promise of electronic commerce, Telescript’s intelligent agent technology may prove to be equally useful as a way to navigate through the sea of corporate data that is expected to be integrated with so-called Intranets, TCP/IP and Web-based networks serving the internal information needs of a corporation.

Contact:

General Magic
420 North Mary Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Tom Hershenson
(408) 774-4343
(408) 774-4010 (fax)
[email protected]