John Sculley, marketer extraordinaire of Macs and colored sugar water, thinks he's found the next big thing. The former top executive at Apple and Pepsi is so enthusiastic that last week he invested in New York-based Gizmoz , which developed technology that takes the failed effort of push technology and goes one better. The Gizmoz technology also leaves a visual trail behind the content, allowing marketers to see how successfully content and promotions are doing, and whether those promotions are being passed on to other users. For the user's part, a Gizmoz is a Java applet that resides on a user's desktop and automatically updates itself with the latest text, audio, sound, or data from the sender. If the computer user likes what they're getting, they can forward it to others, much like an ordinary email.
Email is essentially a publishing model.
Gizmos is part of a movement toward more of a broadcasting model. A Gizmo only takes up about 13 kilobytes of space on the desktop. Users subscribe to content that is then streamed to their desktop from the Gizmoz website. Because the technology takes up so little memory, it can easily be deleted, swapped, forwarded, or embedded in other devices such as PDAs or cellular phones. Previous attempts at push technology, such as PointCast, sparked resentment among users who found their connections clogged with bulky files or who were unable to delete the files once they were downloaded.