The ModeEleven screen saver includes a tool bar that lets the user browse through available screens on a channel, adjust volume, replay a video, or refer a friend.

ModeEleven, an eight-person band of programmers and entrepreneurs based in New York City, hopes to bring the screen saver into the broadband era and make it into something akin to interactive television. ModeEleven’s concept is a simple combination of screen saver technology and the old notion of “push,” or a Web site feeding data on a regular basis to the Desktop. ModeEleven’s client works within the existing screen saver protocols of Windows 98/Me/2000/XP, but when it activates, the software checks the ModeEleven servers for new content in the channels the user subscribes to.

The free program had been in low-key public beta for the past year, attracting several thousand users. It’s now in full release, available to consumers and enterprise customers. Programmers pay ($49.99 to $2,000 a year) to create content channels that can be made available to all users or just members within a private community for which a programmer pays a site license. This model suggests a range of possibilities. Because the screen saver screens and videos are housed and updated on ModeEleven’s servers and accessible from the Web, dispersed members of companies, clubs, or families can share a common screen saver routine and use the system as a kind of broadcasting device or as a way of sharing content, such as family photos.

  Out Of The Crash

A Web-powered screen saver? Push technology? If this sounds like one of those strange prebubble plans for leveraging the Internet in a curious way, it was. The project started in late 1999, months before the dot-com crash brought Web-related investment to a screeching halt.

Caplan, ModeEleven’s director of technology, is a veteran programmer. In the early 1990s he published his first commercial program, Sherlock, a file manager for Windows 3.1. Shortly afterward, Caplan questioned why screen savers couldn’t play movie trailers or movies. He developed the initial idea for a multimedia screen saver about 1994, but broadband connections were in their infancy. Thus, he envisioned distributing the material via CDs.

Screen savers lost their luster by the mid-‘90s, however, and Caplan’s idea only took flight when broadband connections became ubiquitous at work and more common in homes. The Web, rather than CDs, was the natural delivery vehicle for a screen saver that theoretically could serve near-real-time news, alerts, video, images, and ecommerce opportunities. Caplan formed ModeEleven in early 2000 with Leslie Bocskor, a serial entrepreneur with experience in tech companies. Bocskor is now ModeEleven’s president.

“We started when the stock market was tanking,” says Caplan. “I was programming on my dad’s dining room table for six to nine months when not a penny was to be raised.” Ultimately, the big freeze in Web investment started to thaw, and with less than $1 million in private funding, ModeEleven issued a beta of the first “broadcast screen saver” in early 2003. The company now has started selling the idea to corporate customers for their internal communications.

Unlike many previous screen savers and push technologies, Caplan designed ModeEleven to be unobtrusive and polite. He programmed the client in C, and the memory resident client is triggered to run the screen saver by Windows’ own screen saver protocols. ModeEleven doesn’t rob bandwidth or processing cycles while it remains dormant. “That would be rude,” says Caplan.

The program requires 128MB of system RAM. On our system, the client occupied about 6,500KB of memory when idle. When the screen saver activates, it checks ModeEleven’s servers for updated material for the channels you’re subscribed to and downloads the content to a local PC. We discovered this takes awhile, even with a broadband connection. (ModeEleven says the program is usable on dial-up.)

The program recommends 50MB of free hard drive space, and for good reason: The PC does all of the processing of the slideshow, audio, or video playback and stores the images and video locally. We subscribed to just three slideshow channels and found about 24MB of JPEGs stored in the program subdirectory. Caplan says the program cleans out this local directory of obsolete images regularly.

In some cases a programmer can insert a live media stream directly from the Web, as well. And unlike most screen savers, this one is interactive; it has an interface that lets users move back and forth through a stack of images and audio, adjust volume, and even rerun a video clip or click through to Web links that can be embedded in the screens.

The Screen Manager interface lets a channel designer assemble a collection of screens; algorithms in the local PC’s client software determine the order and frequency of a playlist.

  Ubiquitous Public Address System

One of the unique aspects of ModeEleven is an internal algorithm that constructs an intelligent playlist to ensure users see all of the screens the channel offers. The program actually monitors the elements it has shown and determines from the user’s mouse movements or keyboard input if she was at her screen and was likely to have actually viewed a particular element. The algorithms then assign different values to the channel’s elements according to whether the viewer has or hasn’t seen them. The algorithms then push the unseen screens to the top of the stack so they’re more likely to be viewed.

To minimize the load on its own servers, ModeEleven puts the playlist-calculation duties onto the client. “Rather than have our database calculate what the player should be seeing, we distribute that to the local machine and have it request content,” says Bocskor. “This eliminates the need for a huge server farm.”

Why does a screen saver want to ensure users see all screens? Because ModeEleven intends to put the utility to work as a communications tool within the enterprise. “The corporate intranet is probably one of our best markets,” says Bocskor. For example, many companies invest millions in intradepartmental networks brimming with employee and job-related resources that go unused. Human resources staffers often pour reams of employee benefit information into their intranets, for example, but their phones still ring off the hook from employees who don’t realize that data is accessible from their Desktop. “We are providing an answer to that,” says Bocskor. “We provide a ubiquitous public address system.”

The Web-based Screen Manager lets producers create screens using templates. Premium customers can create their own templates for a more customized look.

ModeEleven started selling its product to enterprise customers early this year and is charging $6 to $40 annually per seat to companies. As Bocskor envisions it, employees sitting at their desks while on the phone may not be engaged with their computers, but they’re receptive to important corporate messaging “to find out about a benefits package, to find out news. It creates a call to action that we found is followed up on very often.”

Producers of channels can create screens with hot links that bring an employee to a specific area of the intranet, such as a new employee resource. The client can be set to check the server for new data as often as every 30 seconds. Thus, it’s possible for a company’s producer to insert new alerts that pop up on everyone’s desk. The ModeEleven screens can also handle XML feeds, so a company can design screens that pull in news headlines. And because new members to a channel can register with up to 40 different fields, a producer can distribute only certain screen saver channels to users within perhaps a given ZIP code or according to a particular job level in a company.

A Screen Management tool provides the Web-based and very user-friendly channel-programming interface. Channel producers create ModeEleven screens from templates the company provides. Templates can hold text, stills, or videos. To insert an image in a screen, the producer simply points the template to a file on the Web or on the user’s local machine, and ModeEleven uploads it to its own servers for distribution. The programmer can then give the screen various properties on the user’s display, such as the duration of the image. Producers can also attach a URL to a page so a user can call up a specific Web page. Producers can even specify start and end dates for including a screen in the stack, so that a given image will only run during a certain calendar window.

The ModeEleven client reports back to the server how often each screen was shown. The client even distinguishes between screens that were simply displayed on a client monitor and those that it knows were seen by the user because the machine registered some mouse movement.

ModeEleven has a range of reporting and management tools on the back end for the corporate channel manager and anyone making a screen saver for a family or online community. Managers can invite new members via email and even promote some users to producer status so that they can contribute content. A reporting mechanism lets producers see how many users have viewed which screens and for how long.

  Screen Savers Of The Future?

ModeEleven is in version 1.2 now, and Caplan is working on future iterations. One major addition may be a peer-to-peer architecture for the client software. He promises much more interactivity and letting the program run in a non-screen saver mode. For messaging in corporate intranets, a calendaring function will allow for more precise screens.

Time will tell if a broadcast screen saver has legs. It is refreshing, however, to see techies and investors getting behind some novel uses of the technology. Some of the program’s early adopters are exploring interesting possibilities for screen savers. There’s the requisite aquarium saver, but also portfolios of travel photos, self-help advice, scenic albums of New York City bridges, training material, and even news from Texarkanarocks.com.

For some groups, ModeEleven seems to provide a more intimate mode of communication than just a simple Web site. Each channel also has an online message board so groups can stay in even closer contact. Caplan’s idea was to open up the real estate of the dormant computer display and reimagine it.

“What I wanted to create was like Microsoft Word in a shrink wrap box. You can use it like a typewriter or use it for all of its capabilities. We wanted to make the tool and let our users use it as they see fit,” says Caplan.  

by Steve Smith

Interactive TV In Your PC After years as an investment banker, ModeEleven President and co-founder Leslie Bocskor helped manage several tech companies in the 1990s before co-founding ModeEleven in 2001. Bocskor is a fan of futurism, so we asked him to explore both the solid plans for revising the ModeEleven screen saver and some of his more ambitious hopes for how it can be used. CPU: Do people really need a broadcast screen saver? Bocskor: The thinking behind the product was: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if screen savers could provide some value? The idea is to have movie trailers, music videos, interests . . . you create multiple channels that you could watch on your computer at home or at work. It would be great if it provided entertainment, news, transactions—sort of pushing the Web out to you. CPU: How will the technology change in its next iteration? Bocskor: One of the choices we could have in deployment is that each peer as it goes live looks to the servers for new content and can tell what other machines have gone live in the nearest subnet. It would look close by and take pieces of the various files from those machines. It’s a peer-to-peer push network where the content is pushed to the individual user, so it’s not coming from our servers but coming from within the network. CPU: How will the client software evolve? Bocskor: We are looking to make the client substantially more robust. One of our visions has been that we see it functioning like interactive television through the PC. One of the biggest challenges in interactive TV has been “tcommerce,” making purchases through the television. It has never gotten any traction, while a lot of people are very comfortable making purchases on the PC. We imagine that with our ability to deliver video and our ability to have multiple channels combined with our ability to create a call to action that is seamless to the transaction, that this will be sort of like transactional television. When you see the trailer for a movie you want to rent from Netflix, or whoever, you could just click on the video and then go immediately to the rental. If you see a video for a group you could click to purchase the CD or the track right then.

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