Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The BabelDisc operating system is currently being trialled by a small group of people under a ‘soft’ launch strategy, which DaweVision is looking to expand as the company irons out any final issues or problems within the product.

The company then expects the number of users to grow rapidly with hundreds of thousands of customers signed up within the first 12 months.

“We’re looking to recruit triallists,” said Dawe. “We’ve got 10 users today and hope to take that up to 100 in the next two or three weeks. We’ll then go to a thousand and steadily ramp up from there. You’ve got to get other people to do it because the general public do things that you would never think of.”

The BabelDisc operating system is carried on a CD which is launched on a computer before Windows kicks in and provides seven key applications with all the information, documents and preferences saved on massive internet servers rather than a computer hard drive.

The basis of the product is that a user can go to any PC and use BabelDisc. “No matter what state the software is in, you put in the CD and you’re away,” says Dawe. “The idea is to keep it simple and trouble free. You don’t keep anything locally; they’re all stored on a network server, so you don’t have to worry about back-up.

“Because it’s stored on the internet, you can use any computer, just input your log in details and your personal preferences follow you around.”

These seven open source applications – video, music MP3, internet, email, photo manipulation, instant internet chat and word processing – are the most widely used functions on home PCs and the only programs used by 60 per cent of the world’s computer using population according to Dawe’s own estimates.

Dawe says the company’s preferred market is people whose PC has just crashed, works slow and they’re not sure what’s wrong with it, “and it’s happened for the third or fourth time. They’re just using these applications and they just want something that’s reliable and easy.

“It seems to attract more women than men interestingly enough. The research also showed it tended to attract old people rather than young people.”

DaweVision believes that once BabelDisc establishes a certain amount of market lead, the software will inevitably be copied by other firms and it is at this point that the company intends to launch the hardware version, a £50 box that plugs into the television, completely eliminating the need for PC for people interested in only using the seven applications, it will just need broadband.

Maintaining the principals of basic function over the internet, users will be able to watch television while browsing the web, emailing or any of the systems other functions all on the one screen, what Dawe refers to as true convergence.

“I think globally there’s probably a billion users that would appreciate it,” said Dawe. “We’ve got interest from aid agencies in developing countries because in the third world there isn’t a PC World just around the corner.”