START-UP TRIES TO REINVENT DIGITAL CONTENT NAVIGATION

As digital content proliferates, service providers want consumers to be able to easily navigate available offerings. The solution to date has been increasingly complex remote controls, some of which incorporate keyboards.

A Maryland start-up says it has solved this complexity problem by designing a new navigation system that relies more on intuition and uses a free-space pointing device to trigger a new multi-dimensional content framework.

Hillcrest Labs was founded by Dan Simpkins, who previously founded next-generation switch-maker Salix and sold it to Tellabs for $300 million. The company was founded in 2001 and secured $10 million in venture funding in May 2004, but had not gone public with its HoME navigational system until last week's Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference in San Diego.

Some of the early buzz from that show focused on the free-space pointing device, called “The Loop,” for its lightweight circular design and two-button simplicity, but Hillcrest is more intent on developing a navigational system that dramatically changes digital TV.

“It's not really about the device but a revolutionary navigation system,” said Simpkins in a telephone interview from San Diego. “We are seeing a real sea change in the industry — the battle for the digital home is on. What we realized was that there was a significant gap in technology. There was no effective navigation platform that allows users to easily get at all the new digital content.”

What Hillcrest created is a system its calls “Spontaneous Navigation,” that combines the free-space pointing remote with an application framework, known as Hillcrest HoME. Within HoME is a metadata engine that presents a library of data on applications in such a way that users can easily move in many different directions from any one point or application within the system.

Unlike existing remote controls, The Loop is multi-dimensional — it behaves much more like a computer mouse than a traditional TV remote, said analyst Daniel Briere, president of TeleChoice.

“Today's navigational systems are hierarchical — you follow the bread crumbs,” he said. “Those systems can only go up-down or left-right. This is a six-dimensional system, and it can also go backwards and forwards.”

Consumers can intuitively use The Loop and the Hillcrest navigational system to move through on-demand content such as movies and personally created content — such as pictures or downloaded music — or do point-and-click shopping on the TV set, instead of having to back in and out of a set of hierarchical menus or use a combination of 180 different buttons on a remote control device, Simpkins said.

“We have two kinds of behavior — instinctive and learned,” he said “The idea is to use the instinctive. We point before we speak. And this is very simple, much like a mouse. We have given it to people five years old and 85 years old, and they are all able to pick it up and start playing it.”

Simpkins said Hillcrest is not directly challenging Microsoft, whose IPTV platform includes navigation, or other industry players, but intending to sell its software across the market. As such, the system is portable and easily customizable, he said.

“Hillcrest is a universal supplier of software technology to various manufacturers,” Simpkins said. “It can give service providers the power to present a service in their own unique way.”

The company has been smart in making it possible for companies to easily add “skins” — or customization — to its systems while providing the front-end and back-end hooks to integrate existing and new applications, Briere said.

“This is truly disruptive technology — like the mouse was to the PC,” he said.