Web business intelligence solutions from Maxamine enable companies to keep this imminent visitor experience annoyance from turning into a site management crisis.

    "When you combine the dominance of Internet Explorer with the pervasive use of embedded objects such as flash, shockwave, applets, scriptlets or ActiveX controls, many sites will be affected," said Dr. Stephen Kirkby, CEO of Maxamine. "Popular news outlets and portals that consumers use every day, which contain many 'embedded object' ads, will feel the greatest impact."

    The patent violations involve the technology that allows Web developers to embed interactive programs in Web pages. Today, Web browsers are able to access and run these interactive programs on a Website seamlessly without opening a new instance of the browser.

    What does this mean to site owners? Once Microsoft releases the patent-compliant Internet Explorer (IE), visitors coming to a site with one or more of the embedded objects will be prompted to decide whether to allow the specialized program to run. The annoyance factor for visitors can blow up like wildfire for sites with multiple banner ads.

    Microsoft is planning a January 2004 release of IE that complies with the ruling. Eolas has filed for an injunction to stop Microsoft from shipping IE until it is in compliance with the ruling. Eolas is pressing Microsoft to settle and pay the license fee, enabling IE to operate as it currently does. The outcome remains unclear for now.

    While the inevitable appeals move through the courts, Microsoft has already issued instructions to its development community for remediation. For site owners, remediation efforts will mean identifying the impacted objects and where they are being used within the Website, then altering the code that calls those objects.

    "Maxamine's comprehensive site inventory reporting capabilities will take the pain out of the identification process, enabling the site owner to be ready for the release of a patent-compliant IE," said Dr. Kirkby.

    Contact Maxamine at www.maxamine.com for more information about this or other web business intelligence needs.

    Maxamine produces web business intelligence solutions enabling companies to perform web site structure and quality management with log file traffic analysis into one product. Founded in 1997 in Adelaide, South Australia, Maxamine established its U.S. headquarters in 2000. Partners include EDS, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Keynote and Omniture.

--30--MJR/da* CONTACT: Maxamine Carol Barreyre, 214-629-5157 carol@barreyre.com KEYWORD: CALIFORNIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: LEGAL/LAW SOFTWARE NETWORKING COMPUTERS/ELECTRONICS PRODUCT SOURCE: Maxamine