The portal is dead, long live the vortal

NEWS Generic portal sites which contain large amounts of hard to find information may soon face competition from vortals which present information in a more accessible form, according to executives at Autonomy, Cable & Wireless and Compaq. The vortal can be personalised for the individual or company, and the use of icons rather than words avoids the need for duplicating the site in different languages. Rikke Helms, president of ecommerce at Cable & Wireless, claims that the common portal is nearing extinction. "The likes of Yahoo! and AOL will soon be replaced by the iconic vortals because the generic portals have too much information and poor search facilities. The iconic vortal does not need a keyboard or typing or any specific linguistic skills," she said. According to Jack Stockdale, technical specialist at Autonomy, the iconically organised information is ideal for corporate use. "Generic portal sites are not necessarily suitable for a corporate usage as users waste their time trying to find what they need," he said. Relevare, a UK-based company which provides graphical user interfaces for vortals, was launched this week. It relies on Autonomy's context-based information retrieval and cathegorisation as a backbone of its technology. Andrew Lyons, Relevare founder, said iconisation allows the internet to be accessed from any device. "Because the information in the internet is available via a hierarchical automated information retrieval system, it makes access though any devices such a web TV or PDA more efficient rather than searching thorough millions of web pages," he said.