Since our story in one of the first issues of the Monitor, on Quova, a company that provides a service to locate a computer in geographic space, we've received several e-mails from others doing the same kind of work. This week, from Rob Friedman of Digital Envoy.

"Unfortunately, you guys missed Quova's biggest competitor, Digital Envoy!!! Not only did we invent metro-area geo-targeting almost a year before Quova, but we also filed a patent in early 1999 on our technology, which is likely similar to the technology employed by Quova. Additionally, we have significant strategic alliances with Siemens and Digital Island and the industry-leading product (with well over 99% accuracy on a country-targeting level)."

"Our founders include one of the six original co-founders of Excite and one of the founders of NetSys (now part of Cisco Systems)."

Rob was also good enough to answer a few questions I had: What do you call this industry? He likes "geo-targeting." How will potential buyers of this type of service tell the offerings apart? "� it's partly a matter of accuracy but also product performance. I know that Quova claims that their product returns responses in under 10 ms. We are under 1 ms. I guess there are a variety of factors." 

Finally, Rob explained why Digital Envoy can't provide the demo I'd love to see: the one where you visit the site and have the service tell where you are! Rob explained how "our competition would try to hit our site to determine where we might be weak..." As someone who once did competitive intelligence, I think that's quite correct!