Screensavers

Until a few years ago, computer monitors still had problems if they had to display the same screen image for a longer time - especially in the case of brighter areas, the picture was liable to burn into the screen. The reason for this is how the picture is generated in normal monitors: a focused beam of electrons is accelerated in a vacuum cathode ray tube against a coated glass plate, where the beam is turned into light. With pictures that remain the same, the large amount of energy generated by the electrons was prone to damage the coating.

It was therefore better if the monitor displayed a dark, moving picture when not in use - thus screensavers were created.

Today's monitors are much better. The electron beam is a lot weaker, the coating more stable, so that the images hardly ever burn into the monitor anymore. Flatscreen monitors do not have this problem at all, since they generate the image entirely differently.

Today, screensavers have been assigned new tasks. They are used more often for entertainment than anything else. Funny or pretty screensavers are exchanged among Internet users all around the globe.

In 1996, the American company Pointcast created a screensaver that displayed news headlines which were downloaded in the background while the computer was online. One could configure the information to be displayed on the screen. This type of news distribution was unable to assert itself.

In 1999 an American research group started a screensaver project which distributed computing capacity over many individual PC's: SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence at home) is a vast distributed-computing project. Large amounts of data collected by a radio telescope scanning the sky are split into smaller packets of information and sent to the computers of the screensaver users. These analyse the data on their PC whenever the screensaver is running and then send back the results. In this manner, unnatural signals from space can be identified - SETI@home is on the lookout for aliens. The community of this extraordinary research project has grown to 2 million users.

Moneybee® functions according to a similar principle as SETI@home. The computing method, however, is entirely different: Moneybee® uses artificial intelligence with the aid of neural networks. A further difference with MoneyBee® is the use value: our screensaver creates information that is directly at the users' disposal: share price forecasts and editorial analysis of the results.