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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EPS who wrote (28452)	10/5/1999 7:01:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Respond to of 42771

Making money off of DigitalMe In attending the digitalme presentation today in New York, for press and analysts, the question was how Novell and its partners plan to make money off of digitalme? As with all new things we start off by giving the old answers. For example Eric stated "infrastructure". But the possibilities of this new technology will assert themselves in unfamiliar and exciting new ways that present dynamic new opportunities for both Novell and Novell's partners. Here is a technology that creates at least two things that are new: -1- A way for every person to build an identity and have an independent presence on the internet. One way of thinking about this is to recall the personal web sites that people put up on the net. These sites say this is who I am and this is what I'm interested in. But the difference from a digitalme identity is remarkable. A personal web site is an expression, it must constantly entertain, like a performance or a work of art or we lose our interest. A digitalme identity is more finely honed. It is an attempt to collect, in data, enough about who I am for me to interact with other people. It is a constant process of active self-refinement within categories of ones identity. Whereas a personal webs site might be analogized to a play, a digitalme identity is a player in the play. -2- Secondly I have the ability to use this new power to establish my identity on the net to associate with other individuals in a group. This self-selecting aspect of digitalme is the most powerful marketing tool to hit the net to date. Think of it this way. In syndicated marketing research the most valuable audience is one that fits a desired demographic profile for a given advertiser --- for example male age 24-35, occupation programmer, unmarried, interested in x,y, and z products, reads Sports Illustrated and visits www.biker.com. Whether it is a web site or a magazine the pitch is "this is the type of person that visits our site, you should advertise here." if you want to sell biking equipment. In this instance that person is a qualified candidate for biking products. He fits the desired profile. The majority of web sites try to construct these profiles using these endless click counts and the little bit of crappy information about us they can patch together to convince their advertisers to give them revenue. They guess about who we are. They try to find us like some bizarre digital detective. Novell is about to provide these people with something an awful lot better than clicks --- a self qualifying audience. It declares what it's interests are. And here is where is gets interesting. The value added here is not the information collected on the individual user of the digitalme site, in fact Novell has no access to any user demographics and cannot access the information in the users identity vault, you remain anonymous, but instead the value added is the users act of joining affinity groups. The value is in the match between the affinity groups and the sites that correspond to that interest. With Digitalme a user could join an affinity group for his/her interest in wilderness hiking. He can then establish direct contact with everyone in that group at his vault site through the instant messaging feature announced as part of digitalme today. Here is where it gets to be really terrific! Without knowing who individually is visiting various web sites, Novell through Bordermanager or Clickmarks, a Novell partner, through the bookmarking plug-in feature of digitalme can qualify the entire digitalme identity vault community as having a heavy interest in certain sites and subjects. The operators of the digitalme site could suggest to its users that they establish affinity groups based upon the areeas that correspond to their visits to these sites. The beauty is that the individuals decide how to self aggregate. And they cannot be individually identified. And once they do aggregate, which they do ACTIVELY by joining and participating in an affinity group not PASSIVELY (by clicking around the net), then they become a qualified audience. This aspect of digitalme --- an active user who determine his/her interests and can only be delivered to an advertiser as a group gives the net tremendous possibilities. I can just see Clickmark offering web sites an audience of large groups of qualified buyers, and those sites offering the same groups wholesale type buying experiences. It seems to me that this is the logic of digitalme. The users identity is protected within the group. You suggest to the group everything now being suggested to poorly targeted individuals. What a dynamic! =============== The digitalme presentation was very energizing. They are offering the service with these partner plug ins that allow you to consolidate your bookmarks from multiple computers into your digitalme account, do file transfers and store files on the net, do video instant messaging and text instant messaging, do single sign-on for all web sites and single forms for buying, plus of course the affinity groups. This has got to be one of the greatest possibilities to make money that any company has ever offered to its partners.

To: EPS who wrote (28452)	10/5/1999 7:34:00 PM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello Victor, > I was also looking for an announcement in this direction. So what's the list of partners that were part of the announcement? Did we get the big hitters that we need? > What is the score with the certificates appliances? When are they > coming to market? Note sure what you mean here ... what certificate appliances? > WhitePine alliance sounds good to me..:) This is great stuff! White Pine is a great technology and product shop and has some of the best Voice/Video over IP Servers out there. They also have extensively built up the applications platform on their server ... they run on UNIX and NT ... and also announced LINUX! This might explain their price run the last several days ... and if you follow BarChart: quotes.barchart.com ;-) Scott C. Lemon