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Technology Stocks : EPAY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Pendergast who wrote (709)	10/29/2001 8:43:19 AM
From: Bill Barry	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 717

John, Below is a short article from today's Information Week emailing. If you want more info on EPAY, you may want to check the epay bulletin board on yahoo.com. Best wishes. ** Anthrax Worries May Boost E-Commerce Fear of anthrax-tainted mail is leading some companies and consumers to rely less on snail mail and more on E-mail and E-commerce. IT managers must be prepared by increasing bandwidth and the number of servers to handle the loads, while implementing appropriate applications to manage more E-marketing campaigns and accept E-payments. More customers are turning to E-payments as a way to work around postal problems and fears. For example, Potomac Electric Power Co., a utility that serves 720,000 customers in the Washington, D.C., area, didn't receive any mail from Oct. 22 through Oct. 25 because anthrax was discovered in a local post office. More customers then paid their bills electronically--2,700 logons from Oct. 22 through Oct. 24, compared with 1,900 over the same number of days the week before. Anthrax fears may not be the only reason for the spike; the utility had already begun an ad campaign to encourage E-payments. As more business is conducted on the Web, some companies also may turn to digital certificates to authenticate a user's identity, although several analysts say they don't expect a huge surge in their use. Anthrax creates another reason to turn to digital signatures, but won't be the primary reason companies will do so, says Frank Prince, a security analyst at Forrester Research. "I would expect companies that have already started investigating or piloting digital-signature technology to accelerate those initiatives," Prince says. Electronic marketing initiatives also may shift. The Direct Marketing Association is advising its 4,700 members to include return addresses on direct-mail and send E-mail messages to alert customers that snail mail is coming. Kronos Inc., a provider of time and attendance products, sent 4,000 direct-mail pieces to potential business buyers without a return address, a common practice because recipients wonder who sent it and open the mail. The letters included a sound chip, which when X-rayed caused some to mistake it for a threatening package. Kronos says it will put return addresses on future mailings and will continue to rely on E-mail. Other companies are considering a combined approach. PennWell Corp., a media, research, and events company in Tulsa, Okla., may use postcards that direct people to its Web site so customers won't have to worry about opening mail. - Jennifer Maselli and Eileen Colkin with George V. Hulme Read on at Seamless B-To-B Online Payment Systems Readied update.informationweek.com