Focus on Productivity and Profit at Internet World
By MATT LAKE
If there was any common thread among the products and services demonstrated this
week at the 1998 Fall Internet World trade show, it's that the emphasis has
soundly shifted from being cool to being profitable.
The show, which was held this week at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in
New York, featured a wide range of new products, alliances and services aimed at
making the Internet a more lucrative medium for businesses, and a more
productive one for consumers.
Competition and partnership in the portal arena
The Internet buzzword of 1998 has been "portal" -- and the intense competition
to be consumers' primary gateway to the Web was in evidence at the show. On
Monday, Lycos announced its acquisition of Wired Digital and the search engine
HotBot, and by the opening of the exhibit halls on Wednesday, the Lycos banner
prominently displayed the company's new collection of logos.
Meanwhile, America Online announced several initiatives aimed at expanding its
dominance of the market, primarily by capturing Web users who aren't AOL
subscribers. Claiming that more than 60 percent of the pages viewed on the AOL
Web site are by people who aren't AOL members, Barry Schuler, president of AOL
Interactive Services, showed off a redesign of the company's Web site with lots
of features for non-AOL subscribers.
Although the site is organized around a "channel" concept familiar to portals
like Excite or Yahoo, Schuler distanced AOL from its Web-based rivals. "A portal
is a search engine trying to be AOL," he said. "And we're already AOL."
Schuler also announced the preview release of Instant Messenger 2.0, a new
version of the company's Internet-based chat software, and the news that the
company will soon be providing space to non-subscribers to set up their own Web
pages on the company's Hometown AOL site.
AOL and seven portal sites, including Infoseek, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Netscape,
Snap and Microsoft, set aside their competition to take part in a new privacy
initiative announced by TrustE, an Internet privacy advocate. Collectively, the
sites will donate $3 million worth of banner advertising to TrustE's Privacy
Partnership campaign, which will promote the responsible use of personal
information gathered online.
In an effort to raise public awareness about the security of such data, the
banner ads will carry plainly worded captions such as "Privacy is everyone's
business" and "Do you trust the Web?" The banners will link to tips for
consumers as well as a guide to help Web publishers develop a privacy policy.
AT&T moves into Internet telephony
Technologies that enable companies -- and consumers -- to use the Internet to
make long-distance phone calls were out in full force at the show. While using
Internet connections to call one computer from another is nothing new -- and
jumping from phone company switches to the Internet for part of a long-distance
call is also becoming more common -- the number of companies getting into the
business, including heavyweight AT&T, marked Internet telephony as a growing
trend.
A focal point of AT&T's announcement was its Global Clearinghouse service, which
will enable Internet service providers and small telecommunications carriers to
offer phone-to-phone Internet telephony service to 140 countries. By acting as a
broker and contact point between many small providers, AT&T relieves the
companies of the need to negotiate deals among themselves and handle billing.
The clearinghouse will also enable participating companies to route calls
through the lowest-cost channel: By posting the rate each ISP charges for
channeling calls into the local phone company's switched network and offering
those rates to all other phone-to-phone IP telephony providers, prices are
likely to drop. Since AT&T Global Clearinghouse will also be setting quality
control standards, the clarity and consistency of Internet-based calls is likely
to improve.
Real life broadcasting
RealNetworks, whose RealPlayer streaming video and audio software comes bundled
with Web browsers from Netscape and Microsoft, consolidated its position as the
top Internet multimedia player with two announcements at Internet World.
The latest version of its free player, RealPlayer 5.0, will ship with America
Online signup disks during AOL's fall direct mail blitz. A new version with
improved audio quality and more capabilities called RealPlayer G2, which just
entered its second beta testing phase, will replace its predecessor on AOL disks
once the final version is available.
In a more eccentric effort to promote streaming video on the Web, RealNetworks
invited Web users to submit three-minute videotapes of themselves, which the
company will digitize and post online. Each video becomes an entry in an online
popularity contest judged by visitors to the RealNetworks site. The overall
winner gets what many would regard as a mixed reward: $50,000 and a film crew to
follow them around for 24 hours. This video document will then appear on the Web
as a RealVideo stream in both edited and uncut formats.
The Internet hasn't made paper obsolete
Recognizing that paper hasn't become obsolete in the digital age, some companies
are finding ways to use the Internet to handle paper-based information.
Hewlett-Packard announced a free Web-based service called Instant Delivery that
schedules the delivery of Web pages to printers (a service that coincidentally
stands to increase the company's sales of ink and toner cartridges).
HP's content partners (including MSNBC, Slate, National Geographic and Marvel
Comics) will create ad-free pages daily designed to fit on regular letter-sized
paper, but Internet users can also visit the Instant Delivery site and schedule
printing of any Web page that changes. The service will be available on November
1 at www.instant-delivery.com.
Not even paper-based mail is immune to the reach of the Internet. Two companies
showed off Web-based postage metering software currently undergoing trials with
the U.S. Postal Service.
Pitney-Bowes and StampMaster are participating in the USPS's indicia program --
a service that enables companies to sell metered postage over the Internet on
behalf of the USPS. Using these services, postal customers can print out a
wobbly-looking bar code on their home computers instead of using a stamp.
The Postal Service's original specification called for a hardware device to
store the metered postage on the customer's computer, but StampMaster developed
a software-only variation it's calling Internet Postage that uses a secure Web
server to handle the metering. Pitney Bowes is developing a similar service
called ClickStamp, but is trailing StampMaster in the Postal Service-mandated
nine-month trial period. Both companies plan to sell subscriptions to the
service for $7 to $10 a month (plus postage) when they go live beginning in
April 1999. |
