The Online REPORTER
WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
Sept 9 - Sept 13 1996 Issue No 15
AMERICA ONLINE TO FIGHT BULK E-MAILER'S RESTRANING ORDER
The war against junk email took a number of tortuous turns last week when America Online first announced it would block junk e-mail from a number of persistent "spammers" and then found itself the subject of a temporary restraining order. America Online said it would challenge the order.
AOL announced last Wednesday that mail from several domains it accused of "routinely sending unsolicited mass commercial email" would be blocked. Specifically, it identified cyberpromo.co, answerme.com, servint.com, netfree.com and honey.com. In fact, the first two domains are both used by the same infamous company, Cyber Promotions Inc of Philadelphia. The third domain is that of Servint Corp - Cyber Promotions' Internet Service Provider. Netfree.com, run by Prime Data WorldNet Systems, has also been responsible for numerous junk mailings and acts as a distribution point for FloodGate, a software package that is designed to cull and classify e-mail addresses from postings to Usenet.
In March, Cyber Promotions filed a suit against AOL - saying that the online service was interfering with its e-mailing business. The mail-out company, run by Sanford Wallace contends that America Online's attempt to block its mailings also violates the US constitution first amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. In return, America Online countersued for alleged misappropriation of the AOL subscriber list. America Online also said that unsolicited e-mail has become the number one complaint from their users, with about 15 million bits of unsolicited e-mails arriving in the system each week. It said it had been proactively contacting "spam clearing houses" trying to get them to stop.
No sooner had AOL announced its exclusion policy last week than Cyber Promotions went to the Eastern District Pennsylvania Federal Court to get a temporary restraining order which was granted.
NETSCAPE NAVIO TO GET FIRST OUTING IN IBM NETWORK COMPUTER
And so it finally arrived, IBM's network computer. After the build-up, the machine that finally emerged is about as low-end as it is possible to go, based on the PowerPC 403 embedded microprocessor and being packaged as a replacement for mid-range and mainframe dumb terminals.
The new machines, which will sell for about $700 with 8MB of RAM and without a screen, come with X-Windows and 3270, 5250 terminal emulation built in. It will also come with a Web browser courtesy of Netscape's new Navio operation (OR issue 14).
Intriguingly, the browser is described as being a customized version Navigator 3.0 - the non-modular version of the browser. Navio's brief has previously been described as revolving around the 4.0 release of the browser. Navio itself was refusing to comment on the IBM announcement as we went to press.
As previously reported, the box was designed by Network Computing Devices and is very closely based on that company's Explora terminal. Tim Gant, IBM's VP of integrated workstations within the company's server group says the machines will be aimed at those customers who have populations of green-screen terminals today, and also want to replace 286 and 386 PCs used for data entry.
For some reason IBM is embarrassed about the operating system it is using, and is refusing to name it. However sources say that like the hardware, the OS is based closely upon NCD's work. NCD's Explora uses a much-hacked kernel with its ancestry in the BSD Unix camp.
Those who want to use the machine will need an IBM server - either mainframe, AS/400,RS/6000 or PC-based. The server software consists of boot code, a file system, and user management system to set up user accounts, manage access privileges etc.
Officially, IBM says that the machine is the first in a series of NCs, however Gant says that there is no formal road-map.
What is certain, however, is that the PowerPC-based NCs will be kept firmly as low-end machines. Unlike Sun, which accepts that there may be some overlap between its Java and SPARC-based workstations, IBM is adamant that the NCs will be kept out of the RS/6000s way.
Meanwhile, the IBM PC division is also working on the specification for machines that it loosely calls 'network computers'. However the division has yet to determine whether the Intel-based boxeswill run Java yet so they are little different from conventional diskless workstations.
MACROMEDIA 'FIREWORKS' LOOKS LIKE PREVIEW OF JAVA MEDIA APIS
Is this a sneak preview of the Java Media API set? Macromedia Inc last week announced a set of Java classes and associated APIs for multimedia development and licensed them to Netscape. The browser-maker will be incorporating the 'Fireworks' API into its ONE development platform. Macromedia itself is being incredibly coy about its future plans for Fireworks, however Netscape client integration evangelist Tim Hickman says his company will "support Macromedia's efforts" to get Fireworks incorporated as a core part of the Java media extensions. "It is something that we would love to see happen" he added.
Fireworks will join the Netscape Java foundation classes in Netscape ONE, but Jim Funk, Macromedia VP of corporate development said "there may be some sub-licensing required". He refused to give any indication of how the company intended to handle the future use of the API's, beyond the agreement with Netscape.
The Java media APIs, which encompass 2D, 3D, audio, video, animation, telephony and collaboration are being defined by JavaSoft, Macromedia, Adobe and SGI. Fireworks is described by the duo as being useful for "manipulating text, images, animation, and audio and video". It includes graphics functions such as ink effects, blends and transitions.
ARE ROUTER MAKERS THE NEXT TO FEEL THE EFFECTS OF JAVA?
UB Networks last week unveiled its set of technologies designed to let network devices be managed via a Web interface. At the heart of the current implementation of NetDirector@Web, which will ship later this month, is a system by which each device comes with its own Java applet onboard. This is loaded into the browser from where it communicates using the SNMP protocol. UB is a supporter of both the WBEM (Web-based Enterprise Management effort) and the Java Management API that will complement it. Its current implementation is an indication of what can be achieved pending the arrival of these standardised approaches.
Though the announcement points to a world where browsers are used as standard management interface. It's the next stage of the plan that has wider ranging implications - making networking vendors ponder where their core competence really lie: in the hardware, or as software suppliers?
Router and hub manufacturers have traditionally sunk most of their research and development costs on the software within their boxes, and since network hardware was always proprietary, the resultant software has been tied to the vendor's own platform. However, in a world where network devices are Java enabled networking companies will be faced with a choice: to keep the software to themselves - maintaining the competitive edge of their own hardware, or to sell it to third parties. In the first quarter next year, UB will announce its detailed plans for running a Java virtual machine within network devices themselves. Ron Morita, vice president of network applications for UB Networks Network Products Division has a chuckle when you ask him whether in the medium term he sees UB as a software or a hardware company. He points to his job title and says "perhaps you should ask someone less biased. Nonetheless he acknowledges that selling UB's expertise to third parties is "quite an attractive opportunity - there's a lot of value there, but what you need is a portable environment". How fast the various networking companies grasp the possibilities remains to be seen, but Java has the potential to restructure the embedded network software market in the same way that it may cause upheavals in the desktop applications space.
The potential is greater than just converting today's routing and management software to the new language, however. Morita says that the intention is to get Java ubiquitous throughout the network from desktop to desktop. Once that happens independent software vendors "should be able to create applications that run across all of these devices" he says. Et voila, the intelligent network, simply crawling with the various agents and applets.
*While Cisco Systems has yet to reveal its exact plans for letting users manage its devices via a Web interface, a Java-enabled demo can be found at:
www.cisco.com/warp/public/734/General/javaone_demo/ciscodemo.html
ELLISON RECKONS EUROPEAN TELECO PLANS NC GIVEAWAY
A European phone company - could be France Telecom given its Minitel experience - is looking at giving the Network Computer to families for free and charging a monthly service for Internet access, says Larry Ellison.
InterOffice groupware will be not only a Lotus Notes killer, but will be the killer application Network Computers need to take off, reckons the Oracle Corp chief executive. He bills InterOffice as one of Oracle's most important products saying it could become its biggest in terms of number of users.
"The product will be launched more aggressively than any other product we have ever launched," he said in New York last week, adding that the secret plus would be multimedia electronic mail, and saying that at about $100 per user, it will also be less expensive than Notes and Microsoft Corp's Exchange. The first release ships this month and can run over a corporate intranet, with personal computers on a network, or on new Network Computers.
SYMANTEC PINS HOPES ON SEARCH ENGINE
Does the world need another Internet search engine? You gotta be kidding. But does the world need a better way to search the Web? Always. Software utilities giant Symantec Corp thinks so too, and is hoping users will shell out $50 apiece to be able to trawl seven web search engines simultaneously and take the hassle out of decompressing files, FTP and other downloads.
As anticipated, Cupertino, California-based Symantec's new Internet FastFind engine will be available September 9th from its home page and will hit stores soon after. The software runs under Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 - it doesn't have a Macintosh story at present - and requires 8Mb disk space. Internet FastFind consists of seven elements which users link to via an oval-shaped menu window reminiscent of the new breed of automobile dashboard control units. The software's main function, WebFind, simultaneously searches seven engines - Alta Vista, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo!, Magellan and Excite - and lets users specify which engines to search, the maximum number of matches to retrieve, how many seconds to search and whether to discard invalid links. WebFind will narrow the search to sites only or pages only, and means users won't have to memorize different engines' query syntax. To use it, click on one of the two buttons it adds to a browser's directory bar. NetFileFind lets users search for specific FTP sites using Archie, but without the usual jargon, and download the files by dragging and dropping.
The Notify feature tracks favorite sites and alerts users to changes. PatchConnect analyzes a PC's other software and, working with Notify, tells users when updates are available. WebLaunch lets favorites bookmarks be launched from the Windows taskbar. EasyFTP makes FTP files appear like regular Windows folders that users can drag and drop onto their system. EasyZIP automatically zips and unzips compressed files, but the extension is a separate Symantec product and will only be bundled with Internet FastFind for a limited time. The whole shebang is Symantec's first foray into the world of Internet-only products and is positioned so that users will be well accustomed to its use before Microsoft launches its browser-based Nashville interface for Windows which is expected to include some similar functions like the notifier. Symantec lost $39.8m on revenue up just 3.3% at $445.4m last year and though it plans to milk FastFind for whatever it can it doesn't expect the software to become a significant revenue earner. It just wants to get people using its net software, presumably in anticipation of web versions of its other utilities and management tools. It doesn't rate the competition, saying Quarterdeck Corp's WebCompass multiple search engine is geared toward intranets, and that other internet utilities don't have as wide a range of integrated features. Symantec will tout Internet FastFind's mass market appeal - it's targeting users who surf the web more than five hours a week and is advertising the software in USA Today and on Netscape's home page. Expect bundling deals with modem manufacturers and Internet service providers to follow.
MICROSOFT'S PEGASUS TO BE LAUNCHED IN COMING MONTHS
Microsft's answer to the Network Computer operating system will be launched "within the next several months" Steve Ballmer tells InfoWorld. The OS's actual name will be Windows CE and it will come with a skinny version of Internet Explorer, he tells the paper.
In addition, a CE-equipped machine will be able to run "most" applications written in Visual Basic - and will be able to synchronice files with Microsoft desktop applications such as Word. No, it doesn't fit the NC spec.
JAVA BEANS 1ST DRAFT RELEASED
A first draft of Java Beans, the Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) for creating software components with the Java language, was released last Wednesday by Sun Microsystems. While the draft fills in some of the gaps, one of the most eagerly awaited areas - how Java Beans will interconnect with other component architectures, like Microsoft's ActiveX is a long way from completion - there are APIs defined but nothing in the way of software.
Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools are a primary focus in this initial draft Version 0.30 with support including a drag-and-drop interface, essential for laying out software components at design time.
One difficult that the specifiers face is that a completed 'Beans' specification cannot emerge until Java itself is stabilised. Discussion continues, for example, over the best way for Beans to handle "events" such as mouse-clicks and some of that debate centres on Java, not on components.
Other problems, not of Sun's making, will also affect Java Beans. The drag-and-drop definition mentioned above is fine for design-time layouts, but at run time many Java Beans will display their output on a Web browser, and layouts can vary from one browser to another.
Java Beans will support three distributed network computing mechanisms: JavaSoft's own remote method invocation scheme; the JDBC Java database protocols; and Java IDL, which will allow Java Beans clients connect to servers using Object Management Group's Corba Interface Definition Language.
The draft is downloadable from splash.javasoft.com/beans; Sun will accept comments until September 25th.
IBM PUSHES INTO COMMERCE
"They're real. They're now." was the mantra of Big Blue executives last week as IBM launched CommercePOINT, its one-stop shopping family of Internet commerce software and services. But "now", to IBM, appears to have a rather special meaning. IBM went out of its way to position itself as the only vendor capable of getting businesses and organizations up and ready for commerce today, downplaying the fact that many of the CommercePOINT products will not actually be available until Q4 and that the SET standard, which is to be implemented in IBM's Net.Commerce Payment portion of CommercePOINT, has not yet been finalized.
Apparently IBM is confident that SET will be ready before the end of the year because Net.Commerce is scheduled to ship beginning Q496. Commerce POINT comprises a series of software and services- anything begining with the word 'Net' is a product', anything starting with 'World' is a service:
l Net.Commerce - The merchant server software that was used to sell tickets at the Atlanta games. Will be available in Q4 for about $5,000.
l Net.Commerce Payment - IBM's implementation of the SET protocol. Limited availability in Q4. Will use Nortel's digital certificate technology. Limited availability in Q4 96.
l Net.Registry - the backbone for the World Registry service. Available on a limited basis in Q4.
l World Avenue - IBM's on-line mall will have its grand opening this fall. Two merchants are presently using the service and 20 more are slated to join.
Merchants can join World Avenue by paying a monthly or annual fee or they can opt for 15 % of revenues.
l World Commerce - IBM's turnkey solution for those who don't want to be part of World Avenue. It will be available on a limited basis in Q4.
l World Distributor - Brings together retailers, franchisers and suppliers on a Website. Limited availability to selected customers in Q4.
l World Purchasing - For large businesses and governments that do contractual buying and selling. Limited availability in Q4.
l World Registry - IBM's Public Key Infrastructure offering. Big Blue, like so many others these days, sees itself as that trusted third party to whom a public key registry is likely to be entrusted. Limited availability in Q4.
VXTREME PREVIEWS LOW-BANDWIDTH VIDEO TECH
And another one enters the market: One-year-old start-up VXtreme Inc claims it has the only products that can transmit video over the Internet or intranets using low bandwidths while retaining high quality presentation .
With technology it licensed exclusively from Stanford University, VXtreme is selling a family of products called Web Theater. It consists of server software for streaming video and synchronized content; a 1Mb browser plug-in for Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer with VCR-like controls; and production tools to capture and integrate video, all starting at $2,000.
VXtreme has positioned Web Theater to run in the 28.8Kb to 256Kb per second sweet spot, claiming that's the only way for products to be useful for businesses today. The Palo Alto, California-based firm says users will be able to integrate video with their existing Java or HTML-based content and is signing up systems integrators and VARs to develop applications using Web Theater in areas such as employee training and customer service. Ther company reckons that the key is a new compression method, which allows users to view 20 frames per second of 160x120 resolution video using only 28.8Kb per second. The firm supports LiveScreen now and will support conversion of MPEG-1 and QuickTime files to its streaming mechanism in future. Web Theater requires a minimum 133 MHz Pentium machine to encode video and an 486-class PC to decode. It has 30 beta sites including Sun Microsystems, site developer US Web and CNNfn Online. The plug-in is available for download September 16 and Web Theater ships in October.
NETSCAPE MAKES MOST FROM & MICROSOFT SPENDS MOST ON ADS
Jupiter Communications released its latest AdSpend report last week, predicting that Web advertising could hit $5 billion by the year 2000, up from an expected $312 million this year. 66 percent of all ad revenue comes from the top 10 of the 600 sites surveyed, and most of that revenue came from search engines. Half of the top ten publishing sites are search engines, and Netscape, the top revenue generator, collects most of its revenue from linking search engines to its site.
Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, Magellan and Excite each pay $5 million apiece to be linked to Netscape for a year. Jupiter found that search engines are also among the top Web advertisers, largely because of what they pay to Netscape, but the title of number one Web advertiser belongs to Microsoft, who spent $2 million in Q2.
TOP TEN PUBLISHERS
Rank Site Name Q2 Revenue
1 Netscape $7,755,990
2 InfoSeek $3,793,464
3 Yahoo $3,702,500
4 Lycos $2551,860
5 Excite $2,397,500
6 CNET $2,080,015
7 ZD Net $2,072,088
8 NewsPage $1,407,663
9 ESPNET Sports Zn $1,343,322
10 WebCrawler $1,235,000
www.jup.com
CommerceNet, the consortium of financial, computer and information service companies, has formed the "Internet Robustness Task Force". Comprised of telecos and ISPs, the task force hopes to define, and standardize grade levels of service for Intent connections. The consortium says it's just "gathering people" at this point, but it intends to have a program plan by October. It does possible it could fall victim to its own rather broad agenda, which is to address: "What is Internet connectivity?" and "What can be done to enhance the Internet?".
SMALL TRANSACTIONS ARE WHERE THE MONEY WILL BE
Now that Visa and Mastercard have decided to place their bets on the SET protocol, new sites are being set on the nascent microtransaction market.
MasterCard's senior VP of Electronic Commerce, Steve Mott says that his company is looking at this market right now, but that it is not yet big enough for companies like MasterCard and Visa to make a move just. This, Mott adds, will involve steps like setting up a world-wide consortium and implementing the changes to its rates and billing system - things that MasterCard would most likely have to do in order to handle microtransactions.
One company trying to stay ahead of the curve on microtransactions is DEC, whose Internet Business Group VP Rose Anne Giordano was hyping the company's Millicent microtransaction protocol. This lightweight protocol travels under HTTP and, like similar initiatives by IBM and Digicash, is intended for use with the fraction-of-a-cent transactions that will finally make all the free stuff on the Internet billable. DEC says that today's Internet transaction processing costs something around a penny per transaction - a rate that makes microtransactions impractical.
A forthcoming report from Killen Associates of Palo Alto, California predicts that by the year 2000 the number of electronic cash transactions will number 9 billion, rising to nearer 30 billion by the year 2005. Though the sector encompasses a variety of payment methods, the analysts say that 85% to 90% of the grow will be driven by the Internet and electronic commerce. Moreover a key part of this growth will be in the "microbilling" area with sub-dollar transactions says Killen VP, Jules Street. The average credit card transaction today is around $60-70. The report will be published next month for the definitely non-micro amount of $4,000 www.killen.com
AOL BANKING - LESS THAN MEETS THE EYE
America Online trumpeted the founding of its new online banking service last week. "AOL Teams Up With Eighteen Respected Financial Institutions to Bring Home Banking to Members" was how it put it. Well, sort of. In fact, the company's general manager of personal finance David Bard admits that the move is little more than AOL adding buttons to its browser to take its users to banks existing Web sites. "The value we are adding is the value of the packaging" says Bard; a claim that could also be made by anyone who puts lots of banking links on their home page. To be fair, AOL is ensuring that when the AOL Web browser launches it will be branded with the Bank's logo. Bard said that only "a handful" of the institutions were launching new services with AOL, the rest were pre-existing.
The majority are using Intuit's 'Bank Now' back-end software, the rest are using their own vanilla, Web-based implementations. Bard said that the days of AOL developing custom gateways between particular banks and the online service are over, thanks to the amount of development effort it involves.
The institutions that AOL is linking to and which are offering online transaction services include: American Express, Bank of America, Bank of Stockton, Centura Bank, Commerce Bancshares, Commercial Federal, Compass Bank, CoreStates Bank N.A, Crestar Bank, First Chicago NBD, Laredo National Bank, M&T, Marquette Bank, Sanwa Bank California, Security First Network Bank, Union Bank of California, and Wells Fargo.
America Online declined to say how much, if any money changed hands in the deals, and indeed which way the money flowed. Bard said that around one third of AOL's users already frequent its personal finance area and that the banking links were expected to increase this substantially.
DOUBLECLICK LATEST TO IMPROVE AUDITING TECHNOLOGY
Internet advertising vendor DoubleClick says that the Internet is going to make advertising sellers more accountable to the advertisers who use their services.
Sales Director David Henderson says that the ability Internet advertisers have to track their inventory on the Internet will set the standard for more traditional forms of advertising like television and radio, where reports on when an ad ran are infrequent and where information on who actually heard the ad is often no more than an educated guess.
In keeping with this theme, DoubleClick announced last week that it was making its spotlight service available to its advertisers. When installed on a Web page, the Spotlight software stores information on user profiles and activity in a centralized database, which is maintained by DoubleClick. Spotlight can store information like domain name, company size, geographic location, Zip codes, and sites and pages visited.
DoubleClick hopes to make Spotlight a standard feature of its Website, but right now it is charging advertisers a hefty $5 per 1,000 impressions.
What do you make of the rumours that Netscape may buy Novell? We don't know anyone sensible who thinks its on, but as we went to press Netscape was preparing a large, hush-hush anouncement of some kind.
Kathleen Early, AT&T's VP of EasyCommerce Services hinted that the teleco may be trying to get into the public/private key encryption game. She cited AT&T's reputation as a "trusted third party arbiter" and said that the company is looking at "getting involved at all levels of (Internet) security". In a Keynote panel discussion Early predicted that as Internet usage increases, local brownouts will become a more common occurrence on the Internet, but AT&T believes that full-fledged blackouts will not happen.
Netscape was conspicuous in its absence from last week's Internet and Electronic Commerce show, though Netscape's Marc Andreesen did drop by on Wednesday night to collect an Industry Achievement Award. On the show floor, Netscape contented itself with a corner of business consultant KPMG Peat Marwick's booth. KMPG expects to announce a strategic alliance with Netscape within the next week or two, in which the former would help develop turnkey commercial Websites.
Maybe Gartner should consider a smaller conference hall next time. As the tumbleweed blew around the deserted north side of San Francisco's Moscone center, AKA the site of last week's Gartner Group Internet and Electronic Commerce Conference and Exposition, visitors were practically overflowing from the smaller Macromedia User Conference on the south side. Not a few Gartner attendees were spotted cruising the Macromedia and Intel booths. And we thought that E-commerce was hot and multimedia was cold?
HydraWEB demoed its eponymous Website load balancing software, which manages all http requests to a single IP address and routes them to the most available server. The product can support multiple IP addresses if need be and is now available from $4,500 (for a two-server license) up.
Canton Massachusetts's WebMate International announced that its WebMate Store Maker and Mall Maker virtual storefront software packages will be available on September 25th. Designed to "demystify the process of creating a virtual store or mall", WebMate's software lets you create a commercial Website through a series of point and click interfaces. WebMate International will be announcing SQL plug-ins to their product this week.
SURFING AND CHAT AS ADDICTIVE AS DRUGS OR GAMBLING
Stand by in 20 years time for the kind of class-action suits that are currently hitting the tobacco industry. Reporting in the UK's Daily Telegraph, technology correspondent Robert Uhlig cites a study that says: "The Internet is as addictive as drugs, alcohol or gambling," adding that those most at risk are women and the unemployed.
The study was presented by Dr Kimberly Young at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Dr Young, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told of a woman who divorced rather than pull the plug on her 12-hour-a-day surfing habit. Meeting new people made her feel "attractive and interesting," said Dr Young, which led to her abandoning her household duties of cooking, cleaning and playing golf with him. Dr Young admitted that Internet addiction was not yet formally recognised but asserted that it did exist. Her study of 396 people whom she considers to be psychologically dependent included a comparison with 100 non-dependent users.
Basing her judgements on those criteria normally used to assess addiction to chemicals or gambling; thinking about the Internet while off-line, sometimes to the extent of getting up in the middle of the night to satisfy the craving; a need to surf for progressively longer periods to achieve satisfaction; a feeling of restlessness or irritability when trying to cut down or stop; use of the Internet to escape problems or to relieve feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety or depression; excessive spending, in one case up to $1,500 a month; and lying to friends and family to hide the extent of their Internet use.
Dependent users ranged in age from 14 to 70 and spent an average of 38.5 hours a week surfing, compared with an average of 4.9 hours for the non-dependent group. Of the 396 "Internet addicts", 157 were men and 239 were women, and the most popular use was chat rooms where people could adopt new roles under assumed names, which enables them to be obnoxious or sexy without any repercussions.
INTERNET GENDER GAP IS A GENERATION GAP SAYS FORRESTER
Forrester research has released a report predicting that more than 18 million women will be on the Internet by the year 2,000, up from 5 million today. The study reckons that most of this growth will come from women accessing from the workplace. Forrester interviewed 100 female Internet users last July to examine their online habits and found that most women are experimenters rather than evangelists of the new medium. Analyst Kate Delhagen says that this is because getting online has not yet become simple enough to be truly mainstream.
She adds that while the survey found that nearly 50 percent of women say what they do on-line is "different from what men do", the study found that age was a more important factor in determining Internet usage. Delhagen calls it "more of a generation than a gender gap".
LOTUS UNVEILS NOTES-INTERNET PLAN FOR ACTIVEX SUPPORT
Alongside its Domino Web application server, Lotus Development Corp will also try and proliferate Notes across the Internet by offering Web-enabled versions of its current OCX- and ActiveX-based Lotus Components application building blocks from next year.
The idea is that Web developers will use the Components - current examples include Chart, Comment, Draw/Diagram, File Viewer, Project Scheduler, Spreadsheet and Component Template Builder - within Web applications.
Users will activate a Lotus component with their browsers to access and run the application. Lotus says a broker could use the Components to create an Internet application which queries investment portfolios. When posted to the Web site customers would be able query their portfolios and use the Spreadsheet and Chart components to analyse and display their data. Meantime, Lotus says it is now shipping ActiveX versions of the six core Components - not Web-enabled - in a starter pack at $50 per client seat.
Later this year it will offer Lotus Components Product Warehouse, a Note 4 application allowing for distribution of Lotus Components and licence monitoring within an organisation. The next version of Lotus Word Pro which will ship as a part of SmartSuite 97 in the fourth quarter, the IBM Corp company said, will include a container for Lotus Components.
AT&T LINKS CALL-CENTRES TO
WEB BROWSERS
AT&T Corp is preparing to begin trials of a new service, instant Answers, iA, designed to bridge the gap between call centre applications and companies' Web pages. Although the service brings little in the way of technological advances, it nevertheless looks like an interesting application: on iA-enabled Web sites, users wanting to speak to a company representative have the option of entering their phone number, which is then passed to the company's call centre, generating a phone call in response. Since the call centre operators will be aware of which page the user has just been looking at, the phone call request can be passed to somebody in the correct department, says AT&T, although it admits one drawback with the service is that users accessing the Internet via a modem will need two phone lines - one for the Web connection, the other for the voice conversation. A second feature of the service then enables the call centre operator to download photos or diagrams to the user - for example to illustrate other available products - which automatically appear on the user's screen.
The trial is due to begin next month, with a commercial service following next year. Although AT&T is using the trial to assess the correct tariffing for the service, it will nevertheless be charged on a per transaction basis.
EUNET LAUNCHES ONLINE SERVICE FOR NOKIA'S 9000 PHONE
Nokia seems to have caught the wave with its 9000 series cell-phone-cum-browser. EUnet International Ltd confederation says it is offering customised Internet services on the Nokia 9000 Communicator, calling the offering EUnetTraveller. The deal offers owners of the device access to the Internet in 24 countries in Europe and in the US.
The one-time sign-up charge is $40 and includes 90 minutes of usage, and the connection fee is $0.14 per minute thereafter, on top of call charges, making it an expensive way to surf. The EUNetTraveller service will be available in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, US and Jugoslavia.
The war against junk email took a number of tortuous turns last week when America Online first announced it would block junk e-mail from a number of persistent "spammers" and then found itself the subject of a temporary restraining order. America Online said it would challenge the order.
AOL announced last Wednesday that mail from several domains it accused of "routinely sending unsolicited mass commercial email" would be blocked. Specifically, it identified cyberpromo.co, answerme.com, servint.com, netfree.com and honey.com. In fact, the first two domains are both used by the same infamous company, Cyber Promotions Inc of Philadelphia. The third domain is that of Servint Corp - Cyber Promotions' Internet Service Provider. Netfree.com, run by Prime
DOT Gossip
UB Networks is working with an undisclosed number of unnamed networking companies to implement the Web-based Enterprise Management standard (WBEM) in Java
The Japanese Ministry of Finance is pondering an easing of rules on the disclosure of corporate earnings results on the Internet. However the ministry is worried that deregulation would encourage insider trading. Currently, companies can't publish their results on the Net until at least 12 hours after a press briefing. The ministry may reduce this to 3 hours.
Reed Caldwell, System administrator of Servint.com ( page 1) - Cyber Promotions' ISP - claims that America Online has never contacted him concerning his client's spamming activities. Cyber promotions "are leaving us of next month anyway" he says.
Observers watching troop movements inside Microsoft think it may be dumping all of its object technology into its Internet division
Tacoma City Council has decided to scrap its 6% telecommunication tax levied on Internet Service Providers (OR issue 8). ISP's who have already coughed up will get refunds. However California, Florida, New York and Washington state are considering imposing similar taxes as they try to work out whether ISPs should be considered telecommunications operators (liable for the tax) or... something else.
Netscape Communications has released the finished 3.0 release of Navigator Gold - its drag-and-drop HTML page construction tool.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 contains a couple of glitches that stop Java applets from running correctly, C/Net reports. One is caused by a problem in the just-in-time compiler in the browser and Microsoft's Visual J++ Java development tool (solution - turn it off). The second involves Internet Explorer's Java "zip" class libraries
The US National Basketball Association is suing America Online Inc for allegedly pirating scores and statistics from games in progress.
JavaSoft isn't talking to the Object Management Group - says the OMG.
Buried in Macromedia's announcement of Fireworks API (see page 1) was the news that a future version of Shockwave will be built upon Fireworks, finally merging the Shockwave and Java worlds.Fireworks is expected to be available in the Galileo version of Netscape Navigator, planned to be released by year-end.
Netscape will release the beta version of Navigator 4.0 at its Internet Developer Conference this October, around the same time Microsoft plans to be out with Internet Explorer 4.0 beta, according to C/Net. At long last Netscape is doing something with the technology it aquired from its purchase of Collabra. It says Navigator 4.0 will include threaded discussion support as well as IMAP4 and Secure/MIME encryption and authentication support.
So farewell anon.penet.fi. After three years of operation, the Internet's most famous anonymous remailer has been shut down, thanks to the efforts of the Church of Scientology and the apparently specious claims by the UK's Observer Newspaper which claimed penet was a major conduit for child pornography. Last week a Finnish court ordered Johan Helsingius to reveal the identity of one of the system's users, whom the Church of Scientology had accused of distributing copyrighted documents. The ruling effectively removed the anonymiser's raison d'etre. "The legal protection of the users needs to be clarified," he said. "At the moment the privacy of Internet messages is judicially unclear."
Helsingius says he plans to sue the Observer over the child pornography accusations. For one thing the re-mailer has blocked posting to .binary groups for some time now, and has severely restricted the file size of anything that could be posted via it. A quick examination of many of the pornographic posts which purport to have come via the re-mailer show them to have forged headers. Helsingius is planning to reopen a stripped down service for organisations like the Samaritans, to use.
CommerceNet is working with W3C and JEPI (the Joint Electronic Payments Initiative) to finalize the SET electronic transaction protocol. According to SET backers some minor technical issues as well as "regional differences" remain outstanding., though nobody is saying when the work will be completed.
Search Engine software company Verity Inc. will announce at next week's Seybold convention that it is renaming its Topic product line to Search 97. The Search 97 suite of products will include feature enhancements to Verity's AGENT Server and AGENT Server Toolkit as well as an information server that Verity is calling "Spider". Perhaps Verity is hoping this repositioning will turn its fortunes Bloomberg reported last week that Verity will be posting a first quarter loss of $1.3 million.
The TNG release of CA-Unicenter due at the year-end is to be integrated with Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer 3.0 Web browser and use those recently-created Web-management protocols . What that means for Computer Associates International Inc's much-hyped three-dimensional interface for TNG, created using Mill Valley, California-based Sense8 Corp's WorldToolKit virtual reality design tool, the company has not been able to tell us.
Sources say that Sun Microsystems' Solstice group will be announcing the general availability of its implementation of the Java management API at Networld and Interop next week. Up until now, the software had only been available in "pre-release", which means available only to Sun partners. Sun is also expected to be demoing its Java e-mail client.
Far from losing money on the ill- fated Europe Online SA venture as most people had assumed, Pearson Plc was the one investor in the ill-conceived venture to come out ahead: in a letter to Sunday Business Pearson says it stopped funding Europe Online a year ago when the problems became apparant, and says that it actually doubled its stake money when it sold the company's London operations back to Europe Online for over £1m last year.
AT&T is beta-testing something it calls Instant Answer which lets Web sites call back would -be customers.
IBM's announcement of its NC (page 1) includes a gushing quote from Rob Pemberton, the CEO of Software 2000. "We believe the IBM Network station could be as significant as the intoduction of the original IBM PC" he says - which is more than IBM appears to believe. The company slipped out the machine with the minimum of publicity.
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WEEKLY DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNET FRONT
Sept 9 - Sept 13 1996 Issue No 15
AMERICA ONLINE TO FIGHT BULK E-MAILER'S RESTRANING ORDER
The war against junk email took a number of tortuous turns last week when America Online first announced it would block junk e-mail from a number of persistent "spammers" and then found itself the subject of a temporary restraining order. America Online said it would challenge the order.
AOL announced last Wednesday that mail from several domains it accused of "routinely sending unsolicited mass commercial email" would be blocked. Specifically, it identified cyberpromo.co, answerme.com, servint.com, netfree.com and honey.com. In fact, the first two domains are both used by the same infamous company, Cyber Promotions Inc of Philadelphia. The third domain is that of Servint Corp - Cyber Promotions' Internet Service Provider. Netfree.com, run by Prime Data WorldNet Systems, has also been responsible for numerous junk mailings and acts as a distribution point for FloodGate, a software package that is designed to cull and classify e-mail addresses from postings to Usenet.
In March, Cyber Promotions filed a suit against AOL - saying that the online service was interfering with its e-mailing business. The mail-out company, run by Sanford Wallace contends that America Online's attempt to block its mailings also violates the US constitution first amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. In return, America Online countersued for alleged misappropriation of the AOL subscriber list. America Online also said that unsolicited e-mail has become the number one complaint from their users, with about 15 million bits of unsolicited e-mails arriving in the system each week. It said it had been proactively contacting "spam clearing houses" trying to get them to stop.
No sooner had AOL announced its exclusion policy last week than Cyber Promotions went to the Eastern District Pennsylvania Federal Court to get a temporary restraining order which was granted.
NETSCAPE NAVIO TO GET FIRST OUTING IN IBM NETWORK COMPUTER
And so it finally arrived, IBM's network computer. After the build-up, the machine that finally emerged is about as low-end as it is possible to go, based on the PowerPC 403 embedded microprocessor and being packaged as a replacement for mid-range and mainframe dumb terminals.
The new machines, which will sell for about $700 with 8MB of RAM and without a screen, come with X-Windows and 3270, 5250 terminal emulation built in. It will also come with a Web browser courtesy of Netscape's new Navio operation (OR issue 14).
Intriguingly, the browser is described as being a customized version Navigator 3.0 - the non-modular version of the browser. Navio's brief has previously been described as revolving around the 4.0 release of the browser. Navio itself was refusing to comment on the IBM announcement as we went to press.
As previously reported, the box was designed by Network Computing Devices and is very closely based on that company's Explora terminal. Tim Gant, IBM's VP of integrated workstations within the company's server group says the machines will be aimed at those customers who have populations of green-screen terminals today, and also want to replace 286 and 386 PCs used for data entry.
For some reason IBM is embarrassed about the operating system it is using, and is refusing to name it. However sources say that like the hardware, the OS is based closely upon NCD's work. NCD's Explora uses a much-hacked kernel with its ancestry in the BSD Unix camp.
Those who want to use the machine will need an IBM server - either mainframe, AS/400,RS/6000 or PC-based. The server software consists of boot code, a file system, and user management system to set up user accounts, manage access privileges etc.
Officially, IBM says that the machine is the first in a series of NCs, however Gant says that there is no formal road-map.
What is certain, however, is that the PowerPC-based NCs will be kept firmly as low-end machines. Unlike Sun, which accepts that there may be some overlap between its Java and SPARC-based workstations, IBM is adamant that the NCs will be kept out of the RS/6000s way.
Meanwhile, the IBM PC division is also working on the specification for machines that it loosely calls 'network computers'. However the division has yet to determine whether the Intel-based boxeswill run Java yet so they are little different from conventional diskless workstations.
MACROMEDIA 'FIREWORKS' LOOKS LIKE PREVIEW OF JAVA MEDIA APIS
Is this a sneak preview of the Java Media API set? Macromedia Inc last week announced a set of Java classes and associated APIs for multimedia development and licensed them to Netscape. The browser-maker will be incorporating the 'Fireworks' API into its ONE development platform. Macromedia itself is being incredibly coy about its future plans for Fireworks, however Netscape client integration evangelist Tim Hickman says his company will "support Macromedia's efforts" to get Fireworks incorporated as a core part of the Java media extensions. "It is something that we would love to see happen" he added.
Fireworks will join the Netscape Java foundation classes in Netscape ONE, but Jim Funk, Macromedia VP of corporate development said "there may be some sub-licensing required". He refused to give any indication of how the company intended to handle the future use of the API's, beyond the agreement with Netscape.
The Java media APIs, which encompass 2D, 3D, audio, video, animation, telephony and collaboration are being defined by JavaSoft, Macromedia, Adobe and SGI. Fireworks is described by the duo as being useful for "manipulating text, images, animation, and audio and video". It includes graphics functions such as ink effects, blends and transitions.
ARE ROUTER MAKERS THE NEXT TO FEEL THE EFFECTS OF JAVA?
UB Networks last week unveiled its set of technologies designed to let network devices be managed via a Web interface. At the heart of the current implementation of NetDirector@Web, which will ship later this month, is a system by which each device comes with its own Java applet onboard. This is loaded into the browser from where it communicates using the SNMP protocol. UB is a supporter of both the WBEM (Web-based Enterprise Management effort) and the Java Management API that will complement it. Its current implementation is an indication of what can be achieved pending the arrival of these standardised approaches.
Though the announcement points to a world where browsers are used as standard management interface. It's the next stage of the plan that has wider ranging implications - making networking vendors ponder where their core competence really lie: in the hardware, or as software suppliers?
Router and hub manufacturers have traditionally sunk most of their research and development costs on the software within their boxes, and since network hardware was always proprietary, the resultant software has been tied to the vendor's own platform. However, in a world where network devices are Java enabled networking companies will be faced with a choice: to keep the software to themselves - maintaining the competitive edge of their own hardware, or to sell it to third parties. In the first quarter next year, UB will announce its detailed plans for running a Java virtual machine within network devices themselves. Ron Morita, vice president of network applications for UB Networks Network Products Division has a chuckle when you ask him whether in the medium term he sees UB as a software or a hardware company. He points to his job title and says "perhaps you should ask someone less biased. Nonetheless he acknowledges that selling UB's expertise to third parties is "quite an attractive opportunity - there's a lot of value there, but what you need is a portable environment". How fast the various networking companies grasp the possibilities remains to be seen, but Java has the potential to restructure the embedded network software market in the same way that it may cause upheavals in the desktop applications space.
The potential is greater than just converting today's routing and management software to the new language, however. Morita says that the intention is to get Java ubiquitous throughout the network from desktop to desktop. Once that happens independent software vendors "should be able to create applications that run across all of these devices" he says. Et voila, the intelligent network, simply crawling with the various agents and applets.
*While Cisco Systems has yet to reveal its exact plans for letting users manage its devices via a Web interface, a Java-enabled demo can be found at:
www.cisco.com/warp/public/734/General/javaone_demo/ciscodemo.html
ELLISON RECKONS EUROPEAN TELECO PLANS NC GIVEAWAY
A European phone company - could be France Telecom given its Minitel experience - is looking at giving the Network Computer to families for free and charging a monthly service for Internet access, says Larry Ellison.
InterOffice groupware will be not only a Lotus Notes killer, but will be the killer application Network Computers need to take off, reckons the Oracle Corp chief executive. He bills InterOffice as one of Oracle's most important products saying it could become its biggest in terms of number of users.
"The product will be launched more aggressively than any other product we have ever launched," he said in New York last week, adding that the secret plus would be multimedia electronic mail, and saying that at about $100 per user, it will also be less expensive than Notes and Microsoft Corp's Exchange. The first release ships this month and can run over a corporate intranet, with personal computers on a network, or on new Network Computers.
SYMANTEC PINS HOPES ON SEARCH ENGINE
Does the world need another Internet search engine? You gotta be kidding. But does the world need a better way to search the Web? Always. Software utilities giant Symantec Corp thinks so too, and is hoping users will shell out $50 apiece to be able to trawl seven web search engines simultaneously and take the hassle out of decompressing files, FTP and other downloads.
As anticipated, Cupertino, California-based Symantec's new Internet FastFind engine will be available September 9th from its home page and will hit stores soon after. The software runs under Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 - it doesn't have a Macintosh story at present - and requires 8Mb disk space. Internet FastFind consists of seven elements which users link to via an oval-shaped menu window reminiscent of the new breed of automobile dashboard control units. The software's main function, WebFind, simultaneously searches seven engines - Alta Vista, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo!, Magellan and Excite - and lets users specify which engines to search, the maximum number of matches to retrieve, how many seconds to search and whether to discard invalid links. WebFind will narrow the search to sites only or pages only, and means users won't have to memorize different engines' query syntax. To use it, click on one of the two buttons it adds to a browser's directory bar. NetFileFind lets users search for specific FTP sites using Archie, but without the usual jargon, and download the files by dragging and dropping.
The Notify feature tracks favorite sites and alerts users to changes. PatchConnect analyzes a PC's other software and, working with Notify, tells users when updates are available. WebLaunch lets favorites bookmarks be launched from the Windows taskbar. EasyFTP makes FTP files appear like regular Windows folders that users can drag and drop onto their system. EasyZIP automatically zips and unzips compressed files, but the extension is a separate Symantec product and will only be bundled with Internet FastFind for a limited time. The whole shebang is Symantec's first foray into the world of Internet-only products and is positioned so that users will be well accustomed to its use before Microsoft launches its browser-based Nashville interface for Windows which is expected to include some similar functions like the notifier. Symantec lost $39.8m on revenue up just 3.3% at $445.4m last year and though it plans to milk FastFind for whatever it can it doesn't expect the software to become a significant revenue earner. It just wants to get people using its net software, presumably in anticipation of web versions of its other utilities and management tools. It doesn't rate the competition, saying Quarterdeck Corp's WebCompass multiple search engine is geared toward intranets, and that other internet utilities don't have as wide a range of integrated features. Symantec will tout Internet FastFind's mass market appeal - it's targeting users who surf the web more than five hours a week and is advertising the software in USA Today and on Netscape's home page. Expect bundling deals with modem manufacturers and Internet service providers to follow.
MICROSOFT'S PEGASUS TO BE LAUNCHED IN COMING MONTHS
Microsft's answer to the Network Computer operating system will be launched "within the next several months" Steve Ballmer tells InfoWorld. The OS's actual name will be Windows CE and it will come with a skinny version of Internet Explorer, he tells the paper.
In addition, a CE-equipped machine will be able to run "most" applications written in Visual Basic - and will be able to synchronice files with Microsoft desktop applications such as Word. No, it doesn't fit the NC spec.
JAVA BEANS 1ST DRAFT RELEASED
A first draft of Java Beans, the Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) for creating software components with the Java language, was released last Wednesday by Sun Microsystems. While the draft fills in some of the gaps, one of the most eagerly awaited areas - how Java Beans will interconnect with other component architectures, like Microsoft's ActiveX is a long way from completion - there are APIs defined but nothing in the way of software.
Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools are a primary focus in this initial draft Version 0.30 with support including a drag-and-drop interface, essential for laying out software components at design time.
One difficult that the specifiers face is that a completed 'Beans' specification cannot emerge until Java itself is stabilised. Discussion continues, for example, over the best way for Beans to handle "events" such as mouse-clicks and some of that debate centres on Java, not on components.
Other problems, not of Sun's making, will also affect Java Beans. The drag-and-drop definition mentioned above is fine for design-time layouts, but at run time many Java Beans will display their output on a Web browser, and layouts can vary from one browser to another.
Java Beans will support three distributed network computing mechanisms: JavaSoft's own remote method invocation scheme; the JDBC Java database protocols; and Java IDL, which will allow Java Beans clients connect to servers using Object Management Group's Corba Interface Definition Language.
The draft is downloadable from splash.javasoft.com/beans; Sun will accept comments until September 25th.
IBM PUSHES INTO COMMERCE
"They're real. They're now." was the mantra of Big Blue executives last week as IBM launched CommercePOINT, its one-stop shopping family of Internet commerce software and services. But "now", to IBM, appears to have a rather special meaning. IBM went out of its way to position itself as the only vendor capable of getting businesses and organizations up and ready for commerce today, downplaying the fact that many of the CommercePOINT products will not actually be available until Q4 and that the SET standard, which is to be implemented in IBM's Net.Commerce Payment portion of CommercePOINT, has not yet been finalized.
Apparently IBM is confident that SET will be ready before the end of the year because Net.Commerce is scheduled to ship beginning Q496. Commerce POINT comprises a series of software and services- anything begining with the word 'Net' is a product', anything starting with 'World' is a service:
l Net.Commerce - The merchant server software that was used to sell tickets at the Atlanta games. Will be available in Q4 for about $5,000.
l Net.Commerce Payment - IBM's implementation of the SET protocol. Limited availability in Q4. Will use Nortel's digital certificate technology. Limited availability in Q4 96.
l Net.Registry - the backbone for the World Registry service. Available on a limited basis in Q4.
l World Avenue - IBM's on-line mall will have its grand opening this fall. Two merchants are presently using the service and 20 more are slated to join.
Merchants can join World Avenue by paying a monthly or annual fee or they can opt for 15 % of revenues.
l World Commerce - IBM's turnkey solution for those who don't want to be part of World Avenue. It will be available on a limited basis in Q4.
l World Distributor - Brings together retailers, franchisers and suppliers on a Website. Limited availability to selected customers in Q4.
l World Purchasing - For large businesses and governments that do contractual buying and selling. Limited availability in Q4.
l World Registry - IBM's Public Key Infrastructure offering. Big Blue, like so many others these days, sees itself as that trusted third party to whom a public key registry is likely to be entrusted. Limited availability in Q4.
VXTREME PREVIEWS LOW-BANDWIDTH VIDEO TECH
And another one enters the market: One-year-old start-up VXtreme Inc claims it has the only products that can transmit video over the Internet or intranets using low bandwidths while retaining high quality presentation .
With technology it licensed exclusively from Stanford University, VXtreme is selling a family of products called Web Theater. It consists of server software for streaming video and synchronized content; a 1Mb browser plug-in for Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer with VCR-like controls; and production tools to capture and integrate video, all starting at $2,000.
VXtreme has positioned Web Theater to run in the 28.8Kb to 256Kb per second sweet spot, claiming that's the only way for products to be useful for businesses today. The Palo Alto, California-based firm says users will be able to integrate video with their existing Java or HTML-based content and is signing up systems integrators and VARs to develop applications using Web Theater in areas such as employee training and customer service. Ther company reckons that the key is a new compression method, which allows users to view 20 frames per second of 160x120 resolution video using only 28.8Kb per second. The firm supports LiveScreen now and will support conversion of MPEG-1 and QuickTime files to its streaming mechanism in future. Web Theater requires a minimum 133 MHz Pentium machine to encode video and an 486-class PC to decode. It has 30 beta sites including Sun Microsystems, site developer US Web and CNNfn Online. The plug-in is available for download September 16 and Web Theater ships in October.
NETSCAPE MAKES MOST FROM & MICROSOFT SPENDS MOST ON ADS
Jupiter Communications released its latest AdSpend report last week, predicting that Web advertising could hit $5 billion by the year 2000, up from an expected $312 million this year. 66 percent of all ad revenue comes from the top 10 of the 600 sites surveyed, and most of that revenue came from search engines. Half of the top ten publishing sites are search engines, and Netscape, the top revenue generator, collects most of its revenue from linking search engines to its site.
Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, Magellan and Excite each pay $5 million apiece to be linked to Netscape for a year. Jupiter found that search engines are also among the top Web advertisers, largely because of what they pay to Netscape, but the title of number one Web advertiser belongs to Microsoft, who spent $2 million in Q2.
TOP TEN PUBLISHERS
Rank Site Name Q2 Revenue
1 Netscape $7,755,990
2 InfoSeek $3,793,464
3 Yahoo $3,702,500
4 Lycos $2551,860
5 Excite $2,397,500
6 CNET $2,080,015
7 ZD Net $2,072,088
8 NewsPage $1,407,663
9 ESPNET Sports Zn $1,343,322
10 WebCrawler $1,235,000
www.jup.com
CommerceNet, the consortium of financial, computer and information service companies, has formed the "Internet Robustness Task Force". Comprised of telecos and ISPs, the task force hopes to define, and standardize grade levels of service for Intent connections. The consortium says it's just "gathering people" at this point, but it intends to have a program plan by October. It does possible it could fall victim to its own rather broad agenda, which is to address: "What is Internet connectivity?" and "What can be done to enhance the Internet?".
SMALL TRANSACTIONS ARE WHERE THE MONEY WILL BE
Now that Visa and Mastercard have decided to place their bets on the SET protocol, new sites are being set on the nascent microtransaction market.
MasterCard's senior VP of Electronic Commerce, Steve Mott says that his company is looking at this market right now, but that it is not yet big enough for companies like MasterCard and Visa to make a move just. This, Mott adds, will involve steps like setting up a world-wide consortium and implementing the changes to its rates and billing system - things that MasterCard would most likely have to do in order to handle microtransactions.
One company trying to stay ahead of the curve on microtransactions is DEC, whose Internet Business Group VP Rose Anne Giordano was hyping the company's Millicent microtransaction protocol. This lightweight protocol travels under HTTP and, like similar initiatives by IBM and Digicash, is intended for use with the fraction-of-a-cent transactions that will finally make all the free stuff on the Internet billable. DEC says that today's Internet transaction processing costs something around a penny per transaction - a rate that makes microtransactions impractical.
A forthcoming report from Killen Associates of Palo Alto, California predicts that by the year 2000 the number of electronic cash transactions will number 9 billion, rising to nearer 30 billion by the year 2005. Though the sector encompasses a variety of payment methods, the analysts say that 85% to 90% of the grow will be driven by the Internet and electronic commerce. Moreover a key part of this growth will be in the "microbilling" area with sub-dollar transactions says Killen VP, Jules Street. The average credit card transaction today is around $60-70. The report will be published next month for the definitely non-micro amount of $4,000 www.killen.com
AOL BANKING - LESS THAN MEETS THE EYE
America Online trumpeted the founding of its new online banking service last week. "AOL Teams Up With Eighteen Respected Financial Institutions to Bring Home Banking to Members" was how it put it. Well, sort of. In fact, the company's general manager of personal finance David Bard admits that the move is little more than AOL adding buttons to its browser to take its users to banks existing Web sites. "The value we are adding is the value of the packaging" says Bard; a claim that could also be made by anyone who puts lots of banking links on their home page. To be fair, AOL is ensuring that when the AOL Web browser launches it will be branded with the Bank's logo. Bard said that only "a handful" of the institutions were launching new services with AOL, the rest were pre-existing.
The majority are using Intuit's 'Bank Now' back-end software, the rest are using their own vanilla, Web-based implementations. Bard said that the days of AOL developing custom gateways between particular banks and the online service are over, thanks to the amount of development effort it involves.
The institutions that AOL is linking to and which are offering online transaction services include: American Express, Bank of America, Bank of Stockton, Centura Bank, Commerce Bancshares, Commercial Federal, Compass Bank, CoreStates Bank N.A, Crestar Bank, First Chicago NBD, Laredo National Bank, M&T, Marquette Bank, Sanwa Bank California, Security First Network Bank, Union Bank of California, and Wells Fargo.
America Online declined to say how much, if any money changed hands in the deals, and indeed which way the money flowed. Bard said that around one third of AOL's users already frequent its personal finance area and that the banking links were expected to increase this substantially.
DOUBLECLICK LATEST TO IMPROVE AUDITING TECHNOLOGY
Internet advertising vendor DoubleClick says that the Internet is going to make advertising sellers more accountable to the advertisers who use their services.
Sales Director David Henderson says that the ability Internet advertisers have to track their inventory on the Internet will set the standard for more traditional forms of advertising like television and radio, where reports on when an ad ran are infrequent and where information on who actually heard the ad is often no more than an educated guess.
In keeping with this theme, DoubleClick announced last week that it was making its spotlight service available to its advertisers. When installed on a Web page, the Spotlight software stores information on user profiles and activity in a centralized database, which is maintained by DoubleClick. Spotlight can store information like domain name, company size, geographic location, Zip codes, and sites and pages visited.
DoubleClick hopes to make Spotlight a standard feature of its Website, but right now it is charging advertisers a hefty $5 per 1,000 impressions.
What do you make of the rumours that Netscape may buy Novell? We don't know anyone sensible who thinks its on, but as we went to press Netscape was preparing a large, hush-hush anouncement of some kind.
Kathleen Early, AT&T's VP of EasyCommerce Services hinted that the teleco may be trying to get into the public/private key encryption game. She cited AT&T's reputation as a "trusted third party arbiter" and said that the company is looking at "getting involved at all levels of (Internet) security". In a Keynote panel discussion Early predicted that as Internet usage increases, local brownouts will become a more common occurrence on the Internet, but AT&T believes that full-fledged blackouts will not happen.
Netscape was conspicuous in its absence from last week's Internet and Electronic Commerce show, though Netscape's Marc Andreesen did drop by on Wednesday night to collect an Industry Achievement Award. On the show floor, Netscape contented itself with a corner of business consultant KPMG Peat Marwick's booth. KMPG expects to announce a strategic alliance with Netscape within the next week or two, in which the former would help develop turnkey commercial Websites.
Maybe Gartner should consider a smaller conference hall next time. As the tumbleweed blew around the deserted north side of San Francisco's Moscone center, AKA the site of last week's Gartner Group Internet and Electronic Commerce Conference and Exposition, visitors were practically overflowing from the smaller Macromedia User Conference on the south side. Not a few Gartner attendees were spotted cruising the Macromedia and Intel booths. And we thought that E-commerce was hot and multimedia was cold?
HydraWEB demoed its eponymous Website load balancing software, which manages all http requests to a single IP address and routes them to the most available server. The product can support multiple IP addresses if need be and is now available from $4,500 (for a two-server license) up.
Canton Massachusetts's WebMate International announced that its WebMate Store Maker and Mall Maker virtual storefront software packages will be available on September 25th. Designed to "demystify the process of creating a virtual store or mall", WebMate's software lets you create a commercial Website through a series of point and click interfaces. WebMate International will be announcing SQL plug-ins to their product this week.
SURFING AND CHAT AS ADDICTIVE AS DRUGS OR GAMBLING
Stand by in 20 years time for the kind of class-action suits that are currently hitting the tobacco industry. Reporting in the UK's Daily Telegraph, technology correspondent Robert Uhlig cites a study that says: "The Internet is as addictive as drugs, alcohol or gambling," adding that those most at risk are women and the unemployed.
The study was presented by Dr Kimberly Young at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Dr Young, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told of a woman who divorced rather than pull the plug on her 12-hour-a-day surfing habit. Meeting new people made her feel "attractive and interesting," said Dr Young, which led to her abandoning her household duties of cooking, cleaning and playing golf with him. Dr Young admitted that Internet addiction was not yet formally recognised but asserted that it did exist. Her study of 396 people whom she considers to be psychologically dependent included a comparison with 100 non-dependent users.
Basing her judgements on those criteria normally used to assess addiction to chemicals or gambling; thinking about the Internet while off-line, sometimes to the extent of getting up in the middle of the night to satisfy the craving; a need to surf for progressively longer periods to achieve satisfaction; a feeling of restlessness or irritability when trying to cut down or stop; use of the Internet to escape problems or to relieve feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety or depression; excessive spending, in one case up to $1,500 a month; and lying to friends and family to hide the extent of their Internet use.
Dependent users ranged in age from 14 to 70 and spent an average of 38.5 hours a week surfing, compared with an average of 4.9 hours for the non-dependent group. Of the 396 "Internet addicts", 157 were men and 239 were women, and the most popular use was chat rooms where people could adopt new roles under assumed names, which enables them to be obnoxious or sexy without any repercussions.
INTERNET GENDER GAP IS A GENERATION GAP SAYS FORRESTER
Forrester research has released a report predicting that more than 18 million women will be on the Internet by the year 2,000, up from 5 million today. The study reckons that most of this growth will come from women accessing from the workplace. Forrester interviewed 100 female Internet users last July to examine their online habits and found that most women are experimenters rather than evangelists of the new medium. Analyst Kate Delhagen says that this is because getting online has not yet become simple enough to be truly mainstream.
She adds that while the survey found that nearly 50 percent of women say what they do on-line is "different from what men do", the study found that age was a more important factor in determining Internet usage. Delhagen calls it "more of a generation than a gender gap".
LOTUS UNVEILS NOTES-INTERNET PLAN FOR ACTIVEX SUPPORT
Alongside its Domino Web application server, Lotus Development Corp will also try and proliferate Notes across the Internet by offering Web-enabled versions of its current OCX- and ActiveX-based Lotus Components application building blocks from next year.
The idea is that Web developers will use the Components - current examples include Chart, Comment, Draw/Diagram, File Viewer, Project Scheduler, Spreadsheet and Component Template Builder - within Web applications.
Users will activate a Lotus component with their browsers to access and run the application. Lotus says a broker could use the Components to create an Internet application which queries investment portfolios. When posted to the Web site customers would be able query their portfolios and use the Spreadsheet and Chart components to analyse and display their data. Meantime, Lotus says it is now shipping ActiveX versions of the six core Components - not Web-enabled - in a starter pack at $50 per client seat.
Later this year it will offer Lotus Components Product Warehouse, a Note 4 application allowing for distribution of Lotus Components and licence monitoring within an organisation. The next version of Lotus Word Pro which will ship as a part of SmartSuite 97 in the fourth quarter, the IBM Corp company said, will include a container for Lotus Components.
AT&T LINKS CALL-CENTRES TO
WEB BROWSERS
AT&T Corp is preparing to begin trials of a new service, instant Answers, iA, designed to bridge the gap between call centre applications and companies' Web pages. Although the service brings little in the way of technological advances, it nevertheless looks like an interesting application: on iA-enabled Web sites, users wanting to speak to a company representative have the option of entering their phone number, which is then passed to the company's call centre, generating a phone call in response. Since the call centre operators will be aware of which page the user has just been looking at, the phone call request can be passed to somebody in the correct department, says AT&T, although it admits one drawback with the service is that users accessing the Internet via a modem will need two phone lines - one for the Web connection, the other for the voice conversation. A second feature of the service then enables the call centre operator to download photos or diagrams to the user - for example to illustrate other available products - which automatically appear on the user's screen.
The trial is due to begin next month, with a commercial service following next year. Although AT&T is using the trial to assess the correct tariffing for the service, it will nevertheless be charged on a per transaction basis.
EUNET LAUNCHES ONLINE SERVICE FOR NOKIA'S 9000 PHONE
Nokia seems to have caught the wave with its 9000 series cell-phone-cum-browser. EUnet International Ltd confederation says it is offering customised Internet services on the Nokia 9000 Communicator, calling the offering EUnetTraveller. The deal offers owners of the device access to the Internet in 24 countries in Europe and in the US.
The one-time sign-up charge is $40 and includes 90 minutes of usage, and the connection fee is $0.14 per minute thereafter, on top of call charges, making it an expensive way to surf. The EUNetTraveller service will be available in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, US and Jugoslavia.
The war against junk email took a number of tortuous turns last week when America Online first announced it would block junk e-mail from a number of persistent "spammers" and then found itself the subject of a temporary restraining order. America Online said it would challenge the order.
AOL announced last Wednesday that mail from several domains it accused of "routinely sending unsolicited mass commercial email" would be blocked. Specifically, it identified cyberpromo.co, answerme.com, servint.com, netfree.com and honey.com. In fact, the first two domains are both used by the same infamous company, Cyber Promotions Inc of Philadelphia. The third domain is that of Servint Corp - Cyber Promotions' Internet Service Provider. Netfree.com, run by Prime
DOT Gossip
UB Networks is working with an undisclosed number of unnamed networking companies to implement the Web-based Enterprise Management standard (WBEM) in Java
The Japanese Ministry of Finance is pondering an easing of rules on the disclosure of corporate earnings results on the Internet. However the ministry is worried that deregulation would encourage insider trading. Currently, companies can't publish their results on the Net until at least 12 hours after a press briefing. The ministry may reduce this to 3 hours.
Reed Caldwell, System administrator of Servint.com ( page 1) - Cyber Promotions' ISP - claims that America Online has never contacted him concerning his client's spamming activities. Cyber promotions "are leaving us of next month anyway" he says.
Observers watching troop movements inside Microsoft think it may be dumping all of its object technology into its Internet division
Tacoma City Council has decided to scrap its 6% telecommunication tax levied on Internet Service Providers (OR issue 8). ISP's who have already coughed up will get refunds. However California, Florida, New York and Washington state are considering imposing similar taxes as they try to work out whether ISPs should be considered telecommunications operators (liable for the tax) or... something else.
Netscape Communications has released the finished 3.0 release of Navigator Gold - its drag-and-drop HTML page construction tool.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 contains a couple of glitches that stop Java applets from running correctly, C/Net reports. One is caused by a problem in the just-in-time compiler in the browser and Microsoft's Visual J++ Java development tool (solution - turn it off). The second involves Internet Explorer's Java "zip" class libraries
The US National Basketball Association is suing America Online Inc for allegedly pirating scores and statistics from games in progress.
JavaSoft isn't talking to the Object Management Group - says the OMG.
Buried in Macromedia's announcement of Fireworks API (see page 1) was the news that a future version of Shockwave will be built upon Fireworks, finally merging the Shockwave and Java worlds.Fireworks is expected to be available in the Galileo version of Netscape Navigator, planned to be released by year-end.
Netscape will release the beta version of Navigator 4.0 at its Internet Developer Conference this October, around the same time Microsoft plans to be out with Internet Explorer 4.0 beta, according to C/Net. At long last Netscape is doing something with the technology it aquired from its purchase of Collabra. It says Navigator 4.0 will include threaded discussion support as well as IMAP4 and Secure/MIME encryption and authentication support.
So farewell anon.penet.fi. After three years of operation, the Internet's most famous anonymous remailer has been shut down, thanks to the efforts of the Church of Scientology and the apparently specious claims by the UK's Observer Newspaper which claimed penet was a major conduit for child pornography. Last week a Finnish court ordered Johan Helsingius to reveal the identity of one of the system's users, whom the Church of Scientology had accused of distributing copyrighted documents. The ruling effectively removed the anonymiser's raison d'etre. "The legal protection of the users needs to be clarified," he said. "At the moment the privacy of Internet messages is judicially unclear."
Helsingius says he plans to sue the Observer over the child pornography accusations. For one thing the re-mailer has blocked posting to .binary groups for some time now, and has severely restricted the file size of anything that could be posted via it. A quick examination of many of the pornographic posts which purport to have come via the re-mailer show them to have forged headers. Helsingius is planning to reopen a stripped down service for organisations like the Samaritans, to use.
CommerceNet is working with W3C and JEPI (the Joint Electronic Payments Initiative) to finalize the SET electronic transaction protocol. According to SET backers some minor technical issues as well as "regional differences" remain outstanding., though nobody is saying when the work will be completed.
Search Engine software company Verity Inc. will announce at next week's Seybold convention that it is renaming its Topic product line to Search 97. The Search 97 suite of products will include feature enhancements to Verity's AGENT Server and AGENT Server Toolkit as well as an information server that Verity is calling "Spider". Perhaps Verity is hoping this repositioning will turn its fortunes Bloomberg reported last week that Verity will be posting a first quarter loss of $1.3 million.
The TNG release of CA-Unicenter due at the year-end is to be integrated with Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer 3.0 Web browser and use those recently-created Web-management protocols . What that means for Computer Associates International Inc's much-hyped three-dimensional interface for TNG, created using Mill Valley, California-based Sense8 Corp's WorldToolKit virtual reality design tool, the company has not been able to tell us.
Sources say that Sun Microsystems' Solstice group will be announcing the general availability of its implementation of the Java management API at Networld and Interop next week. Up until now, the software had only been available in "pre-release", which means available only to Sun partners. Sun is also expected to be demoing its Java e-mail client.
Far from losing money on the ill- fated Europe Online SA venture as most people had assumed, Pearson Plc was the one investor in the ill-conceived venture to come out ahead: in a letter to Sunday Business Pearson says it stopped funding Europe Online a year ago when the problems became apparant, and says that it actually doubled its stake money when it sold the company's London operations back to Europe Online for over £1m last year.
AT&T is beta-testing something it calls Instant Answer which lets Web sites call back would -be customers.
IBM's announcement of its NC (page 1) includes a gushing quote from Rob Pemberton, the CEO of Software 2000. "We believe the IBM Network station could be as significant as the intoduction of the original IBM PC" he says - which is more than IBM appears to believe. The company slipped out the machine with the minimum of publicity.
(c) 1996 May not be copied
online REPORTER, a sister publication of Unigram.X and ClieNT Server News, is published weekly in Europe by:
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