The online REPORTER
Weekly Dispatches from the Internet Front
June 17 - June 21 1996 Issue No 3
UK SECURITY MOVE HERALDS OECD AND EC COMMERCE PROPOSALS
Current thinking in the OECD and the European Commission on electronic trade and encryption policy was heralded by proposals from the UK last week. The UK Department of Trade and Industry issued recommendations aimed at easing electronic trade through the use of licensed, regulated 'Trusted Third Parties' (TTPs). The plan is said to be based on similar work being carried out by the two international bodies.
Though sounding superficially similar to the US's controversial 'Clipper' proposals, the UK system of public key management will be voluntary and is geared more towards facilitating electronic trade, than controlling criminal use of encryption. The 'Paper on Regulatory Intent Concerning Use of Encryption of Public Networks' proposes licensing the TTPs to provide a range of security-related services to business and individuals. Typically, says the paper, these might include "the verification of a client's public key, time stamping of documents and digital signatures... TTPs may also offer a service of key retrieval... in addition to facilitating the real time encryption of a client's communications."
Both the European Commission and the OECD have been working on similar proposals, and the UK says it expects its system to fit within a common international framework needed to support inter-working between TTPs. By getting its proposals out early, the UK hopes to influence the directions of these international developments.
An OECD experts meeting on June 26-27 will begin drafting cryptography policy guidelines, following an earlier meeting in Washington DC on May 8. Their work is due to be complete early next year.
dtiinfo1.dti.gov.uk/cii/encrypt/
MICROSOFT COMES OUT BATTLING FOR THE INTRANET
Microsoft, showing remarkable quickness for a company which six months ago had no Internet division and no Internet plan to speak of, mapped its intranet path in a pitch to Wall Street and big business at an Intranet Strategy Day event in San Jose last week. And in a show of un-characteristic rhetoric, Bill Gates turned his guns on Netscape Communications and Sun's Scott McNealy, ridiculing the former's belief that users don't want powerful PCs and the latter's commitment to open standards.
Key pieces of the Microsoft plan included the first showing of Internet Explorer 4.0, previously known as Nashville. This is the software that will ostensibly kill the Windows 95 brower market by turning the desktop itself into a browser capable of handling both local files and Internet files in the same way. The 'Windows Active Desktop' can have ActiveX controls and hyperlinks scattered on it.
Internet-enabled Office 97 was also on show, which will permit things like documents that contain live hyperlinks to other documents stored on the Internet. It will also include an application called Outlook for managing e-mail, schedules, tasks, contacts, and files from a single point. It will ship at year end. Redmond will also bundle its FrontPage HTML authoring and Web site management tool and its new Tripoli search engine with Windows NT 4.0, due to ship this summer.
Microsoft demonstrated a new Directory Server, one of the pieces originally intended for Cairo that it hinted at when it launched Exchange Server. The directory server is built chiefly on DNS and X.500 protocols and supports LDAP as well, meaning that NT files and Internet sites will share the same naming system. Microsoft will rename its Jakarta Java development tool Visual J++, and will release it in late summer or early fall.
The company also demonstrated Viper, an OLTP server, and Common Internet File System, a file-sharing technology that rivals SunSoft's WebNFS. CIFS is an enhanced version of the Server Message Block distributed file sharing system found in Windows, Windows 95, WindowsNT and OS/2. It enables PCs to access network information over TCP/IP nets. WebNFS and CIFS allow users to share files directly on the Internet without requiring users to download or copy them to a local machine first. Data General, DEC, Intel and Network Appliance have endorsed the protocol. Netscape has yet to jump with either.
"PURPOSELESS" W3C UNDER FIRE
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web's ostensible standards body, came under fire last week from its own Advisory Council for being ineffective and possibly detrimental to the future of the Web, writes Maureen O'Gara
W3C was criticized as being rudderless, purposeless and disorganized at a time when billions of dollars in Internet investments ride on its moves. It is said to have only accidently hit upon its projects so far and to have no organized way of conducting itself and getting consensus. Its next output, after HTML 3.2, is unknown. It is unsure whether it is supposed to invent technology or document it, and it has no controls in place to prevent companies from waylaying its workgroups.
As a result, a Process Committee is being formed by members of the Advisory Council to map out a charter and way of working. It hopes to present its recommendations by the end of August if not before. It is believed to include Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle and IBM.
Chairman of the W3C Albert Vezza, who is also associate director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, said the organization isn't chartered to "either promote or not promote the Internet. Its charter is to maintain and enhance the Web toward the purposes that the W3C members deem important." While maintaining that allegations of the conflict between the organization and its Advisory Council "paint an exaggerated, negative and inaccurate picture of the W3C," Vezza said that a committee of W3C members and staff is planned to recommend procedures for improved communications between the members and staff.
MIT's representatives reportedly reminded the Advisory Council that its advise could be disregarded only to be reminded himself by the Council, which represents a throng of high falutin' vendors and users, that they could vote with their dollars and their feet.
The latest bug Java security has been uncovered by David Hopwood of Oxford University. It's another attack on the class loader which allows running native code. Hopwood says it effects all current Java implementations.
ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk/~david/java/bugs
GATES SLAMS NETSCAPE AND SUN
Bill Gates mounted a robust defence of Microsoft's record on open standards last week with a swing at Netscape, challenging it to publish its APIs and criticizing undocumented changes made to LiveScript and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. As for Scott McNealy's ideas on networked computers, Gates described him as "the most entertaining person in the industry - he should start a humour department". The unfamilar position as (temporary?) under-dog seems to be agreeing with his rhetorical skills.
Netscape tried to pre-empt the Microsoft assault by publishing its own Intranet plans the day before. Leading the Netscape charge are new versions of Navigator and the SuiteSpot servers. Galileo, the Navigator upgrade, was the software originally called Dogbert - after the Dilbert comic strip character - until it ran into objections from the lawyers. Galileo will incorporate some of the groupware functionality Netscape acquired as well as full Java and Java Class Libraries support. It will also integrate the Borland AppAccelerator Java JIT compiler Netscape licensed, and feature improvements in e-mail and news clients such as Secure/MIME encryption for messages and mail filtering. The Navigator version is in alpha now with product due by the end of the year.
The next-generation SuiteSpot, code-named Orion, offers more a comprehensive look at Netscape's Intranet goals with product enhancements ranging over several servers to roll out over the next 12 months. Orion will gun for the Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange space by integrating the groupware technology that Netscape acquired with Collabra. The Collabra integration will take place particularly in the Mail and News Servers as well as Galileo, with Mail Server, for example, handling calendaring and scheduling SuiteSpot will offer better management capabilities through the already-planned SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) support as well as support for industry management systems like HP OpenView, Tivoli TME and CA Unicenter. Netscape also plans to add APIs, class libraries and access-control-list security for application development.
AOL & MACROMEDIA SWAP TECH
As AOL readies itself for the move to a browser-based front-end, it is pondering how to reproduce the nice proprietary animation and sound that it already has. It has plumped for Macromedia's Shockwave and consequently AOL & Macromedia have signed a technology swap deal whereby AOL gets Shockwave and Macromedia gets AOL's compression technology
Shockwave will be integrated in a new version of the AOL client based upon Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it is expected to make an appearance this Autumn. Meanwhile, back on the server, AOL will be making Macromedia's Backstage Designer authoring tool available to its members to allow them to customise and design their own Web pages.
For its part Macromedia will be taking AOL's ART compression technology and the AOL software development kit. ART, which provides streamed audio and MIDI, as well as conventional image compression, will be embedded in Shockwave - which just might reduce the horrendous size of the files. Macromedia developers will get ART as an 'Xtra' included in their authoring tools. The AOL SDK will be distributed to developers in the same way, and the claim is that it will let them offer 'one button' access to either AOL or the Internet from their CD-ROM titles. This sounds like a novel way for AOL to drum up extra end-user business.
America Online is left as the only major online service that has committed itself to a complete re-build using Internet technology. This, combined with analysts warnings that AOL faced a slowing of subscriber growth has put pressure on its share price. Stock which was trading at $71 at the beginning of May dropped to $43 following analyst's statements. It recovered somewhat, to hover around the $50 mark.
CLARIS BUYS IN HTML TOOL
Claris Corporation has gone shopping for an Web-page builder and bought San Andreas Systems's in-development system which was codenamed "Loma Prieta." Claris will market the stuff as "Claris Home Page" on both Macintosh, Windows 95 and NT. Terms of the deal where not disclosed. A beta will be available by the end of the month from www.claris.com with a finished product ready by the end of the summer, pricing yet to be decided. Neither Claris nor the Los Altos, California-based San Andreas Systems would disclose the terms of the deal.
"Ho-hum, another HTML editor"? Well maybe, except that Home Page is meant to handle all those nasty things like frames and tables that simpler HTML editors choke on. Version 1.0 will not support ActiveX controls, but this will be added in a subsequent release.
THERE'S MONEY IN THAT E-VAULT
Topsfield Massacheusetts based Software Partners reckons its software will let Internet Service Providers become data back-up business. The company is selling the newly announced, punningly-dubbed SaftePosit as a way for business and home users to back up their data in secure, remote sites via an Internet connection.
It seems a fair idea: as Internet access provision becomes a commodity item, ISPs need ways to differentiate themselves, so why not become a data-vault? One reason why not might be the stringent quality assurance programs that any corporate is going to demand before giving up control of its back-ups. Faced with that problem Software Partners is offering a scheme whereby it runs a back-up system for the ISP in return for a monthly fee and a 25% cut of the back-up revenue. Under this "Reseller" deal the ISP would offer the SafetyPosit service to its user base and handle monthly billing with the data going to Software Partners' own storage site. Even if the prospective e-vaulter decides to take an all-out licence and set up its own back-up facility, he or she will be expected to pay 10% of revenues in return for consulting on system configuration and operational proceedures.
Though it doesn't intend to offer its own end-user service, Software Partners has come up with recommended pricing. Home office pricing starts at $9.95 per month for up to 10 Megabytes of new data or $16.95 per month for up to 25Mb of monthly new data. The recommended pricing for business users ranges from $49.95 for 100MB to $395 per month for up to 1 Gb of monthly new data. Minimum mandatory hardware requirements for licensees include a T1 or better Internet connection, a security firewall, a RAID server to receive backups, and a robotic tape library for backup storage. A UPS, stand-by generator and fire-supression system is recommended.
The system incorporates the 128-bit Public Key Cryptosystem from RSA Data in the US, but expect weaker encryption overseas. Only the end-users get the key and they are authenticated with RSA's 1,024 digit public/private key Digital Signature software.
The company has been ironing out the operational wrinkles with a pilot project running since April, claimed to be capable of storing up to 9 Tb of data. The software is currently in beta test and is on a 90 day free trial. No, you can't download it, since it contains RSA strong encryption.
One big, unanswered, and yet vital question is what kind of assurance contracts, the ISPs will be signing with their customers. A business whose data-centre burns down won't be best pleased if Software Partners' own Internet links goes down on the same day. The company says that they have dual lines from completely separate providers, and will be advising partners on the level of assurance they should be offering. However this information wasn't immediately to hand. www.softwarepartners.com
The OECD is trying to agree on how to protect consumers cybershopping with their credit cards. There's still no safety net to protect consumers from fraud, delivery problems or defectis, and they can't get access to either the foreign merchants or their judicial systems. Moreover the responsibility of the credit card companies currently varies between countries.
The OECD is hoping to convince the credit card companies to create "a uniform, industry driven redress mechanism that would inspire consumer confidence." The results of a conference being held this week will be published on October 3. www.oecd.org.
30% MORE INTERNET - BT & MCI
MCI Corp and British Telecommunications have glued together their two Internet backbones into a global offering aimed at ISPs, other carriers and businesses building intranets. Based on 155Mbps backbones, and offering 45Mbps connections, the companies claim InternetPlus should increase international capacity of the Internet by 30%. NTT Data will act as a distributor for the services in Japan.
The companies will tempt customers with the offer of service level agreements and premium connections offering bandwidth guarantees. The system will be managed by the company's Concert joint venture and will initially have eight 'superhubs', broadly equivalent to MFS's Metropolitan Area Exchanges: within a year there will be 20 in the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, the Americas and Asia. Local ISPs will be able to connect to these hubs. Vint Cerf, MCI's senior VP of data architecture calls this the "single largest international deployment of Internet technology". Spending for the project has been reported as anything up to $300m, but in a briefing the company put expenditure at a relatively modest $100m. The two companies already have IP offerings in 70 countries, with dial-up access from 45. One of the aims of scattering the superhubs around the globe will be to relieve the Internet's current reliance on connections passing through the US.
Concert will split its offerings into three areas; Intranet, dial-up and 'transport services' catering for carriers, ISPs and businesses who want to buy into the raw bandwidth. There will be two levels of performance guarantee available, the higher level "isn't quite the same as nailing up a permanent circuit", and indeed it's not quite clear what the nature of the bandwidth guarantees will be, particularly since there is no prohibition on using the services for the transport of real-time voice and video.
DECENCY ACT APPEAL IN DOUBT
Internet-based libertarians and librarians breathed a sigh of relief late last week when three US Federal judges ruled that Section 507 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act was unconstitutional. The Philadelphia court also granted the plaintiffs in the case a preliminary injunction preventing prosecution under the law, pending appeals which must be filed within 20 days. Intriguingly, the Justice Department hadn't committed itself to appealing as we went to press. The judges ruled that Section 507, (ne the Communications Decency Act, ne the Exon Bill) infringed the US Constitution's first amendment, protecting freedom of speech. "As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion" wrote US District Judge Steven Dalzell.
The decision essentially granted all that the plaintiffs could have hoped for. In total more than 40 software companies, civil liberties groups, ISPs and online companies had opposed the legislation. A second lawsuit, that merged with the ACLU's was headed by the American Library Assoation.
Section 507 aims to protect those under the age of 18 from "any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or any other communication which is obscene or indecent". It penalises anyone who knowingly "makes, creates, or solicits" or "initiates the transmission". In practice, since it is quite possible for under-18s to read newsgroups and browse web-sites, this opened users, ISPs and online services up to prosecution.
The case partly hinged on whether the Internet should be considered in the same way as print communications - which are protected under the First Amendment - or as a broadcast medium, which is heavily regulated. In their ruling, the Judges said that "Because it would necessarily affect the Internet itself, the CDA would necessarily reduce the speech available for adults on the medium. This is a constitutionally intolerable result."
All 251k of the decision can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation site at:
www.eff.org/Alerts/HTML/960612_aclu_ v_reno_decision.html
JAMBA AND ICONAUTHOR TO SHARE JAVA BASE - OEMS SOUGHT.
Nashua, New Hampshire-based Aimtech has launched Jamba - a cute visual Java authoring tool. Though more limited than the firm's flagship IconAuthor multimedia authoring package, the next release of IconAuthor, due out before year end, will be built on Jamba technology. "We are looking at IconAuthor version 8 as being Jamba +" said President and CEO Andrew Huffman. The company hasn't decided whether to merge the two product lines yet, - they'll probably remain separate, with a different feature-set, though based on the same core code. IconAuthor 8 will be able to load old IconAuthor presentations and spit out Java versions.
"Compiling IconAuthor down to the Java Virtual machine would have been great, but it would have taken longer" says Huffman.
Meanwhile, Aimtech is touting the Jamba code around as an OEM product, hoping to attract those companies already offering HTML construction utilities which need to add Java authoring.
Jamba, which does away with scripting altogether, is aimed at those building visual presentations a la Shockwave, makes heavy use of ActiveX components. In fact Aimtech has built a Java class that corresponds to standard ActiveX controls. Extra extensions can be added by those with a programming bent.
Rather than compiling the presentations down to straight raw byte-code, Jamba describes animations in simple ASCII files. These are used by a small Jamba interpreter to invoke the correct Java classes. Someone invoking a Jamba animation over the web will find themselves downloading a 100k standard set of Jamba Java classes together with the small ASCII file and any GIFs needed. Jamba, in beta now, will be out for Windows 95 next month, priced at $495. www.aimtech.com
WALL STREET NET FRENZY FADES
If the public debut of Web search company Infoseek Corporation is any indication, the Wall Street Internet furor may have subsided. Infoseek, as likely a candidate as any to boom on the stock market, launched 3.45 million shares on Nasdaq at $12 a share last week - and ended its day only two dollars higher instead of climbing up to dizzying heights. Last Thursday it slumped, to close at $11.50 .
The anemic performance is not confined to Infoseek. When three judges ruled against the Communications Decency Act (CDA) last Wednesday, in essence pulling the government back from interference with Internet capitalism, the market barely registered it. Although the ruling affected key Internet stocks like Netscape, Spyglass, CyberCash, Raptor and Yahoo, those stocks didn't shoot up in giddy reaction - in fact, the Internet Stock Index (ISDEX) actually fell 7.73 points, or 1.29%, to 589.99.
MCI, INTEL TEAM ON WEB
MCI teamed with Intel to develop and market Internet products and services last week and now finds itself in the business of selling hardware with networkMCI WebMaker, a Web package that features an Intel-made server. networkMCI Webmaker, targeted at US small and medium-sized businesses yet to go on the Web, complements MCI's recently-formed Web-hosting and content creation business. The turnkey package includes a 200 MHz Pentium Pro server, NT, Intel-developed tools, Cisco routers, a firewall, Netscape server and client products and leased-line connectivity.
WebMaker is available immediately at $10,000 and will be marketed by MCI. The companies plan to move on to develop enhanced Internet multimedia capabilities and services, high-end intranet and remote network access offerings. Most compelling is a multicasting technology that highly compresses data and reserves bandwidth on the network so that it broadcasts smoothly.
Microsoft Corp says it will bundle its FrontPage Web authoring tool and its Search Server with the Windows NT Server version 4.0 due this summer: Search Server, code named Tripoli, is part of the next-generation Cairo version, and offers automatic content indexing of documents on corporate intranet servers; it will be offered free with NT 4.0.
Rumor has it that Netscape, finally paying attention to the 10 million OS/2 users worldwide, is working on a Navigator port to OS/2 by year-end. The effort's reportedly been pushed by the high number of OS/2 users in Europe.
MacMillan Online columnist Mike Miller, saying the only way the Network Computer will fly is if ISPs and the like give them away, quipped that the letters NC might actually stand for "no charge." Not that Oracle and its crowd would mind, since licensees would swallow the cost.
IBM will use the text search engine from Personal Library Software Inc (PLS) for its new Internet-based service, IBM infoMarket. IBM infoMarket, which hosts databases and publishes information for people without Web servers, lets users find information on several different servers with one query. PLS has also allied itself with Informix to provide a text DataBlade for the Informix Universal Server.
How big is Java? Well, the top Java books are out selling the top Windows 95 books by at least two to one.
Right on the tail of a Federal court's Communications Decency Act (CDA) ruling, Lycos has laid out a set of guidelines to make advertising on its Web site "child-safe." Saying that advertisers have a responsibility to protect children from exploitation, Lycos presented 21 guidelines that prohibits advertising that, for example, misleads, appeals to peer pressure or oddly enough, appeals to supersition or "luck-bearing powers." www.lycos.com
The British Broadcasting Corp said that digital television could be harmed unless the UK government ensures that consumers need only one set-top decoder box for both satellite and terrestrial service.
Adobe has a GIF89a plug-in for Illustrator 6.0 available for download that ties its desktop publishing empire even closer to its efforts on the Web and makes Illustrator the first vector-based graphics program to support GIF natively.
www.adobe.com
IN BRIEF
NBC, PBS AND VDONET TEAM
Internet yearling VDONet of Palo Alto, California has allied itself with NBC, Cisco and PBS in a initiative for 'multicasting' or broadcasting audio and video over the Internet to several users simultaneously.
The VDOCast Center for Multicasting has been set up by the partners to bring VDONet's technology to the market and make video programming widely available, developing technology as well as a business model. Conventional Webcasting only broadcasts to one user at a time point-to-point, meaning that scores of users cause traffic snarls for the server. VDONet's multicasting, however, can broadcast to a number of servers at once and theoretically opens up the broadcast to thousands of viewers.
The start-up figures the technology, which is highly scaleable, could have applications in everything from virtual town hall meetings to news to pay-per-view events such as concerts. VDONet says the technology's not up and running yet, although "everybody knows it works." It figures it'll have broader demonstrations by the end of year, with a viable product by 1997 - depending, of course, upon the market demand.
WEBTV AIMS AT HIGH RESOLUTION
WebTV Networks Inc, a General Magic spinoff, is offering a reference platform design for dial-up Internet services that'll deliver high resolution images to a television, eventually not even requiring a set-top box. The Palo Alto California start-up, founded by ex-Apple guys by way of General Magic, says licensees will have set-top boxes that plug in to existing televisions by October, with integrated Web televisions by next year.
WebTV says the dial-up solution will be cheaper than cable modems with Web browsing and email only raising the price of a television by $50 to $100. CEO Steve Perlman, who was responsible for much of the Macintosh video, graphics and multimedia technology, claims other Internet TV offerings will be more expensive than WebTV because they emulate PC behavior, not TVs.
Web TV is licensing its design to some unspecified consumer electronics companies which will build the set-tops and Web-enabled televisions. It aims to make its money by charging fees as the Internet service provider, and plans to turn a portion of its subscriber fees over to the hardware providers in an attempt to attract volume manufacturers. Users will be expected to control the Web through yet another remote control and can expect the WebTV Network to function somewhere in between a full-blown online service and an Internet gateway to aggregate content.
The device will run with applications that cover functions like shopping, entertainment and financial services. It's including security software to prevent minors from getting access beyond an approved site list, and there'll be a call waiting feature to tell users to turn off WebTV and pick up the telephone. WebTV says it has filed 35 patent applications, particularly for its digital image enhancement techniques which reshape video signal on the fly for "unprecedented quality." The firm claims Web pages are legible across a living room.
WebTV is Perlman's third start-up; he previously helped design General Magic Inc's MagicTV which was never released. In addition to Perlman, other Apple alumni at WebTV - which operated under the pseudonym Artemis Research until it came out with its offering - include Bruce Leak, the mind behind QuickDraw and QuickTime, and Phil Goldman, who created MultiFinder. The company looks to break even in its second year. Meanwhile, parent company General Magic has been dabbling with Web-enabled PDAs for Motorola and Sony and will make a substantial Net announcement next week.
PHILIPS SET-TOP FOR SCHOOLS
Philips Media Systems is targeting the classroom with a version of its television-based Web browser. Philips is billing the School 2000 browser, which runs over a telephone line and a television monitor, as a low-cost alternative to PCs in the class room.
The browser includes software for Web surfing, e-mail and news groups as well as a "child-proofing" feature that blocks Web sites that shouldn't be seen by young eyes. School 2000 ships with a CD-interactive browser, modem, proprietary software, custom browser and an on-screen keyboard with a real keyboard optional. The browser, to be released this fall, will sell for about $700, well under a PC's price tag, but higher perhaps than would be expected for a device that ships without monitor.
HOLODECK AHOY
Remember the "it's all done by mirrors" virtual teleconferencing system promised by IBM Corp and Teleport Corp this time last year? One year on, the TeleSuite system is ready and waiting at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and the Capital Hilton in Washington. The system sticks a video mirror against one wall to make the room appear twice as large as it really is, so that users get the impression that they are in the same room as people miles away.
They communicate in real-time audio and video and can even make "virtual eye contact," according to the company. The IBM Global Network will provide the telecommunications services for TeleSuites installed worldwide, and IBM will market the system around the world.
SAP BRINGS R/3 TO WEB
That bastion of the corporate world, SAP AG, has put its sizable stamp of approval on Internet commerce with the announcement of a release of its R/3 that adds 25 Web application components to the manufacturing software. The pieces will be released as a dot upgrade to R/3 version three and include components such as a supply chain management application that acts as a shopping basket for electronic product catalogs.
SAP also announced at its Sapphire user's conference last week that it has come up with over 100 Business APIs (BAPIs) that let companies conduct business over the Internet with other parties, regardless of the platforms they run on. The BAPIs are DCOM compliant and will be Corba compliant as well. It is also offering a new R/3 Internet transaction server based upon Windows NT as part of the 3.1 release. The transaction server is being developed in conjunction with iXOS GmbH in Munich, Germany. R/3 3.1 is due by year-end.
MICROSOFT BUYS ESHOP FOR NORMANDY
Commerce! Commerce! goes the cry, and so Microsoft has bought up little eShop Inc which runs the eShop Plaza at www.eshop.com. No-one is commenting on rumours that eShop was also being wooed by Netscape Communication. Microsoft will use eShop's software in its Merchant system - part of the 'Normandy' server suite announced last week (OR issue 2). MSN will also use the software in its MSN Mall and over eShop Plaza's existing customers, which include Tower records and 1-800-Flowers. Microsoft's group VP of platforms Paul Maritz reckons that the acquisition of the company will accelerate development of Microsoft Merchant by one to two years.
No financial details were given, but most of eShop's 35 staff will be making the trip to Redmond. eShop began developing its online electronic shopping system four or five years ago using proprietary protocols, but subsequently adapted it to Web use. The package itself, has previously been sold as "eShop Technology" and runs on Unix servers. Microsoft's first task will be to port it to NT. It is expected in beta this August, with the finished version following by year-end. They haven't decided on pricing yet.
...AND IBM'S UNVEILS E-MALL
IBM Corp last week unveiled plans for its 'World Avenue' virtual shopping mall, claiming it already has four retailers committed to taking space, though only two, Limited Inc's Express unit and Hudson Bay Co of Canada are going public at this stage. However a spokesperson later said that the official Olympic merchandising site would become an Avenue member, not that it is quite sure what it will sell there since the 1996 games will be over by the time the Mall opens. IBM hopes to have 20 spaces filled by the time the mall opens for business in the fall.
The Mall is based up on its Net.Commerce bundle of commerce technology which it announced at May's Internet World show.
Big Blue is charging $30,000 for each site based on a catalog of 300 products, plus a $2,500 monthly fee and 5% of each purchase.
For that retailers get tools for their in-house developers to build catalogs and product demonstrations. It sounds pricey, but IBM claims setting up shop at its mall is far cheaper than building a web shopping site from scratch, and cites Forrester Group research suggesting companies spend an average of $593,000 initially and $2.8m every year to maintain their web commerce services.
It promises a European version of the mall by year end. Mall services will include personal profiling, gift registry and accessory services. Merchants get a consumer profiling function, market feedback and site sales patterns.
Retailers will foot the bill for print and online advertising and attracting consumers. IBM says a council of mall members will have to devise ways of driving traffic to the mall. IBM promises the most advanced implementation of secure sockets layer (SSL) and secure electronic transactions (SET) for electronic payment on the net by the time World Avenue opens for business.
There's no news on whether L.L. Bean, or J.C Penney - two existing Net.Commerce customers will be tempted on board.
The Olympics merchandising site, claimed to have the same look and feel that the rest of World Avenue will have can be found at www.atlanta.olympic.org/acog/products/ d-products.html
...AND COMPUSERVE, PRODIGY
On the back of IBM's World Avenue cybermall announcement, CompuServe Inc and Prodigy Services Corp, say they will broaden their own online shopping areas. By the fall, when World Avenue is scheduled to open, Prodigy expects its eight-year-old shopping section, The Market Place, to be converted to HTML and available on the Web. Prodigy has 20 retailers in its Market Place and says it will be able to attract more when it abandons its proprietary system.
"By moving to the Web it will be easier for us to start doing more deals. The advantage we have is that we can aggregate two million people to our shopping site, where others are just hanging out there on the Internet." Prodigy says the biggest change to its service will be to let users hypertext from a content area to a related retail outlet. Both Prodigy and CompuServe say they strike individual deals with retailers, so that some pay the providers a cut of their profits or volume and others pay a flat fee.
CompuServe couldn't say when its Electronic Mall service would reach the Internet, but with 11 years experiences and 170 merchants, it predicts it will be the top shopping site. "We invented online shopping," it boasted. The firm has said it will move its service to the Internet by year end. The CompuServe shopping service sales grew by 40% in 1995 and traffic increased 80%. But the determining factor may be which service is up and running first. It appears IBM and Prodigy will launch neck and neck, with CompuServe arriving sometime before the end of the year.
INTUIT ADDS INSURANCE TO QFN
Intuit Inc, claiming it will be an "information conduit" between insurance companies and customers, announced last week that it would build an insurance service within its Quicken Financial Network(QFN). The firm believes QFN will establish Intuit as a leading financial information provider on the Web. Three major insurance firms have paid Intuit an undisclosed amount to offer policy information and quotes to users of QFN and it expects to announce more firms within 18 months.
Despite the efforts to build electronic insurance sales, the site runs afoul the traditional insurance model, which in most cases requires paper trails and sales people. Although most insurance companies will make online purchases an option, the largest company in the service, Met Life, will use QFN only as a source for qualified leads, since it's "wedded to [its] agency force."
The offering comes as a result of Intuit's recent acquisition of Interactive Insurance Services. Revenues will reportedly come from advertising, lead generation, commissions and software development. Intuit admitted it didn't expect to make much, if any, money from the mostly free service next year, but projected that QFN would be profitable within two years. The company is likely to continue its buying habits: "We have been relatively acquisitive in this area and we will remain so," Intuit said.
Daniel Stone, CNN senior vice-president for business development, told the International Advertising Association's World Congress in Seoul last week that advertising on its CNN Interactive site will total "several million dollars" and the site will break even in '96 - its first full year of operation - Reuter reports. Stone told the news-service that revenue from the Internet operation would double next year. It reportedly charges advertisers between $5,000 and $35,000 to put links on the site's pages.
DG unveils thin server
Surrounded by industry buzz about thin clients, Data General has responded to network computers by coming up with the concept of a "thin server." While the server itself won't be lightweight, it will be especially configured to support a network of thin clients, all downloading information and applets. Because NCs require so much data to be transferred over the network, the servers will be dedicated by function primarily to filing and retrieving information rather than simply processing data. The thin servers will be part of a new Thin Line business unit focused on Internet appliances to appear in early 1997.
JAVASOFT? MAKING A PROFIT?
Since it's running a business built on a giveaway programming language, the first question that JavaSoft gets asked is how it'll make money on Java.
Its answer? It already is. The company is receiving a "not insignificant revenue stream" for licenses of Java and JavaOS, JavaSoft VP of product marketing David Spenhoff said.
That's only the beginning. It will also see revenues from shrink-wrapped products like the newly-announced "Jeeves," a replacement for CGI-bin connections that allows applets to be downloaded to servers.
While it's giving away the binaries to its Hot Java classes and browser, it will sell the source code to developers as well as charge for site licenses for "branded" browsers. Spenhoff said that JavaSoft could act as an "applet clearing house" to sell applets to developers, much as EarthWeb is doing with its Gamelan Direct service. JavaSoft won't take a significant cut from applets sold.
Spenhoff said it won't be long before profitability is feasible. There's an expectation, he said, "that JavaSoft will establish a profitable business model...that the industry will look at and say, 'So this is how you do it.'"
THE TERMINAL AS NC
IdeaAssociates Ltd has shipped what could turn out to be the first Network Computer - but unless you are one of the 4m terminal users on TCP/IP-compatible mainframes, there's no need to reach for your cheque book just yet.
The Idea Internet Terminal Server can support up to 64 users at any one time, and comes complete with character-based Web browsing, electronic mail and information retrieval, storage and printing capabilities. Running on Microsoft Corp's Windows NT, the server guarantees to transform your antiquated green screen into - well, it will still be an antiquated green screen, but with more functions. First shipments have already left the firms' UK base in Surbiton, Surrey, priced at $4,800 for a one- to 16-user configuration.
To satisfy the more conventional Network Computer followers, Idea has launched its Internet Client Station, developed to comply with Oracle Corp's specification outlined last month. The kit has been designed for corporate use rather than as a cheap Internet access device for the home, and comes complete with a full Web browser, support for Java applets, a user-friendly graphical user interface, SNA Host support and Ethernet communications. It has a RISC processor, but no memory. The final price had yet to be agreed, but Violo said it would be closer to $1,000 than $500
AT&T, SG FORMS WEB ALLIANCE
AT&T has formed an alliance with the Silicon Graphics Inc, to provide World Wide Web, Internet and intranet systems integration throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. AT&T will become a value-added reseller for the complete line of Silicon Graphics products. And the agreement will also extend to Unisource NV once the latter subsumes AT&T's European units, following the merger of the two companies, announced last month.
AT&T claims over 150,000 users have registered for its WorldNet Internet service in the first nine weeks. With all hardware units soon to be divested, it is now free to enter alliances with any manufacturer it chooses. It is already close to Mountain View, California-based Silicon Graphics in the multimedia arena. www.att.com
W3C HAS JAVA-BUILT SERVER
The W3C has cobbled together what is likely the first public release of a Java-based http server in a prototype called Jigsaw that's debuting on its website. Jigsaw is an object-oriented web server written entirely in Java and was built specifically to further the design of next-generation Web protocols.
One of the key features of the server is modularity so that better or different implementations of specific parts can easily repalce their predecessors.
Calling Jigsaw simply a prototype, W3C chairman Albert Vezza said, "The Jigsaw http server is not a product which we anticipate anyone would sell." Both source code and binaries will be released for it for use by people, including W3C members and staff, who want to experiment with new Java server ideas and features.
While Jigsaw will continue to be modified for some time, the W3C said it hopes to have a version with stabilized design and APIs by December that will include HTTP 1.1 support, increased performance through JIT compilers and a better user interface.
Long term goals include mobile code experimentations, where the server would let outside code execute locally. www.w3.org
IBM has launched world-wide IBM Web Services for Web site development and hosting. It hopes the venture will establish a firm customer base predominantly at entry level, before the Internet becomes an important business tool. IBM will provide a complete consultancy service, including a team of experts it hires out to external organizations to check the integrity of their networks. "If there's a hole in the system, the 'rent-a-hacker' crew will find it,"Á the company said.
UK company JSB Computer Systems Ltd, based in Congleton, Cheshire, has launched the INTRAnet Jazz Open Gateway, an IPX/SPX gateway, claimed to be the first to enable 32-bit WinSock applications to access intranets and the Internet, with no need for a TCP/IP stack on the workstation. Part of the INTRAnet Jazz Integrated Suite, the gateway supports NetWare, Unix and Windows NT. It costs roughly $760 for a five-user licence, with a 50-user licence selling for $5,400. http://www.intranet.co.uk/
Intel Corp has come out with Adaptive Technology, which enables Fast Ethernet microcode to be upgraded for better performance, and is giving it away free on its Web site. According to Intel, the new capability increases the performance and flexibility of personal computer networks by as much as 20%. www.intel.com/ comm-net/sns/showcase/speed/eepro100
The Japanese Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications has set up a Digital Post Office on the Internet: procurement information will also be available. www/mpt.go.jp/procurement/ index.html
Tucson, Arizona-based Artisoft Inc has launched version 7.0 of its flagship LANtastic network operating system, with the main enhancements being in the area of Internet communications. Specifically, the new version incorporates Netscape Communications Corp Navigator 2.0; CompuServe Inc's SpryNet Internet access service; a full TCP/IP stack and a Winsock gateway designed to enable multiple users to share a single dial-up Internet connection. The company has also added Windows95 support. It is shipping now, from $120 for a single user, to $1,000 for an unlimited number.
Sundar Iyer, of Silicon Graphics India, told Reuters that there are in India "probably 10m people waiting to log on right now that can't because there aren't enough lines available".
IN BRIEF
Java applets for sale
EarthWeb LLC, leveraging the success of its Gamelan Java registry Web site, has launched an electronic marketplace where applet developers can sell their wares. The Sun-endorsed Gamelan Direct, to premier in July, will be part of the Gamelan Web site, which EarthWeb claims is one of the top 25 Web sites in the world and gets 25 to 30 million hits monthly. EarthWeb beta tested the online store with its own EarthWeb Chat applet, netting over 5,000 licensees in one month. The New York City company will get a cut on each applet sold, with most of the revenue going back to the developer.
Gamelan Direct will likely be joined as a Java applet broker by JavaSoft, which has made similar plans, but EarthWeb marketing VP Nova Spivack insisted that having two separate sources would make the market more viable. The service will support several transaction forms, such as digital cash.
Gamelan, which lists over 2,500 Java resources including 2,000 or so applets, has become such an Internet fixture that one of Earthweb's partners quipped "If you don't know Gamelan, you're not a Java developer."
www.gamelan.com
FOR THOSE WHO CAN STAND ADS
A Japanese start-up dubbed Hyper Net has come up with a plan to give free Internet access to all comers - provided they're willing to watch a continuous stream of advertisements whenever they browse. Hyper Net claims to have signed up more than 20k subscribers in Japan in the first two weeks it was on the net, and is laying plans to bring its system to the US in September. It's now negotiating with unnamed Internet Service Providers to carry its traffic, with its initial efforts concentrated on bigger regional or nationwide ISPs like Netcom. The Hyper Net plan hinges on a program it calls Hot Cafe that replaces the standard dialer used by browsers. For now Hot Cafe runs on Windows 95 only, with a Mac version due out later this year.
In addition to establishing a dial-up link to an ISP Hot Cafe opens a little window on the desktop in which advertising continuously appears - changing as frequently as once every minute. Surfers can use any browser they want, but they can't close, hide or minimize the Hot Cafe window. It just sits there on top of whatever else is running, spewing out its continuous stream of sales pitches. Closing Hot Cafe immediately cuts off the Internet connection, since the advertising software is also the dialer.
The ads that appear in the Hot Cafe window are fed to it by a Unix-based Tandem, running Hyper Net server software, and can include hyperlinks to take a surfer directly to an advertiser's web site. Hyper Net will provide the Tandem to ISPs that sign up for its plan. The beauty of it all, as Hyper Net execs explain the scheme, is that the money they collect from advertisers is going to be enough to pay ISPs the revenue they would have otherwise gotten from surfers' monthly subscription fees and connect time charges. That's what makes it possible to offer access for free.
Advertisers will pay Hyper Net fees based on the number of times their ad appears in front of surfers, with the company raking its profits off the top before passing on what's left to ISPs. Hyper Net is also going to demand that anyone getting in line for the free service fill out a personal profile firm. That's going to let it target advertising to match a surfer's particular interests. By tracking which hyperlinks a surfer follows Hyper Net will eventually be able to add even more detail to the profile. Such profiles, of course, are gold to the advertising community. The better an ad can be targeted, the higher the price that can be charged. It's a standard concept in the magazine advertising industry, a new one for the Net. Tokyo-based Hyper Net is setting up its US operation in San Jose, California. In Japan the first ISP it signed up is the Internet access arm of the giant ASCII Corporation, which began offering free access in late April and passed the 20k subscriber point barely half a month later. Hyper Net is figuring to book 300k Japanese users via ASCII in its first year of operation and says its out recruiting other Japanese ISPs as well.
SYBASE ROLLS WEB STRATEGY
Sybase, claiming it already has a huge presence on the Internet in some of the largest and most sophisticated Web sites, is launching a technology initiative over the next year to make ubiquitous Internet applications possible. Sybase, whose databases power the likes of HotWired, Pathfinder (which has 13 GB of data on its site) and C|Net, will revamp its application server technology, security, database technology and its adaptive server for Internet use. Perhaps most critical to Sybase's Web strategy is its adaptive server with accompanying middleware and snap-in data type architecture. for things like text, imaging, audio and video.
In addition to those types, Sybase will roll out a Web page data type. Among other things, the Web page type will allow the database to dynamically resolve links in Web pages when they're shifted around. Adaptive server also adjusts to workload so that the database can be tuned without interruption for maximum performance at its present usage.
The application server will include componentized services that handle things like session management and connection management ; allow developers to write their application servers in standard client/server languages like C++ while connecting to Web-specific languages like Java through JDBC and Sybase's own WebSQL. Security will add high-level secure APIs and SSL transport for servers connecting to a database on an IP network. Sybase VP of enterprise product marketing David Hsieh said that "all databases should be net ready," since databases in the Web space are primarily intended for publishing. A graphic utility that will ship in the next version of Sybase's will help to maintain Web sites and their links to databases.
The technology, made public last week, will start rolling out this summer and will continue over the next year.
BONDING ON THE INTERNET GUARANTEES TRADE
A bunch of bonding specialists from the Corporation for International Business have come up with the idea of selling what amounts to an insurance policy for companies doing business on the 'net. The policies guarantee customers that cyberstores actually deliver ordered products.
The Internet Bonded Business Trust (IBBT), which has set up shop in New York City's World Trade Center and on the 'net, started selling its performance bonds last week.
For a $30 application fee, $300 annual membership fee, and $500 bond premium that Connecticut Surety underwrites, cyber businesses get an Internet Bonded Business logo on their web site. It's supposed to ease fears customers may have but the bonds only cover up to $50k in claims by all cybershoppers as a group. http://www.ibbt.com
BCE TAKES 8.3% OF WEB SEARCH SPECIALIST AUTONOMY
BCE (Holdings) Plc, the snooker halls operator that turned itself into a computer games developer, has invested £2.5m for an 8.3% stake in Autonomy Corp Plc, a buyout from Cambridge Neurodynamics Ltd.
Autonomy has the exclusive mass market licence to market, distribute, supply and exploit a suite of autonomous search agent software that uses artificial intelligence technologies to enable Internet users to customise their own daily newspapers or conduct other searches on the World Wide Web. The software includes intranet agents for internal network searches, mail agents for prioritizing email, and guardian agents for controlling access.
Autonomy is, needless to say, to be operated autonomously from BCE.
http://www.camneuro.stjohns.co.ukg
DOT Gossip
Mountain View, California-based Network Appliance says it will launch a data access technology this fall to link WebNFS and CIFS and will integrate it into its NetApp file servers as well as selling it to third parties.
Not known for its modesty, Attachmate was quick to spot a trend and self-style itself "the intranet Company" last year. But its attempts to trademark the tag line obviously came to naught, as restrictive notices no longer appear on its web site, while at least two other firms now also claim the grandiose (and ideally singular) title: the UK's JSB and Canada's Intranet Technologies.
TriTeal Corp, the Carlsbad California-based company that provides Common Desktop Environment (CDE) compliant user interfaces for the Unix market, is working up some kind of Network Desktop client environment, and previewing it under a non-disclosure agreement. It claims that the thing will run on any device attached to a network. It is not browser-centric, as the company believes a network operating system must be more lightweight, although it will support a browser if required. TriTeal is also working with its CDE partner The Santa Cruz Operation in the Internet, X-Window and Motif. arenas
CheckPoint Software is set to announce Firewall 2.1 this Tuesday, the latest version of its flagship Firewall-1 product line. Using what CheckPoint terms "Stateful Multi-Layer Inspection" technology, the product is claimed to incorporate the best aspects of packet filters and application gateways to provide transparent connectivity with security. According to IDC, CheckPoint has now shipped some 4,000 units, and has a 40% market share. http://www.checkpoint.com
FOR JAKARTA, NOW READ VISUAL J++.
Former X/Open Co Ltd chief Geoff Morris is putting together a Web and intranet start-up he expects to go live in the fourth quarter; it will also provide a European distribution channel for US-developed technologies.
Look closely at Tom Cruise's laptop computer in the Hollywood blockbuster Mission Impossible and you'll see that the Web browser critical to the movie's plot (such as it is) is marked with a prominent 'N'. Given the subject matter, one would think they would have chosen Spyglass.(groan - Ed) www.missionimpossible.com
The Client/Server Labs Inc RPMark bench-marking house owned by Atlanta, Georgia-based Enabling Technologies Group Inc, has an intranet benchmark to test Web server performance: out next month, it rates a configuration of server, operating system, protocol stack, security, Web server software, relational database connection and database.
Netscape Communications Corp has bought two more of Sequent Computer Systems Inc's Internet Accelerator boxes for FTP file transfer purposes: they are based on Sequent's Symmetry 5000 Servers and Netscape has two already in addition to its Network File System boxes from Network Appliance Corp.
One person not staying around to see how the Network Computer pans out is Oracle Corp vice-president of the network computing division Andy Laursen: he's leaving to join Unwired Planet Inc, a Redwood City, California start-up working on wireless Internet technology - but the company wouldn't say when he starts or even what his title will be - we have to wait for the product launch this summer for more.
Must be nice to be so wealthy that the difference between $100m and $200m simply makes no odds: before the announcement, the Wall Street Journal hazarded a figure of $200m for the sum that BT and MCI Corp planned to invest in their industrial strength Internet venture, MCI told us the number was $100m, Reuters persisted with a figure of $300m, which apparently originated with a BT interview, the UK's Daily Telegraph went with $200m, the Wall Street Journal stuck with $200m after the event, the International Herald Tribune had $100m, the Financial Times went with "multimillion dollar network" before the event and no number after it, so we checked with MCI again, and they said, asserted, insisted, stressed, observed and assured us it was $100m.
Aimtech has scrapped a joint venture with IBM to convert IconAuthor for use with set-top boxes. And rumour has it that Microsoft and Adobe are evaluating Aimtech's Jamba technology (see page 3) for inclusion in Jakarta and Pagemill respectively.
A Morgan Stanley survey of MIS directors reveals that 52% of companies are using Web servers for intranets, 44% are building an Intranet and 27% plan to program in Java.
Following its success with Bob (ahem) Microsoft has developed IRC application that presents chat sessions as comic strips with users as cartoon characters. To let chat participants focus on what they write rather than what's being drawn, Comic Chat dynamically sets up things like character placement within cartoon panels and determines character expressions based upon the content of the speech balloon. Users can specify settings as well, however. Comic Chat only runs on Windows 95 and Explorer 3.0.
Yahoo Inc is to include Digital Equipment Corp's Alta Vista search engine at its Web site, and will share advertising revenue with DEC. Yahoo previously used the Open Text search engine. OT says it was having to buy too much hardware to support the service and not getting any revenue from it.
Nortel (Northern Telecom to old-timers) has denied a report in Interactive Week of an impending Internet telephony switch launch. Peter Brockmann, senior manager of Internet solutions market development at the company says the forthcoming enhancements to its Rapport dial-up switch these are aimed at providing secure dial-in to corporate Intranets over public lines.
Internet Service Provider PSINet is "unlikely to be independent in two years time" president and CEO Bill Schrader, told CNN; "we will be making a decision over our independence in the next three months". In May PSINet employed Merrill Lynch & Co to help it "review strategic alternatives".
Jerry Taylor MCI president and COO says that Internet and Intranet was a $100m business for MCI last year a figure that should grow to be more than $2 billion by the year 2000. He adds that MCI's Internet traffic is growing by between 15%-20% per month. Digging our calculators out, this suggests that if revenues rose in line with traffic, and assuming 15% growth, his business should be worth $535m by next year. So when's the slow-down due?
Time magazine last week named Netscape chairman Jim Clark one of the 25 most influential people in America. God, he must be thrilled. Imagine, being on the same list as Courtney Love. Time also supplies a shorter list of the 10 most powerful people in America. Bill Gates is number two, second only to the Tumbling Duke... no, not really - Bill Clinton. Andy Grove also made that list.
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Weekly Dispatches from the Internet Front
June 17 - June 21 1996 Issue No 3
UK SECURITY MOVE HERALDS OECD AND EC COMMERCE PROPOSALS
Current thinking in the OECD and the European Commission on electronic trade and encryption policy was heralded by proposals from the UK last week. The UK Department of Trade and Industry issued recommendations aimed at easing electronic trade through the use of licensed, regulated 'Trusted Third Parties' (TTPs). The plan is said to be based on similar work being carried out by the two international bodies.
Though sounding superficially similar to the US's controversial 'Clipper' proposals, the UK system of public key management will be voluntary and is geared more towards facilitating electronic trade, than controlling criminal use of encryption. The 'Paper on Regulatory Intent Concerning Use of Encryption of Public Networks' proposes licensing the TTPs to provide a range of security-related services to business and individuals. Typically, says the paper, these might include "the verification of a client's public key, time stamping of documents and digital signatures... TTPs may also offer a service of key retrieval... in addition to facilitating the real time encryption of a client's communications."
Both the European Commission and the OECD have been working on similar proposals, and the UK says it expects its system to fit within a common international framework needed to support inter-working between TTPs. By getting its proposals out early, the UK hopes to influence the directions of these international developments.
An OECD experts meeting on June 26-27 will begin drafting cryptography policy guidelines, following an earlier meeting in Washington DC on May 8. Their work is due to be complete early next year.
dtiinfo1.dti.gov.uk/cii/encrypt/
MICROSOFT COMES OUT BATTLING FOR THE INTRANET
Microsoft, showing remarkable quickness for a company which six months ago had no Internet division and no Internet plan to speak of, mapped its intranet path in a pitch to Wall Street and big business at an Intranet Strategy Day event in San Jose last week. And in a show of un-characteristic rhetoric, Bill Gates turned his guns on Netscape Communications and Sun's Scott McNealy, ridiculing the former's belief that users don't want powerful PCs and the latter's commitment to open standards.
Key pieces of the Microsoft plan included the first showing of Internet Explorer 4.0, previously known as Nashville. This is the software that will ostensibly kill the Windows 95 brower market by turning the desktop itself into a browser capable of handling both local files and Internet files in the same way. The 'Windows Active Desktop' can have ActiveX controls and hyperlinks scattered on it.
Internet-enabled Office 97 was also on show, which will permit things like documents that contain live hyperlinks to other documents stored on the Internet. It will also include an application called Outlook for managing e-mail, schedules, tasks, contacts, and files from a single point. It will ship at year end. Redmond will also bundle its FrontPage HTML authoring and Web site management tool and its new Tripoli search engine with Windows NT 4.0, due to ship this summer.
Microsoft demonstrated a new Directory Server, one of the pieces originally intended for Cairo that it hinted at when it launched Exchange Server. The directory server is built chiefly on DNS and X.500 protocols and supports LDAP as well, meaning that NT files and Internet sites will share the same naming system. Microsoft will rename its Jakarta Java development tool Visual J++, and will release it in late summer or early fall.
The company also demonstrated Viper, an OLTP server, and Common Internet File System, a file-sharing technology that rivals SunSoft's WebNFS. CIFS is an enhanced version of the Server Message Block distributed file sharing system found in Windows, Windows 95, WindowsNT and OS/2. It enables PCs to access network information over TCP/IP nets. WebNFS and CIFS allow users to share files directly on the Internet without requiring users to download or copy them to a local machine first. Data General, DEC, Intel and Network Appliance have endorsed the protocol. Netscape has yet to jump with either.
"PURPOSELESS" W3C UNDER FIRE
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web's ostensible standards body, came under fire last week from its own Advisory Council for being ineffective and possibly detrimental to the future of the Web, writes Maureen O'Gara
W3C was criticized as being rudderless, purposeless and disorganized at a time when billions of dollars in Internet investments ride on its moves. It is said to have only accidently hit upon its projects so far and to have no organized way of conducting itself and getting consensus. Its next output, after HTML 3.2, is unknown. It is unsure whether it is supposed to invent technology or document it, and it has no controls in place to prevent companies from waylaying its workgroups.
As a result, a Process Committee is being formed by members of the Advisory Council to map out a charter and way of working. It hopes to present its recommendations by the end of August if not before. It is believed to include Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle and IBM.
Chairman of the W3C Albert Vezza, who is also associate director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, said the organization isn't chartered to "either promote or not promote the Internet. Its charter is to maintain and enhance the Web toward the purposes that the W3C members deem important." While maintaining that allegations of the conflict between the organization and its Advisory Council "paint an exaggerated, negative and inaccurate picture of the W3C," Vezza said that a committee of W3C members and staff is planned to recommend procedures for improved communications between the members and staff.
MIT's representatives reportedly reminded the Advisory Council that its advise could be disregarded only to be reminded himself by the Council, which represents a throng of high falutin' vendors and users, that they could vote with their dollars and their feet.
The latest bug Java security has been uncovered by David Hopwood of Oxford University. It's another attack on the class loader which allows running native code. Hopwood says it effects all current Java implementations.
ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk/~david/java/bugs
GATES SLAMS NETSCAPE AND SUN
Bill Gates mounted a robust defence of Microsoft's record on open standards last week with a swing at Netscape, challenging it to publish its APIs and criticizing undocumented changes made to LiveScript and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. As for Scott McNealy's ideas on networked computers, Gates described him as "the most entertaining person in the industry - he should start a humour department". The unfamilar position as (temporary?) under-dog seems to be agreeing with his rhetorical skills.
Netscape tried to pre-empt the Microsoft assault by publishing its own Intranet plans the day before. Leading the Netscape charge are new versions of Navigator and the SuiteSpot servers. Galileo, the Navigator upgrade, was the software originally called Dogbert - after the Dilbert comic strip character - until it ran into objections from the lawyers. Galileo will incorporate some of the groupware functionality Netscape acquired as well as full Java and Java Class Libraries support. It will also integrate the Borland AppAccelerator Java JIT compiler Netscape licensed, and feature improvements in e-mail and news clients such as Secure/MIME encryption for messages and mail filtering. The Navigator version is in alpha now with product due by the end of the year.
The next-generation SuiteSpot, code-named Orion, offers more a comprehensive look at Netscape's Intranet goals with product enhancements ranging over several servers to roll out over the next 12 months. Orion will gun for the Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange space by integrating the groupware technology that Netscape acquired with Collabra. The Collabra integration will take place particularly in the Mail and News Servers as well as Galileo, with Mail Server, for example, handling calendaring and scheduling SuiteSpot will offer better management capabilities through the already-planned SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) support as well as support for industry management systems like HP OpenView, Tivoli TME and CA Unicenter. Netscape also plans to add APIs, class libraries and access-control-list security for application development.
AOL & MACROMEDIA SWAP TECH
As AOL readies itself for the move to a browser-based front-end, it is pondering how to reproduce the nice proprietary animation and sound that it already has. It has plumped for Macromedia's Shockwave and consequently AOL & Macromedia have signed a technology swap deal whereby AOL gets Shockwave and Macromedia gets AOL's compression technology
Shockwave will be integrated in a new version of the AOL client based upon Microsoft's Internet Explorer, it is expected to make an appearance this Autumn. Meanwhile, back on the server, AOL will be making Macromedia's Backstage Designer authoring tool available to its members to allow them to customise and design their own Web pages.
For its part Macromedia will be taking AOL's ART compression technology and the AOL software development kit. ART, which provides streamed audio and MIDI, as well as conventional image compression, will be embedded in Shockwave - which just might reduce the horrendous size of the files. Macromedia developers will get ART as an 'Xtra' included in their authoring tools. The AOL SDK will be distributed to developers in the same way, and the claim is that it will let them offer 'one button' access to either AOL or the Internet from their CD-ROM titles. This sounds like a novel way for AOL to drum up extra end-user business.
America Online is left as the only major online service that has committed itself to a complete re-build using Internet technology. This, combined with analysts warnings that AOL faced a slowing of subscriber growth has put pressure on its share price. Stock which was trading at $71 at the beginning of May dropped to $43 following analyst's statements. It recovered somewhat, to hover around the $50 mark.
CLARIS BUYS IN HTML TOOL
Claris Corporation has gone shopping for an Web-page builder and bought San Andreas Systems's in-development system which was codenamed "Loma Prieta." Claris will market the stuff as "Claris Home Page" on both Macintosh, Windows 95 and NT. Terms of the deal where not disclosed. A beta will be available by the end of the month from www.claris.com with a finished product ready by the end of the summer, pricing yet to be decided. Neither Claris nor the Los Altos, California-based San Andreas Systems would disclose the terms of the deal.
"Ho-hum, another HTML editor"? Well maybe, except that Home Page is meant to handle all those nasty things like frames and tables that simpler HTML editors choke on. Version 1.0 will not support ActiveX controls, but this will be added in a subsequent release.
THERE'S MONEY IN THAT E-VAULT
Topsfield Massacheusetts based Software Partners reckons its software will let Internet Service Providers become data back-up business. The company is selling the newly announced, punningly-dubbed SaftePosit as a way for business and home users to back up their data in secure, remote sites via an Internet connection.
It seems a fair idea: as Internet access provision becomes a commodity item, ISPs need ways to differentiate themselves, so why not become a data-vault? One reason why not might be the stringent quality assurance programs that any corporate is going to demand before giving up control of its back-ups. Faced with that problem Software Partners is offering a scheme whereby it runs a back-up system for the ISP in return for a monthly fee and a 25% cut of the back-up revenue. Under this "Reseller" deal the ISP would offer the SafetyPosit service to its user base and handle monthly billing with the data going to Software Partners' own storage site. Even if the prospective e-vaulter decides to take an all-out licence and set up its own back-up facility, he or she will be expected to pay 10% of revenues in return for consulting on system configuration and operational proceedures.
Though it doesn't intend to offer its own end-user service, Software Partners has come up with recommended pricing. Home office pricing starts at $9.95 per month for up to 10 Megabytes of new data or $16.95 per month for up to 25Mb of monthly new data. The recommended pricing for business users ranges from $49.95 for 100MB to $395 per month for up to 1 Gb of monthly new data. Minimum mandatory hardware requirements for licensees include a T1 or better Internet connection, a security firewall, a RAID server to receive backups, and a robotic tape library for backup storage. A UPS, stand-by generator and fire-supression system is recommended.
The system incorporates the 128-bit Public Key Cryptosystem from RSA Data in the US, but expect weaker encryption overseas. Only the end-users get the key and they are authenticated with RSA's 1,024 digit public/private key Digital Signature software.
The company has been ironing out the operational wrinkles with a pilot project running since April, claimed to be capable of storing up to 9 Tb of data. The software is currently in beta test and is on a 90 day free trial. No, you can't download it, since it contains RSA strong encryption.
One big, unanswered, and yet vital question is what kind of assurance contracts, the ISPs will be signing with their customers. A business whose data-centre burns down won't be best pleased if Software Partners' own Internet links goes down on the same day. The company says that they have dual lines from completely separate providers, and will be advising partners on the level of assurance they should be offering. However this information wasn't immediately to hand. www.softwarepartners.com
The OECD is trying to agree on how to protect consumers cybershopping with their credit cards. There's still no safety net to protect consumers from fraud, delivery problems or defectis, and they can't get access to either the foreign merchants or their judicial systems. Moreover the responsibility of the credit card companies currently varies between countries.
The OECD is hoping to convince the credit card companies to create "a uniform, industry driven redress mechanism that would inspire consumer confidence." The results of a conference being held this week will be published on October 3. www.oecd.org.
30% MORE INTERNET - BT & MCI
MCI Corp and British Telecommunications have glued together their two Internet backbones into a global offering aimed at ISPs, other carriers and businesses building intranets. Based on 155Mbps backbones, and offering 45Mbps connections, the companies claim InternetPlus should increase international capacity of the Internet by 30%. NTT Data will act as a distributor for the services in Japan.
The companies will tempt customers with the offer of service level agreements and premium connections offering bandwidth guarantees. The system will be managed by the company's Concert joint venture and will initially have eight 'superhubs', broadly equivalent to MFS's Metropolitan Area Exchanges: within a year there will be 20 in the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, the Americas and Asia. Local ISPs will be able to connect to these hubs. Vint Cerf, MCI's senior VP of data architecture calls this the "single largest international deployment of Internet technology". Spending for the project has been reported as anything up to $300m, but in a briefing the company put expenditure at a relatively modest $100m. The two companies already have IP offerings in 70 countries, with dial-up access from 45. One of the aims of scattering the superhubs around the globe will be to relieve the Internet's current reliance on connections passing through the US.
Concert will split its offerings into three areas; Intranet, dial-up and 'transport services' catering for carriers, ISPs and businesses who want to buy into the raw bandwidth. There will be two levels of performance guarantee available, the higher level "isn't quite the same as nailing up a permanent circuit", and indeed it's not quite clear what the nature of the bandwidth guarantees will be, particularly since there is no prohibition on using the services for the transport of real-time voice and video.
DECENCY ACT APPEAL IN DOUBT
Internet-based libertarians and librarians breathed a sigh of relief late last week when three US Federal judges ruled that Section 507 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act was unconstitutional. The Philadelphia court also granted the plaintiffs in the case a preliminary injunction preventing prosecution under the law, pending appeals which must be filed within 20 days. Intriguingly, the Justice Department hadn't committed itself to appealing as we went to press. The judges ruled that Section 507, (ne the Communications Decency Act, ne the Exon Bill) infringed the US Constitution's first amendment, protecting freedom of speech. "As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion" wrote US District Judge Steven Dalzell.
The decision essentially granted all that the plaintiffs could have hoped for. In total more than 40 software companies, civil liberties groups, ISPs and online companies had opposed the legislation. A second lawsuit, that merged with the ACLU's was headed by the American Library Assoation.
Section 507 aims to protect those under the age of 18 from "any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or any other communication which is obscene or indecent". It penalises anyone who knowingly "makes, creates, or solicits" or "initiates the transmission". In practice, since it is quite possible for under-18s to read newsgroups and browse web-sites, this opened users, ISPs and online services up to prosecution.
The case partly hinged on whether the Internet should be considered in the same way as print communications - which are protected under the First Amendment - or as a broadcast medium, which is heavily regulated. In their ruling, the Judges said that "Because it would necessarily affect the Internet itself, the CDA would necessarily reduce the speech available for adults on the medium. This is a constitutionally intolerable result."
All 251k of the decision can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation site at:
www.eff.org/Alerts/HTML/960612_aclu_ v_reno_decision.html
JAMBA AND ICONAUTHOR TO SHARE JAVA BASE - OEMS SOUGHT.
Nashua, New Hampshire-based Aimtech has launched Jamba - a cute visual Java authoring tool. Though more limited than the firm's flagship IconAuthor multimedia authoring package, the next release of IconAuthor, due out before year end, will be built on Jamba technology. "We are looking at IconAuthor version 8 as being Jamba +" said President and CEO Andrew Huffman. The company hasn't decided whether to merge the two product lines yet, - they'll probably remain separate, with a different feature-set, though based on the same core code. IconAuthor 8 will be able to load old IconAuthor presentations and spit out Java versions.
"Compiling IconAuthor down to the Java Virtual machine would have been great, but it would have taken longer" says Huffman.
Meanwhile, Aimtech is touting the Jamba code around as an OEM product, hoping to attract those companies already offering HTML construction utilities which need to add Java authoring.
Jamba, which does away with scripting altogether, is aimed at those building visual presentations a la Shockwave, makes heavy use of ActiveX components. In fact Aimtech has built a Java class that corresponds to standard ActiveX controls. Extra extensions can be added by those with a programming bent.
Rather than compiling the presentations down to straight raw byte-code, Jamba describes animations in simple ASCII files. These are used by a small Jamba interpreter to invoke the correct Java classes. Someone invoking a Jamba animation over the web will find themselves downloading a 100k standard set of Jamba Java classes together with the small ASCII file and any GIFs needed. Jamba, in beta now, will be out for Windows 95 next month, priced at $495. www.aimtech.com
WALL STREET NET FRENZY FADES
If the public debut of Web search company Infoseek Corporation is any indication, the Wall Street Internet furor may have subsided. Infoseek, as likely a candidate as any to boom on the stock market, launched 3.45 million shares on Nasdaq at $12 a share last week - and ended its day only two dollars higher instead of climbing up to dizzying heights. Last Thursday it slumped, to close at $11.50 .
The anemic performance is not confined to Infoseek. When three judges ruled against the Communications Decency Act (CDA) last Wednesday, in essence pulling the government back from interference with Internet capitalism, the market barely registered it. Although the ruling affected key Internet stocks like Netscape, Spyglass, CyberCash, Raptor and Yahoo, those stocks didn't shoot up in giddy reaction - in fact, the Internet Stock Index (ISDEX) actually fell 7.73 points, or 1.29%, to 589.99.
MCI, INTEL TEAM ON WEB
MCI teamed with Intel to develop and market Internet products and services last week and now finds itself in the business of selling hardware with networkMCI WebMaker, a Web package that features an Intel-made server. networkMCI Webmaker, targeted at US small and medium-sized businesses yet to go on the Web, complements MCI's recently-formed Web-hosting and content creation business. The turnkey package includes a 200 MHz Pentium Pro server, NT, Intel-developed tools, Cisco routers, a firewall, Netscape server and client products and leased-line connectivity.
WebMaker is available immediately at $10,000 and will be marketed by MCI. The companies plan to move on to develop enhanced Internet multimedia capabilities and services, high-end intranet and remote network access offerings. Most compelling is a multicasting technology that highly compresses data and reserves bandwidth on the network so that it broadcasts smoothly.
Microsoft Corp says it will bundle its FrontPage Web authoring tool and its Search Server with the Windows NT Server version 4.0 due this summer: Search Server, code named Tripoli, is part of the next-generation Cairo version, and offers automatic content indexing of documents on corporate intranet servers; it will be offered free with NT 4.0.
Rumor has it that Netscape, finally paying attention to the 10 million OS/2 users worldwide, is working on a Navigator port to OS/2 by year-end. The effort's reportedly been pushed by the high number of OS/2 users in Europe.
MacMillan Online columnist Mike Miller, saying the only way the Network Computer will fly is if ISPs and the like give them away, quipped that the letters NC might actually stand for "no charge." Not that Oracle and its crowd would mind, since licensees would swallow the cost.
IBM will use the text search engine from Personal Library Software Inc (PLS) for its new Internet-based service, IBM infoMarket. IBM infoMarket, which hosts databases and publishes information for people without Web servers, lets users find information on several different servers with one query. PLS has also allied itself with Informix to provide a text DataBlade for the Informix Universal Server.
How big is Java? Well, the top Java books are out selling the top Windows 95 books by at least two to one.
Right on the tail of a Federal court's Communications Decency Act (CDA) ruling, Lycos has laid out a set of guidelines to make advertising on its Web site "child-safe." Saying that advertisers have a responsibility to protect children from exploitation, Lycos presented 21 guidelines that prohibits advertising that, for example, misleads, appeals to peer pressure or oddly enough, appeals to supersition or "luck-bearing powers." www.lycos.com
The British Broadcasting Corp said that digital television could be harmed unless the UK government ensures that consumers need only one set-top decoder box for both satellite and terrestrial service.
Adobe has a GIF89a plug-in for Illustrator 6.0 available for download that ties its desktop publishing empire even closer to its efforts on the Web and makes Illustrator the first vector-based graphics program to support GIF natively.
www.adobe.com
IN BRIEF
NBC, PBS AND VDONET TEAM
Internet yearling VDONet of Palo Alto, California has allied itself with NBC, Cisco and PBS in a initiative for 'multicasting' or broadcasting audio and video over the Internet to several users simultaneously.
The VDOCast Center for Multicasting has been set up by the partners to bring VDONet's technology to the market and make video programming widely available, developing technology as well as a business model. Conventional Webcasting only broadcasts to one user at a time point-to-point, meaning that scores of users cause traffic snarls for the server. VDONet's multicasting, however, can broadcast to a number of servers at once and theoretically opens up the broadcast to thousands of viewers.
The start-up figures the technology, which is highly scaleable, could have applications in everything from virtual town hall meetings to news to pay-per-view events such as concerts. VDONet says the technology's not up and running yet, although "everybody knows it works." It figures it'll have broader demonstrations by the end of year, with a viable product by 1997 - depending, of course, upon the market demand.
WEBTV AIMS AT HIGH RESOLUTION
WebTV Networks Inc, a General Magic spinoff, is offering a reference platform design for dial-up Internet services that'll deliver high resolution images to a television, eventually not even requiring a set-top box. The Palo Alto California start-up, founded by ex-Apple guys by way of General Magic, says licensees will have set-top boxes that plug in to existing televisions by October, with integrated Web televisions by next year.
WebTV says the dial-up solution will be cheaper than cable modems with Web browsing and email only raising the price of a television by $50 to $100. CEO Steve Perlman, who was responsible for much of the Macintosh video, graphics and multimedia technology, claims other Internet TV offerings will be more expensive than WebTV because they emulate PC behavior, not TVs.
Web TV is licensing its design to some unspecified consumer electronics companies which will build the set-tops and Web-enabled televisions. It aims to make its money by charging fees as the Internet service provider, and plans to turn a portion of its subscriber fees over to the hardware providers in an attempt to attract volume manufacturers. Users will be expected to control the Web through yet another remote control and can expect the WebTV Network to function somewhere in between a full-blown online service and an Internet gateway to aggregate content.
The device will run with applications that cover functions like shopping, entertainment and financial services. It's including security software to prevent minors from getting access beyond an approved site list, and there'll be a call waiting feature to tell users to turn off WebTV and pick up the telephone. WebTV says it has filed 35 patent applications, particularly for its digital image enhancement techniques which reshape video signal on the fly for "unprecedented quality." The firm claims Web pages are legible across a living room.
WebTV is Perlman's third start-up; he previously helped design General Magic Inc's MagicTV which was never released. In addition to Perlman, other Apple alumni at WebTV - which operated under the pseudonym Artemis Research until it came out with its offering - include Bruce Leak, the mind behind QuickDraw and QuickTime, and Phil Goldman, who created MultiFinder. The company looks to break even in its second year. Meanwhile, parent company General Magic has been dabbling with Web-enabled PDAs for Motorola and Sony and will make a substantial Net announcement next week.
PHILIPS SET-TOP FOR SCHOOLS
Philips Media Systems is targeting the classroom with a version of its television-based Web browser. Philips is billing the School 2000 browser, which runs over a telephone line and a television monitor, as a low-cost alternative to PCs in the class room.
The browser includes software for Web surfing, e-mail and news groups as well as a "child-proofing" feature that blocks Web sites that shouldn't be seen by young eyes. School 2000 ships with a CD-interactive browser, modem, proprietary software, custom browser and an on-screen keyboard with a real keyboard optional. The browser, to be released this fall, will sell for about $700, well under a PC's price tag, but higher perhaps than would be expected for a device that ships without monitor.
HOLODECK AHOY
Remember the "it's all done by mirrors" virtual teleconferencing system promised by IBM Corp and Teleport Corp this time last year? One year on, the TeleSuite system is ready and waiting at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and the Capital Hilton in Washington. The system sticks a video mirror against one wall to make the room appear twice as large as it really is, so that users get the impression that they are in the same room as people miles away.
They communicate in real-time audio and video and can even make "virtual eye contact," according to the company. The IBM Global Network will provide the telecommunications services for TeleSuites installed worldwide, and IBM will market the system around the world.
SAP BRINGS R/3 TO WEB
That bastion of the corporate world, SAP AG, has put its sizable stamp of approval on Internet commerce with the announcement of a release of its R/3 that adds 25 Web application components to the manufacturing software. The pieces will be released as a dot upgrade to R/3 version three and include components such as a supply chain management application that acts as a shopping basket for electronic product catalogs.
SAP also announced at its Sapphire user's conference last week that it has come up with over 100 Business APIs (BAPIs) that let companies conduct business over the Internet with other parties, regardless of the platforms they run on. The BAPIs are DCOM compliant and will be Corba compliant as well. It is also offering a new R/3 Internet transaction server based upon Windows NT as part of the 3.1 release. The transaction server is being developed in conjunction with iXOS GmbH in Munich, Germany. R/3 3.1 is due by year-end.
MICROSOFT BUYS ESHOP FOR NORMANDY
Commerce! Commerce! goes the cry, and so Microsoft has bought up little eShop Inc which runs the eShop Plaza at www.eshop.com. No-one is commenting on rumours that eShop was also being wooed by Netscape Communication. Microsoft will use eShop's software in its Merchant system - part of the 'Normandy' server suite announced last week (OR issue 2). MSN will also use the software in its MSN Mall and over eShop Plaza's existing customers, which include Tower records and 1-800-Flowers. Microsoft's group VP of platforms Paul Maritz reckons that the acquisition of the company will accelerate development of Microsoft Merchant by one to two years.
No financial details were given, but most of eShop's 35 staff will be making the trip to Redmond. eShop began developing its online electronic shopping system four or five years ago using proprietary protocols, but subsequently adapted it to Web use. The package itself, has previously been sold as "eShop Technology" and runs on Unix servers. Microsoft's first task will be to port it to NT. It is expected in beta this August, with the finished version following by year-end. They haven't decided on pricing yet.
...AND IBM'S UNVEILS E-MALL
IBM Corp last week unveiled plans for its 'World Avenue' virtual shopping mall, claiming it already has four retailers committed to taking space, though only two, Limited Inc's Express unit and Hudson Bay Co of Canada are going public at this stage. However a spokesperson later said that the official Olympic merchandising site would become an Avenue member, not that it is quite sure what it will sell there since the 1996 games will be over by the time the Mall opens. IBM hopes to have 20 spaces filled by the time the mall opens for business in the fall.
The Mall is based up on its Net.Commerce bundle of commerce technology which it announced at May's Internet World show.
Big Blue is charging $30,000 for each site based on a catalog of 300 products, plus a $2,500 monthly fee and 5% of each purchase.
For that retailers get tools for their in-house developers to build catalogs and product demonstrations. It sounds pricey, but IBM claims setting up shop at its mall is far cheaper than building a web shopping site from scratch, and cites Forrester Group research suggesting companies spend an average of $593,000 initially and $2.8m every year to maintain their web commerce services.
It promises a European version of the mall by year end. Mall services will include personal profiling, gift registry and accessory services. Merchants get a consumer profiling function, market feedback and site sales patterns.
Retailers will foot the bill for print and online advertising and attracting consumers. IBM says a council of mall members will have to devise ways of driving traffic to the mall. IBM promises the most advanced implementation of secure sockets layer (SSL) and secure electronic transactions (SET) for electronic payment on the net by the time World Avenue opens for business.
There's no news on whether L.L. Bean, or J.C Penney - two existing Net.Commerce customers will be tempted on board.
The Olympics merchandising site, claimed to have the same look and feel that the rest of World Avenue will have can be found at www.atlanta.olympic.org/acog/products/ d-products.html
...AND COMPUSERVE, PRODIGY
On the back of IBM's World Avenue cybermall announcement, CompuServe Inc and Prodigy Services Corp, say they will broaden their own online shopping areas. By the fall, when World Avenue is scheduled to open, Prodigy expects its eight-year-old shopping section, The Market Place, to be converted to HTML and available on the Web. Prodigy has 20 retailers in its Market Place and says it will be able to attract more when it abandons its proprietary system.
"By moving to the Web it will be easier for us to start doing more deals. The advantage we have is that we can aggregate two million people to our shopping site, where others are just hanging out there on the Internet." Prodigy says the biggest change to its service will be to let users hypertext from a content area to a related retail outlet. Both Prodigy and CompuServe say they strike individual deals with retailers, so that some pay the providers a cut of their profits or volume and others pay a flat fee.
CompuServe couldn't say when its Electronic Mall service would reach the Internet, but with 11 years experiences and 170 merchants, it predicts it will be the top shopping site. "We invented online shopping," it boasted. The firm has said it will move its service to the Internet by year end. The CompuServe shopping service sales grew by 40% in 1995 and traffic increased 80%. But the determining factor may be which service is up and running first. It appears IBM and Prodigy will launch neck and neck, with CompuServe arriving sometime before the end of the year.
INTUIT ADDS INSURANCE TO QFN
Intuit Inc, claiming it will be an "information conduit" between insurance companies and customers, announced last week that it would build an insurance service within its Quicken Financial Network(QFN). The firm believes QFN will establish Intuit as a leading financial information provider on the Web. Three major insurance firms have paid Intuit an undisclosed amount to offer policy information and quotes to users of QFN and it expects to announce more firms within 18 months.
Despite the efforts to build electronic insurance sales, the site runs afoul the traditional insurance model, which in most cases requires paper trails and sales people. Although most insurance companies will make online purchases an option, the largest company in the service, Met Life, will use QFN only as a source for qualified leads, since it's "wedded to [its] agency force."
The offering comes as a result of Intuit's recent acquisition of Interactive Insurance Services. Revenues will reportedly come from advertising, lead generation, commissions and software development. Intuit admitted it didn't expect to make much, if any, money from the mostly free service next year, but projected that QFN would be profitable within two years. The company is likely to continue its buying habits: "We have been relatively acquisitive in this area and we will remain so," Intuit said.
Daniel Stone, CNN senior vice-president for business development, told the International Advertising Association's World Congress in Seoul last week that advertising on its CNN Interactive site will total "several million dollars" and the site will break even in '96 - its first full year of operation - Reuter reports. Stone told the news-service that revenue from the Internet operation would double next year. It reportedly charges advertisers between $5,000 and $35,000 to put links on the site's pages.
DG unveils thin server
Surrounded by industry buzz about thin clients, Data General has responded to network computers by coming up with the concept of a "thin server." While the server itself won't be lightweight, it will be especially configured to support a network of thin clients, all downloading information and applets. Because NCs require so much data to be transferred over the network, the servers will be dedicated by function primarily to filing and retrieving information rather than simply processing data. The thin servers will be part of a new Thin Line business unit focused on Internet appliances to appear in early 1997.
JAVASOFT? MAKING A PROFIT?
Since it's running a business built on a giveaway programming language, the first question that JavaSoft gets asked is how it'll make money on Java.
Its answer? It already is. The company is receiving a "not insignificant revenue stream" for licenses of Java and JavaOS, JavaSoft VP of product marketing David Spenhoff said.
That's only the beginning. It will also see revenues from shrink-wrapped products like the newly-announced "Jeeves," a replacement for CGI-bin connections that allows applets to be downloaded to servers.
While it's giving away the binaries to its Hot Java classes and browser, it will sell the source code to developers as well as charge for site licenses for "branded" browsers. Spenhoff said that JavaSoft could act as an "applet clearing house" to sell applets to developers, much as EarthWeb is doing with its Gamelan Direct service. JavaSoft won't take a significant cut from applets sold.
Spenhoff said it won't be long before profitability is feasible. There's an expectation, he said, "that JavaSoft will establish a profitable business model...that the industry will look at and say, 'So this is how you do it.'"
THE TERMINAL AS NC
IdeaAssociates Ltd has shipped what could turn out to be the first Network Computer - but unless you are one of the 4m terminal users on TCP/IP-compatible mainframes, there's no need to reach for your cheque book just yet.
The Idea Internet Terminal Server can support up to 64 users at any one time, and comes complete with character-based Web browsing, electronic mail and information retrieval, storage and printing capabilities. Running on Microsoft Corp's Windows NT, the server guarantees to transform your antiquated green screen into - well, it will still be an antiquated green screen, but with more functions. First shipments have already left the firms' UK base in Surbiton, Surrey, priced at $4,800 for a one- to 16-user configuration.
To satisfy the more conventional Network Computer followers, Idea has launched its Internet Client Station, developed to comply with Oracle Corp's specification outlined last month. The kit has been designed for corporate use rather than as a cheap Internet access device for the home, and comes complete with a full Web browser, support for Java applets, a user-friendly graphical user interface, SNA Host support and Ethernet communications. It has a RISC processor, but no memory. The final price had yet to be agreed, but Violo said it would be closer to $1,000 than $500
AT&T, SG FORMS WEB ALLIANCE
AT&T has formed an alliance with the Silicon Graphics Inc, to provide World Wide Web, Internet and intranet systems integration throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. AT&T will become a value-added reseller for the complete line of Silicon Graphics products. And the agreement will also extend to Unisource NV once the latter subsumes AT&T's European units, following the merger of the two companies, announced last month.
AT&T claims over 150,000 users have registered for its WorldNet Internet service in the first nine weeks. With all hardware units soon to be divested, it is now free to enter alliances with any manufacturer it chooses. It is already close to Mountain View, California-based Silicon Graphics in the multimedia arena. www.att.com
W3C HAS JAVA-BUILT SERVER
The W3C has cobbled together what is likely the first public release of a Java-based http server in a prototype called Jigsaw that's debuting on its website. Jigsaw is an object-oriented web server written entirely in Java and was built specifically to further the design of next-generation Web protocols.
One of the key features of the server is modularity so that better or different implementations of specific parts can easily repalce their predecessors.
Calling Jigsaw simply a prototype, W3C chairman Albert Vezza said, "The Jigsaw http server is not a product which we anticipate anyone would sell." Both source code and binaries will be released for it for use by people, including W3C members and staff, who want to experiment with new Java server ideas and features.
While Jigsaw will continue to be modified for some time, the W3C said it hopes to have a version with stabilized design and APIs by December that will include HTTP 1.1 support, increased performance through JIT compilers and a better user interface.
Long term goals include mobile code experimentations, where the server would let outside code execute locally. www.w3.org
IBM has launched world-wide IBM Web Services for Web site development and hosting. It hopes the venture will establish a firm customer base predominantly at entry level, before the Internet becomes an important business tool. IBM will provide a complete consultancy service, including a team of experts it hires out to external organizations to check the integrity of their networks. "If there's a hole in the system, the 'rent-a-hacker' crew will find it,"Á the company said.
UK company JSB Computer Systems Ltd, based in Congleton, Cheshire, has launched the INTRAnet Jazz Open Gateway, an IPX/SPX gateway, claimed to be the first to enable 32-bit WinSock applications to access intranets and the Internet, with no need for a TCP/IP stack on the workstation. Part of the INTRAnet Jazz Integrated Suite, the gateway supports NetWare, Unix and Windows NT. It costs roughly $760 for a five-user licence, with a 50-user licence selling for $5,400. http://www.intranet.co.uk/
Intel Corp has come out with Adaptive Technology, which enables Fast Ethernet microcode to be upgraded for better performance, and is giving it away free on its Web site. According to Intel, the new capability increases the performance and flexibility of personal computer networks by as much as 20%. www.intel.com/ comm-net/sns/showcase/speed/eepro100
The Japanese Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications has set up a Digital Post Office on the Internet: procurement information will also be available. www/mpt.go.jp/procurement/ index.html
Tucson, Arizona-based Artisoft Inc has launched version 7.0 of its flagship LANtastic network operating system, with the main enhancements being in the area of Internet communications. Specifically, the new version incorporates Netscape Communications Corp Navigator 2.0; CompuServe Inc's SpryNet Internet access service; a full TCP/IP stack and a Winsock gateway designed to enable multiple users to share a single dial-up Internet connection. The company has also added Windows95 support. It is shipping now, from $120 for a single user, to $1,000 for an unlimited number.
Sundar Iyer, of Silicon Graphics India, told Reuters that there are in India "probably 10m people waiting to log on right now that can't because there aren't enough lines available".
IN BRIEF
Java applets for sale
EarthWeb LLC, leveraging the success of its Gamelan Java registry Web site, has launched an electronic marketplace where applet developers can sell their wares. The Sun-endorsed Gamelan Direct, to premier in July, will be part of the Gamelan Web site, which EarthWeb claims is one of the top 25 Web sites in the world and gets 25 to 30 million hits monthly. EarthWeb beta tested the online store with its own EarthWeb Chat applet, netting over 5,000 licensees in one month. The New York City company will get a cut on each applet sold, with most of the revenue going back to the developer.
Gamelan Direct will likely be joined as a Java applet broker by JavaSoft, which has made similar plans, but EarthWeb marketing VP Nova Spivack insisted that having two separate sources would make the market more viable. The service will support several transaction forms, such as digital cash.
Gamelan, which lists over 2,500 Java resources including 2,000 or so applets, has become such an Internet fixture that one of Earthweb's partners quipped "If you don't know Gamelan, you're not a Java developer."
www.gamelan.com
FOR THOSE WHO CAN STAND ADS
A Japanese start-up dubbed Hyper Net has come up with a plan to give free Internet access to all comers - provided they're willing to watch a continuous stream of advertisements whenever they browse. Hyper Net claims to have signed up more than 20k subscribers in Japan in the first two weeks it was on the net, and is laying plans to bring its system to the US in September. It's now negotiating with unnamed Internet Service Providers to carry its traffic, with its initial efforts concentrated on bigger regional or nationwide ISPs like Netcom. The Hyper Net plan hinges on a program it calls Hot Cafe that replaces the standard dialer used by browsers. For now Hot Cafe runs on Windows 95 only, with a Mac version due out later this year.
In addition to establishing a dial-up link to an ISP Hot Cafe opens a little window on the desktop in which advertising continuously appears - changing as frequently as once every minute. Surfers can use any browser they want, but they can't close, hide or minimize the Hot Cafe window. It just sits there on top of whatever else is running, spewing out its continuous stream of sales pitches. Closing Hot Cafe immediately cuts off the Internet connection, since the advertising software is also the dialer.
The ads that appear in the Hot Cafe window are fed to it by a Unix-based Tandem, running Hyper Net server software, and can include hyperlinks to take a surfer directly to an advertiser's web site. Hyper Net will provide the Tandem to ISPs that sign up for its plan. The beauty of it all, as Hyper Net execs explain the scheme, is that the money they collect from advertisers is going to be enough to pay ISPs the revenue they would have otherwise gotten from surfers' monthly subscription fees and connect time charges. That's what makes it possible to offer access for free.
Advertisers will pay Hyper Net fees based on the number of times their ad appears in front of surfers, with the company raking its profits off the top before passing on what's left to ISPs. Hyper Net is also going to demand that anyone getting in line for the free service fill out a personal profile firm. That's going to let it target advertising to match a surfer's particular interests. By tracking which hyperlinks a surfer follows Hyper Net will eventually be able to add even more detail to the profile. Such profiles, of course, are gold to the advertising community. The better an ad can be targeted, the higher the price that can be charged. It's a standard concept in the magazine advertising industry, a new one for the Net. Tokyo-based Hyper Net is setting up its US operation in San Jose, California. In Japan the first ISP it signed up is the Internet access arm of the giant ASCII Corporation, which began offering free access in late April and passed the 20k subscriber point barely half a month later. Hyper Net is figuring to book 300k Japanese users via ASCII in its first year of operation and says its out recruiting other Japanese ISPs as well.
SYBASE ROLLS WEB STRATEGY
Sybase, claiming it already has a huge presence on the Internet in some of the largest and most sophisticated Web sites, is launching a technology initiative over the next year to make ubiquitous Internet applications possible. Sybase, whose databases power the likes of HotWired, Pathfinder (which has 13 GB of data on its site) and C|Net, will revamp its application server technology, security, database technology and its adaptive server for Internet use. Perhaps most critical to Sybase's Web strategy is its adaptive server with accompanying middleware and snap-in data type architecture. for things like text, imaging, audio and video.
In addition to those types, Sybase will roll out a Web page data type. Among other things, the Web page type will allow the database to dynamically resolve links in Web pages when they're shifted around. Adaptive server also adjusts to workload so that the database can be tuned without interruption for maximum performance at its present usage.
The application server will include componentized services that handle things like session management and connection management ; allow developers to write their application servers in standard client/server languages like C++ while connecting to Web-specific languages like Java through JDBC and Sybase's own WebSQL. Security will add high-level secure APIs and SSL transport for servers connecting to a database on an IP network. Sybase VP of enterprise product marketing David Hsieh said that "all databases should be net ready," since databases in the Web space are primarily intended for publishing. A graphic utility that will ship in the next version of Sybase's will help to maintain Web sites and their links to databases.
The technology, made public last week, will start rolling out this summer and will continue over the next year.
BONDING ON THE INTERNET GUARANTEES TRADE
A bunch of bonding specialists from the Corporation for International Business have come up with the idea of selling what amounts to an insurance policy for companies doing business on the 'net. The policies guarantee customers that cyberstores actually deliver ordered products.
The Internet Bonded Business Trust (IBBT), which has set up shop in New York City's World Trade Center and on the 'net, started selling its performance bonds last week.
For a $30 application fee, $300 annual membership fee, and $500 bond premium that Connecticut Surety underwrites, cyber businesses get an Internet Bonded Business logo on their web site. It's supposed to ease fears customers may have but the bonds only cover up to $50k in claims by all cybershoppers as a group. http://www.ibbt.com
BCE TAKES 8.3% OF WEB SEARCH SPECIALIST AUTONOMY
BCE (Holdings) Plc, the snooker halls operator that turned itself into a computer games developer, has invested £2.5m for an 8.3% stake in Autonomy Corp Plc, a buyout from Cambridge Neurodynamics Ltd.
Autonomy has the exclusive mass market licence to market, distribute, supply and exploit a suite of autonomous search agent software that uses artificial intelligence technologies to enable Internet users to customise their own daily newspapers or conduct other searches on the World Wide Web. The software includes intranet agents for internal network searches, mail agents for prioritizing email, and guardian agents for controlling access.
Autonomy is, needless to say, to be operated autonomously from BCE.
http://www.camneuro.stjohns.co.ukg
DOT Gossip
Mountain View, California-based Network Appliance says it will launch a data access technology this fall to link WebNFS and CIFS and will integrate it into its NetApp file servers as well as selling it to third parties.
Not known for its modesty, Attachmate was quick to spot a trend and self-style itself "the intranet Company" last year. But its attempts to trademark the tag line obviously came to naught, as restrictive notices no longer appear on its web site, while at least two other firms now also claim the grandiose (and ideally singular) title: the UK's JSB and Canada's Intranet Technologies.
TriTeal Corp, the Carlsbad California-based company that provides Common Desktop Environment (CDE) compliant user interfaces for the Unix market, is working up some kind of Network Desktop client environment, and previewing it under a non-disclosure agreement. It claims that the thing will run on any device attached to a network. It is not browser-centric, as the company believes a network operating system must be more lightweight, although it will support a browser if required. TriTeal is also working with its CDE partner The Santa Cruz Operation in the Internet, X-Window and Motif. arenas
CheckPoint Software is set to announce Firewall 2.1 this Tuesday, the latest version of its flagship Firewall-1 product line. Using what CheckPoint terms "Stateful Multi-Layer Inspection" technology, the product is claimed to incorporate the best aspects of packet filters and application gateways to provide transparent connectivity with security. According to IDC, CheckPoint has now shipped some 4,000 units, and has a 40% market share. http://www.checkpoint.com
FOR JAKARTA, NOW READ VISUAL J++.
Former X/Open Co Ltd chief Geoff Morris is putting together a Web and intranet start-up he expects to go live in the fourth quarter; it will also provide a European distribution channel for US-developed technologies.
Look closely at Tom Cruise's laptop computer in the Hollywood blockbuster Mission Impossible and you'll see that the Web browser critical to the movie's plot (such as it is) is marked with a prominent 'N'. Given the subject matter, one would think they would have chosen Spyglass.(groan - Ed) www.missionimpossible.com
The Client/Server Labs Inc RPMark bench-marking house owned by Atlanta, Georgia-based Enabling Technologies Group Inc, has an intranet benchmark to test Web server performance: out next month, it rates a configuration of server, operating system, protocol stack, security, Web server software, relational database connection and database.
Netscape Communications Corp has bought two more of Sequent Computer Systems Inc's Internet Accelerator boxes for FTP file transfer purposes: they are based on Sequent's Symmetry 5000 Servers and Netscape has two already in addition to its Network File System boxes from Network Appliance Corp.
One person not staying around to see how the Network Computer pans out is Oracle Corp vice-president of the network computing division Andy Laursen: he's leaving to join Unwired Planet Inc, a Redwood City, California start-up working on wireless Internet technology - but the company wouldn't say when he starts or even what his title will be - we have to wait for the product launch this summer for more.
Must be nice to be so wealthy that the difference between $100m and $200m simply makes no odds: before the announcement, the Wall Street Journal hazarded a figure of $200m for the sum that BT and MCI Corp planned to invest in their industrial strength Internet venture, MCI told us the number was $100m, Reuters persisted with a figure of $300m, which apparently originated with a BT interview, the UK's Daily Telegraph went with $200m, the Wall Street Journal stuck with $200m after the event, the International Herald Tribune had $100m, the Financial Times went with "multimillion dollar network" before the event and no number after it, so we checked with MCI again, and they said, asserted, insisted, stressed, observed and assured us it was $100m.
Aimtech has scrapped a joint venture with IBM to convert IconAuthor for use with set-top boxes. And rumour has it that Microsoft and Adobe are evaluating Aimtech's Jamba technology (see page 3) for inclusion in Jakarta and Pagemill respectively.
A Morgan Stanley survey of MIS directors reveals that 52% of companies are using Web servers for intranets, 44% are building an Intranet and 27% plan to program in Java.
Following its success with Bob (ahem) Microsoft has developed IRC application that presents chat sessions as comic strips with users as cartoon characters. To let chat participants focus on what they write rather than what's being drawn, Comic Chat dynamically sets up things like character placement within cartoon panels and determines character expressions based upon the content of the speech balloon. Users can specify settings as well, however. Comic Chat only runs on Windows 95 and Explorer 3.0.
Yahoo Inc is to include Digital Equipment Corp's Alta Vista search engine at its Web site, and will share advertising revenue with DEC. Yahoo previously used the Open Text search engine. OT says it was having to buy too much hardware to support the service and not getting any revenue from it.
Nortel (Northern Telecom to old-timers) has denied a report in Interactive Week of an impending Internet telephony switch launch. Peter Brockmann, senior manager of Internet solutions market development at the company says the forthcoming enhancements to its Rapport dial-up switch these are aimed at providing secure dial-in to corporate Intranets over public lines.
Internet Service Provider PSINet is "unlikely to be independent in two years time" president and CEO Bill Schrader, told CNN; "we will be making a decision over our independence in the next three months". In May PSINet employed Merrill Lynch & Co to help it "review strategic alternatives".
Jerry Taylor MCI president and COO says that Internet and Intranet was a $100m business for MCI last year a figure that should grow to be more than $2 billion by the year 2000. He adds that MCI's Internet traffic is growing by between 15%-20% per month. Digging our calculators out, this suggests that if revenues rose in line with traffic, and assuming 15% growth, his business should be worth $535m by next year. So when's the slow-down due?
Time magazine last week named Netscape chairman Jim Clark one of the 25 most influential people in America. God, he must be thrilled. Imagine, being on the same list as Courtney Love. Time also supplies a shorter list of the 10 most powerful people in America. Bill Gates is number two, second only to the Tumbling Duke... no, not really - Bill Clinton. Andy Grove also made that list.
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