BankBoston, the Massachusetts Electronic Commerce Association and Rights Exchange, Inc., of Buffalo, N.Y., have joined to sponsor the Internet Information Payments Collaborative's (IIPC) roundtable summit, "Making Information Pay: Setting An Agenda for Industry Collaboration," to be held at the BankBoston conference center in Boston on June 16-18, 1999.
"This is a gathering for people who want to move the Internet to the next level of information exchange -- profitability," said Bill Densmore, cofounder of Clickshare Service Corp., one of the IIPC's founding collaborators. "Attendees are coming not just to listen, but to set an agenda for research and trialing which will lead to industry-wide solutions."
The summit is the IIPC's kickoff event. Secure credit-card registration is available from http://www.iipc.net/registration/.
Experts from the World Wide Web Consortium, CommerceNet, the Copyright Clearance Center Inc., ASCAP and the International DOI Digital Object Identifier) Foundation will present status reports on their efforts. Along with the sponsors, experts from companies such as Bank One, Lycos, Compaq, Entrust, AOL, Gruner + Jahr USA Publishing and John Wiley & Sons are expected to participate in setting the agenda for breakout sessions.
Among agenda-setting speakers will be Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., whose topic will be: "The Struggle for the Soul of the Web: Why Micropayments are Needed to Pevent a Collapse in Web Usability." Dr. Nielsen is a web user-experience visionary and a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, of Atherton, Calif., which he co-founded with the former head of Apple Computer Corp. research, Dr. Donald A. Norman.
Until 1998, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and led that company's Web usability efforts starting with the original design of SunWeb in early 1994. His previous affiliations include the IBM User Interface Institute, Bell Communications Research, and the Technical University of Denmark. Nielsen is the author of the bestselling textbooks "Usability Engineering" and "Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond"; his next book, "Designing Excellent Websites: Secrets of an Information Architect", will be published in May.
Using the roundtable format, supplemented with provocative talks and papers, all attendees will have a chance to participate to (a) identify industry needs, (b) specify appropriate solutions and then (c) help direct the ensuing research and trial scope of the IIPC. Collaborators on Sunday will identify business requirements for an information-commerce infrastructure, and on Monday will hear about emerging solutions. The Tuesday morning session will build recommendations for followup research and consumer technology trials by the IIPC.
"Internet development is a group effort, and we think public-private collaboration among academic and business researchers is to everyone's advantage," says Dr. Leslie D. Ball, a professor at the UMass-Amherst Isenberg School of Management who is co-directing both initiatives.
"Publishers are confused by the array of unproved options for managing and selling information on the Internet," says Stephen C. Mott, IIPC's other co-director, an electronic-commerce consultant and and a former executive with MasterCard International and publishers. "We provide a way to pool research-and-development around finding a common infrastructure for on-demand purchase of digital information, including words, sounds and pictures."
The IIPC will study and test information-payment technologies, including one offered by Clickshare, a Massachusetts-based startup, which is the IIPC's first technology collaborator. Other technology vendors and solutions are expected to be part of the trials, however.
Both Mott and Ball said they saw the need for the IIPC emerging from the failure of several pioneering information payment protocols to gain a critical-mass of commercial adoption. They said it is clear the market for information sales needs a forum for developing consensus on an operating structure. The network operating structure needs to support competitive yet interoperable marketing, and pricing beyond subscriptions and advertising sales.
"Internet development is a group effort, and we think public-private collaboration among academic and business researchers is to everyone's advantage," says Dr. Leslie D. Ball, a professor at the Isenberg School of Management who is co-directing both initiatives.
"Publishers are confused by the array of unproved options for managing
and selling information on the Internet," says Stephen C. Mott, IIPC's
other co-director, an electronic-commerce consultant and and a former
executive with MasterCard International and publishers. "We provide a way
to pool research-and-development around finding a common infrastructure for
on-demand purchase of digital information, including words, sounds and
pictures."
Dr. Leslie Ball
Professor of Information Technology
Room 202-D / Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003
(413) 545-5654
ball@iipc.net