CyberLand/David Hipschman:
Making the Net pay Its way
Editor & PublisherInteractive /Hoag
Levins:
First to Achieve the Digital Equivalent of Single-Copy Newspaper
Sales
The Netly News/Noah Robischon
with Steve Baldwin: Micropaying Through the Nose
Interactive Age/John Evan Frook:
Clickshare Culls Microrevenues
News.Com/Janet Kornblum:
Is Web a field of dreams?
NetGuide/Reid Goldsborough:
Digital News: Ripping Into Newspapers
Web Week/Bill Roberts:
Micropayment Venture Pushes Centralized Billing
The New York Times CyberTimes
Extra/Jamie Murphy and Ed Forrest:
Who's doing all this measuring?
Stop the Presses!/Steve Outing:
Pay-Per-Click: The Next Great Online Revenue Stream?
Byte/Robert Hummel:
How Java Can Pay the Rent
Interactive Age/John Evan Frook:
Monitor monitored by Clickshare
Cowles/SIMBA Media Daily/Laurie
Peterson:
Christian Science Monitor To Launch Web Site, E-Mail Service
Mass Hi Tech/Pam Derringer:
Clickshare eyes web, sees possible profit in pay-to-use browsing
WEBster/Cynthia Kurkowski:
Web publishing: is fortune really just a click away?
Boardwatch/Durant Imboden:
Self-publishing opportunities on the Internet
PC Week/Jim Kerstetter:
Clickshare adopts pay-as-you-surf plan
C|Net News/Rose Aguilar: Clickshare
collects for online pubs
Stop the Presses/Steve Outing:
Clickshare has a lot going for it
Web Week/Jeremy Carl: making a
subscription-based model work
WEBster: has Clickshare the
"excelsior" to sell info by the page on the Web?
TBTF/Keith Dawson: Clickshare
addresses outstanding obstacles
Software developers, Web page designers and companies that provide Internet connections have been making money. But the "content providers," as the writers, artists and editors that produce the words and images embedded in the Net are called in this strange new world, have wondered how they would get paid, as have the brave, foolhardy or rich souls that "publish" them.
Marketers have declaimed that the economic model of the Net only needed a secure, verifiable transaction methodology (they talk that way) to become viable. Meanwhile, pundits have proclaimed that the "culture" of the Net necessitated that information remain free -- a prospect as unappealing for a writer as a rejection slip....
This week, however, a Massachusetts-based corporation may have actually changed the nature of the Net. Clickshare launched its pioneer "multi-site, single-ID, Internet micropayment system" and users began clicking on -- and paying for -- information online.
Some may think Clickshare is the beginning of the end for free access to information on the Web. Others may conclude that it is the "killer ap" that will finally make Web publishing a reality. Whatever you think, Clickshare's launch is a pivotal moment for the Net.
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Sept. 18 (E&P Interactive)--In the latest attempt to turn the elusive promise of the Internet into actual publishing profits, a company formed by a newspaper publisher and a university mathematician has launched the Clickshare "single transaction enabling" utility that supports the digital equivalent of single-copy newspaper sales across the Web.
While Clickshare Corp.'s service is the latest of several entries in the new Internet field of "transaction enabling" systems, it is the first to comprehensively address distribution problems specific to Web-based newspapers and magazines. Most newspapers on the Web would like to charge non-subscribing users a small amount of money to access single news articles but have thus far not found a practical system to accomplish this....
Last week--twenty-four months after they first began--Densmore and Oliver launched their new Internet Clickshare service. In the first two days of operation, it processed $62.60 worth of transactions--hardly an amount to make the firm an industrial titan. However, industry watchers say the concept, if accepted by users and publishers, has the potential to spawn a sprawling Internet utility, stitching together thousands of pay-to-view publishing sites charging small fees (in the range of ten to twenty-five cents per document view) to huge numbers of visitors.
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Way back when The Netly News was but a gleam on our screen -- before syndication, before becoming a multinational corporation and before Josh became the dictator of a small Eastern European nation -- we considered using a micropayment business model.
We reasoned that if each of our millions of readers were willing to plunk down a nickel for every article they read, we'd have the biggest bellies in Fat City. Hell, if a mere 100,000 people a day came through our site (remember, there are supposedly 15 million active Internet users), we'd be making $25,000 per week. And even we could live on that (though Josh would have to give up his three-hour-per-day habit). So when Clickshare announced last week that micropayments were finally a reality, we asked where to sign.
"Most of the financial mechanisms that people are coming up with are trying to capture people rather than release them," Clickshare marketing director Felix Kramer says with postmodern verve. Clickshare, which has netted $175.85 since last Friday, "utilizes the interconnectedness of the Web."
Here's how: Netly Publishing would enter into a deal with Clickshare and install its software on our servers. Next we would tell all of our readers that we were going to start charging them $.10 and up for each article they read on Netly. Clickshare then tracks readers' usage and supplies a record of their "page visits," including session IDs and time stamps, and submits a bill based on that usage from Netly Publishing. Clickshare keeps 20 percent of the tab, 30 percent is kicked back to the company that bills the users and provides the connectivity, and the other half goes back into the Netly coffers (note that if Netly acts as the bill collector/ service provider, a full 70 percent of the total bill goes into our pockets). All the user sees is an aggregate bill at the end of the month.
"I think this is a way that writers can finally end up getting paid for their writing," said Kramer. It's the dawn of a new age -- none too soon if you ask us.
Right now the most lucrative aspect of the Clickshare system is its ability to gather detailed user demographics. Beyond that, Kramer admits that "we're not sure about these models we're implementing. It may change once we gain more experience."
The whole venture depends on Clickshare's ability to achieve step one -- luring The Netly News Networks Publishing Ventures SA and other content providers into using its system. Clickshare essentially has to become the network to become viable. In truth, if you can become the network, you've got it made anyhow. We're not certain that Clickshare is really ready to go head-to-head with Microsoft, but Kramer assures us that he "expects to be talking to a lot of Fortune 500 companies" once Clickshare finds a CEO.
Of course, the operation also depends on the readers' willingness to shell out for the articles they read. To that end, Team Netly has put together a special Consumer Report on navigating the Web with Clickshare. We sent out our seasoned subjective site appraiser, Steve Baldwin, and after much deliberation, he arrived at a definitive judgment of how much these popular web pages are actually worth -- and why.
[We at Clickshare couldn't resist including the story's sidebar, but think it's only appropriate that you go to the original story to get the links for the items below -- and that wy you an appreciate the original design too.]
Four11 Directory Services ($0.30 per click): Being able to stalk your former co-workers and significant others has to be worth something.
USA Today's Lotto Results ($0.18 per click): You didn't win again, loser! (there -- I've just saved you $0.18).
Any Quake Cheat Pages ($0.75 per click): Look, you've already spent $49 on this game -- spend a few more bucks to get through the damned thing.
Internet Underground ($0.08 per click): The going rate for deep-thinking repurposed journalism (we might shell out a quarter for the whole site.)
Playboy ($0.50 per click): Excellent editorial content.
The Charo Calender ($0.15 per click): She's added two performing elephants to her act. Wouldn't you pay $0.15 to know this?
Search Voyeur ($0.45 per click): Horrifyingly funny. We could watch this for hours and rack up a big bill.
Seducing Your Lover by Sign ($1.00 per click): Worth at least a buck if it works.
Any Search Engine ($0.00 per click): Never in a million years would we pay for searching. If these greedy vendors start charging,tell them you're going back to the World Wide Web Worm.
The Netly News ($1.75 per click): Cutting-edge web journalism (besides, we need to raise funds for Stamper's one-way bus ticket to Comdex.)
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Sixty-two dollars and sixty cents might not seem like a lot of cash, but to the folks at Clickshare Corp. it is history in the bank.
That microscopic amount -- not enough to buy dinner for four at a posh restaurant -- is the money collected over the weekend by Clickshare's just-launched Internet micropayment system, which enables people to buy individual articles over the Internet for as little as 10, 25 or 50 cents.
Only about a dozen registered buyers conducted online purchases between Friday and Sunday, but Clickshare says that's not the point. It claims the launch of its system marks the first time a technology has been implemented to allow publishers to charge for information on the Internet, as opposed to giving it away gratis.
The launch of Clickshare makes good on a promise. The company announced its plans to introduce a publisher's commerce tool more than a year ago. It has steadily advanced its strategy by developing the technology behind its multi-site payment system....
A Williamstown, Mass.-based Internet start-up, Clickshare beats to the punch no less than IBM, which is pushing its similar Cryptolope technology as the gateway to for-pay information. But it might face an uphill climb in continued competition with Big Blue. Though Cryptolopes are just coming out of the test phase, IBM 's Infomarket unit claims it has as many as 40 contracts with publishers to use its technology to sell articles over the Net...
Of course, both Clickshare and Crytolopes also face an unknown element - whether consumers will be willing to pay for information delivered over the Net. ...
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Clickshare today launched a service that may help answer the most burning questions for Web publishers: If you build it, will they come? And perhaps more important, will they pay for it?
Clickshare has a technology that can charge consumers every time they call up information on the Web. Users register their credit cards with Clickshare, log on, and then can pay for news on a "click-as-you-go" basis....
But it's unclear whether people will pay for information on the Web when they can find it in other ways for free, said Mark Loncar, a partner for marketing technologies with CKS Partners....
Bill Densmore, Clickshare's chairman, summed up his company's strategy this way: "We're the Web's first working micropayment service. Now, publishers can charge for valuable information on the Internet, rather than giving it away."
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Another option being explored by online publishers is pay-per-click services. With Clickshare, the monitoring system that facilitates such pay-as-you-go services, sites can set rates as low as 10 cents per page. Even if an online publisher doesn't charge for a hit, it could use Clickshare to track usage and provide this information to advertisers, says Bill Densmore.
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Look ahead six months. Dozens of Web sites are charging subscription fees, and more are joining them every day. Pay-per-view emerges as the standard way to subsidize content, and surfers pay every time they hit the water.
Now consider this: Would this reality be more palatable if the audience could pay a central billing entity instead of getting a bill from a dozen different marketers? ...
Steve Outing, an Internet publishing consultant and president of Planetary News in Boulder, Colo., said, "Clickshare raises the bar and gives newspapers a lot more options about how to bring in new revenue. Until now the best you could do was a subscription model." ...
Bill Harvey, vice chairman of Next Century Media Inc., a Sausalito, Calif.-based interactive media consulting, measurement and tracking firm, added that "Clickshare starts with the philosophy that you can get some money from the consumer as long as you keep the price per page quite low, 10 cents or a quarter. You have to have a three-legged stool to make money--online shopping, ads and consumer subscriptions. Clickshare seems to understand this better than anyone else. I think they're going to succeed, but it has to be tested." ...
The Monitor expects to test a pay-per-piece model for its voluminous archive, said David Creagh, the Monitor's electronic publishing manager. "We adopted it because we think they have the most sophisticated technology we've seen for raw audience data--who goes where for what," he said. "We're going to need that but don't know how we'll use it." ...
Jonathan Roosevelt, an associate at Battery Ventures in Boston who specializes in Internet ventures, finds the Clickshare model intriguing. "They have a fantastic technology. It really is sophisticated, neat stuff. I'm not sure that they're applying it in the best way," he said. ...
But with all the free content, do Web users want to pay at all? Consultant Outing isn't sure. "The difficult part for magazine publishers and newspapers is figuring out what people are willing to pay even for a few pages," he said. "As people see more of that, it will become more accepted, but initially that will be tough going. Paying for archive access is a no-brainer."
Creagh believes people will pay. Earlier this year the Monitor put up a Bosnia site. When Creagh later asked 2,500 site visitors if and how they'd be willing to pay, more than half were game for a micropayment system like Clickshare.
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A number of companies now are trying to bring some calm to the seeming madness of measuring traffic on World Wide Web sites -- and on the banners advertisers pay to place on those sites -- though each has its own view of how and what to measure....
Devising more accurate and efficient methods of a Web site's popularity among Internet users is a battle that's just now beginning....
Once a user is registered with Clickshare, for example, he or she can surf from Clickshare site to Clickshare site without having to re- register at each stop. Clickshare registrants can also use their account with the company to pay what they owe on any Web purchase....
Currently, the Christian Science Monitor, American Reporter, and Studio Briefing use the Clickshare system.
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In recent conference presentations, I've been telling my audiences that the model that makes the most sense for newspapers operating on the Internet right now is to give as much away free as possible, and concentrate on attracting advertisers because they will carry most of the weight in supporting newspaper Web operations in the future. Densmore's pay-per-click strategy actually fits in well with this advice, in that pay-per-click allows a publisher to charge potentially small amounts (microtransactions) for premium content that is worth paying for from the consumer perspective.
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Felix Kramer, marketing director at Clickshare (Williamstown, MA), another company that's exploring the field of electronic commerce, sees this as one of the functions of the Web distributor. "People are going to deposit their applets at payware sites on the Web," he explains. "Other people will collect the fees for them and send them a monthly check."
Kramer envisions a billing model for applet use based on data transferred, not on time used. Each download of an applet might cost a few cents or dollars but would allow the use of an applet during an entire session. The alternative, in which the applet might be equipped with a built-in expiration timer, interrupting your application to demand another nickel, is not as likely to occur. "The Internet is a stateless system," Kramer says. "Time as a method of measurement will go away."
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The Christian Science Monitor plans to include 15 years of newspaper archives at its soon-to-debut Web site. The venerable paper also announced it has picked Clickshare Corp. to provide traffic measurement and microtransaction strategies for the site. The Monitor's endorsement is a major boost for Clickshare, which has been one of the least hyped of the Web traffic measurement companies to date.
Monitor electronic publishing manager Dave Creagh said Clickshare will be used to measure repeat visitors to the site. He said the determining factor in selecting Clickshare was the firm's ability to track unique users without requiring on-site registration and password access.
"(Clickshare's) technology to track visitors. including time spent per visit, is the most sophisticated we've seen," said Creagh. He added that Clickshare's willingness to work with third-party auditors, such as NetCount and I/Pro, also factored in the decision. "We feel that Clickshare will soon set the standard for allowing transaction-based pricing on the Internet."
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The Christian Science Monitor will unveil a new Web site in two weeks that features a 15-year searchable archive, 24-hour real time audio newscasts from Monitor radio and a crossword puzzle with two levels of difficulty -- one of which lets you cheat a little.
The Electronic Edition of The Christian Science Monitor at http://www.csmonitor.com will be free to users through the summer, according to Dave Creagh, electronic publishing manager. Some areas will require registration. Two pricing models will be tested this fall -- a monthly subscription rate of about $6 for unlimited access and a transaction-based plan that would charge, say, 10 cents to view a political cartoon. ...
The Web site will employ Clickshare Access and Payment Service software to track usage. The software gives users a "digital calling card" so they can log in once and charge purchases at many Web sites to a single account. It also tracks visits to advertiser-supported pages.
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A Massachusetts-based "virtual company"" with a handful of employees scattered across the country is betting that the practice of paying for information on the Web will become as accepted as the once-preposterous notion of paying to watch TV....
...Clickshare's future is bright, despite the rise of companies such as Open Market in Cambridge that are also beginning to form business networks. But Open Market collects user/payer information and stores it in one location, Densmore said. Unlike Open Market, Clickshare's user data will be decentralized among the network of affiliated publishers, with each user giving information to a publisher they trust rather than to a large centralized database with which they have no contact, he said.
Densmore is unfazed by prospective rivals.
"The numbers are so huge now that nobody is competing with anybody," Densmore said. "There is enough business for everybody at this stage."
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The ability to support microtransactions -- purchases under a dollar -- across the Internet promises to drive the sale of information on the World Wide Web. Publishers and authors will be able to sale their works by the article or chapter, or quotable text for that matter. Suddenly, publication archives will become a new revenue source -- not just supported by Web advertising banners, but supported by user purchases of information. Ten cents here, a dollar there, it all adds up to big revenue gains. Revenue publishers might otherwise never have generated under the traditional subscription or newsstand model...
One secure microtransaction system developed by Clickshare Corp., is being tested this spring. (See WEBster article "Clickshare Begins Trials of Clickshare Access & Payment Service" 04.02.96.) With the exception of the initial user registration which must be conducted offline, the Clickshare Service operates online, verifying users, tracking user purchases and delivering user activity reports to its publishers for billing and collection....
"Clickshare provides another model for supporting the sites," said Felix Kramer, president of Kramer Communications and spokesperson for Clickshare. "Sites will get some revenue by casual clickers."
The Unix-based Clickshare Service is in its initial phase of testing by publishers Studio Briefing and American Reporter. Both publishers are looking for a secure payment system which allows them to sale their wares for under a dollar while still supporting high-priced purchases. Clickshare's flexible pricing model attracted the online daily American Reporter. The American Reporter is marketing dailies in two formats: an all-in-one newsstand price and per-article rate ranging from $1 to $30. The Clickshare system can deal with the complexities of such a variable pricing structure with its unlimited pricing levels.
[from the issue's table of contents:]
But will the model catch on? It may all come down to pricing.
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News reporters are another group of writers who hope to make money on the Web. Newshare Corporation is an online syndicate that expects to help freelancers and publishers earn revenues from worldwide dissemination of their work.
"We gather the work of content providers like newspapers, broadcasters and independent writers and artists," the company explains in its recruiting pitch. "Then we make it possible for each of these providers to share their content with their own customers, subscribers and users all under a single system of validation, tracking and payment."
....Right now, Newshare's content is being offered free of charge, so it's impossible to guess how successful the concept will be when billing starts in mid-1996. To draw your own conclusions, and to see what kinds of content providers the "Clickshare" service attracts, keep an eye on http://www.newshare.com.
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Clickshare Corp. has developed software that gives World-Wide Web site publishers a way to charge users based on their activity.
The Williamstown, Mass., startup's Access and Payment Service uses a "digital calling card" process in which users establish a line of credit with the site simply by phoning the publisher. Clickshare's Web server application is then initiated when a user re-enters a site. The system keeps track of a user's activity on the site, with each page having its own price. The lowest per-hit cost that Clickshare can afford is about 10 cents, company officials said.Some users, although pleased by the technology, said they hope the base fee will drop.
"I think the system should be flexible enough to charge pennies," said Joe Shea, editor in chief of the Internet magazine American Reporter, in Hollywood, Calif. Shea is one of two users currently testing Clickshare's Access and Payment Service software.
....Clickshare's Access and Payment Service is now available for Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alpha servers running Unix and Intel Corp.-based machines running Unix. Other platforms will follow this year, officials said.Return to top (index of clips)
Technology trials have started for a new Internet payment system from Clickshare that will make it easier to pay for online subscriptions.
Called the Clickshare Access and Payment Service, the technology lets users bill charges from several online content publishers to a single billing account. ...
For users, the attraction is that they won't have to use their credit cards for small transactions, nor will they have to give their credit card numbers to multiple vendors to sign up for multiple online publications...
The catch is that the publisher must also have signed up for the Clickshare service. But the company hopes that publishers will be attracted to the service because it will make it easier to track customer billing, count the number of times a user views a given site, and monitor visits to advertiser-supported pages.
Two publishers are participating in the tests: Studio Briefing, a daily entertainment industry newsletter, and American Reporter, an online news daily.
The registration at Clickshare provides users with a single ID and password account and a list of publishers using the service. The system also supports authentication for intranets, officials said.
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....The Clickshare system monitors and collects data on where the consumer has visited and purchased information, then sends the data back to the home publisher and the remote publisher. The remote publisher receives his share of the sale, the local publisher keeps a slice in compensation for the referral, and Newshare keeps a portion. And the participating publishers receive a detailed accounting of what consumers are reading, which can serve to provide advertisers with a verified account of online viewership.
The Clickshare concept has some wise thinking behind it. President Bill Densmore, a former newspaper publisher, has designed Clickshare as an open system supporting Internet standards. Consumers can use Clickshare with any Web browser software. It makes purchasing data on the Web simple; the consumer gets only one bill no matter where in the world she has purchased information. And a single password works everywhere. Credit card information is not transmitted over the Internet; rather, that data is kept solely by the local publisher. Consumers are kept track of by an alphanumeric ID number that is discernable only by the local publisher.
....Clickshare as a concept has a lot going for it. It would allow newspaper publishers worldwide to put price tags on their premium data online -- say, access to their electronic archive -- and easily permit anyone on the Internet to buy it without having to submit a credit card number.
This idealistic vision of Internet publishing commerce is predicated, of course, on Newshare signing up a critical mass of publishers to be part of the Clickshare network. That's going to be its biggest challenge, especially since Newshare is a small company without a proven track record. I, for one, wish them luck.
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Williamstown, MA-based Newshare has begun alpha-testing its new Clickshare pay-per-click system, which is scheduled to debut as a full-fledged service in early 1996.
....Other subscription-based programs have appeared on the market in recent months, but Newshare is positioning its product as differing from its competition in terms of its pricing structure. The company will go after low-end subscriptions by enabling individual providers to charge as little as 10 cents per page and up, making transactions that would be impossible or worthless with a credit card economically feasible. Revenues from such sales will be divided among the publisher of the content (royalty), the referring publisher (referral commission), and Newshare, which will take a percentage as a transaction fee (tentatively set at 15 percent).
Newshare Preident Bill Densmore explained a hypothetical transaction with his system. "Let's say you click on a link from a story about the Boston Red Sox in the San Jose Mercury News. The link takes you to the Boston Globe's Web site, where another story is. Using Clickshare, the San Jose Mercury News, as the referring publisher (the source of the link) would take a certain percentage of the transaction and the Boston Globe (the actual publisher of the article) would also take a percentage." For this system to work, both must be running the free Clickshare software.
While the Web has always offered easy navigation between content on different sites, products such as Newshare may make the subscription-based model of Web usage a more common phenomenon. "We're creating a platform for publishers to share users and share content without having to surrender their copyright, without selling physical control of their material," said Densmore.
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Williamstown, Mass. -- Publishers can stop banging their heads against the free content wall, maybe. Late last month, Newshare Corp. announced they had developed the excelsior that will allow Web businesses to sell information by the page.
Called Clickshare, the system is run from the publisher's server and requires no special consumer software. It also handles third-party usage tracking and allows users to invoke automatic parental control.
"Much of the publishing world has held back from participating in the Internet because it lacked a way to charge for information and a way to verify viewership to advertisers," said Bill Densmore, Newshare Corp. president and co-founder. "Clickshare presents a solution to both problems. Clickshare addresses the issue of how to obtain revenue from per-query access to content or databases."
...."And users can have a single billing relationship with a publisher or Internet service provider yet surf the net freely, purchasing words, sounds or pictures from any Clickshare-enabled site without having to constantly re-register or recall multiple passwords," Densmore said.
Consumers enter the Clickshare universe by registering with a single, independent publisher (or more if the user desires multiple account relationships). Any publisher with the system might then sell a hypertext "page" of information in response to a user's click for a price of 10 cents or less. A range of higher charges are fully supported, as well, if desired by the publisher. The Clickshare system will then charge the home-base publisher of the remote user the 10 cents and will distribute a portion as a royalty to the selling publisher, a portion as a commission to the referring publisher and will retain a portion as a transaction fee....
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Here is an appealing proposal, called Clickshare, from Newshare Corp. of Williamstown, MA (which bills itself as "The Internet's first news broker- age" -- though it seems to me that Clickshare's potential applications extend well beyond news gathering and distribution). I first read about it in Online Business Today. Clickshare addresses a number of the outstanding obstacles to online commerce:
Clickshare is not the first proposal of this type but it may be the most comprehensive to date. It combines features of Digicash's ecash <http://www.digicash.com/ecash/ecash-home.html>, IPro's I/CODE system <http://www.ipro.com/>, and some of the back-office functions of Open Market <http://www.openmarket.com/products/ProdDescrTMS.html>. It requires no hardware or software at the user end. And if offers the advantage to the user of entrusting personal information only to one single organization that s/he can freely choose.
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