Key points about Clickshare

Key points:

1. USER CONVENIENCE -- The user maintains one account relationship and must remember only one password, while retaining unimpeded access to a universe of information -- whether free, by subscription or charged by the page-- from Clickshare-enabled publishers.

2. PUBLISHER INDEPENDENCE -- Independent information providers each maintain their own base of customers or subscribers as well as physical control of their copyrighted information. This makes updating, pricing, user tracking and persona lization simple and locally based.

3. ADVERTISING VALIDATION -- The Clickshare service collects records of visits by specific users to all Clickshare-enabled information, whether print, audio, graphical or software applets, and can provide this sorted, aggregated information to advertisers as a form of third- party validation of publisher viewership claims. However, advertisers may obtain the actual names of Clickshare users only from the user's home publisher (only for individual users who consent to the release of this information).

4. PERSONAL PRIVACY -- Sensitive name, address and credit information is stored at the user's home publisher only. This information never traverses the Internet during information-browsing sessions. The Clickshare service knows users only by their home publishing member and a randomly-generated user ID number. There is no central database of user names and only the user's home publisher can associate a name with a user ID.

5. NO SPECIAL SOFTWARE -- Standard web-browser software from is all a user needs to enroll at a Clickshare-enabled Web publishing site. And Clickshare works within official standards, thus imposing no proprietary modifications to the Int ernet environment.

6. NO CREDIT CARDS ON NET -- The user's home publishing members acquires credit-card information about the user in whatever fashion is acceptable, from a security standpoint, to the card issuer. Once this information resides securely in a off-line database, the user provides a standard ID and password combination to begin a Clickshare session. Only at settlement time, using an off-line protocol, is it necessary to relate information purchases to the user's credit account. With Clickshare, no credit-card numbers move across the Internet in real time.