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Copyright ©1996 IBIC
The Internet Digest (a Magellan "3-Star" site), is a publication for Webmasters, HTML programmers, Corporate Web Page Designers, Netsurfers, and anyone interested in learning more about the internet. Internet Digest is a convenient way for you to stay informed of valuable resources on the Internet. Internet Digest Focuses on helping you with page design basics, and explaining HTML and how the Web works, and the technical aspects of running, administering, and marketing WorldWideWeb sites.
A group of leading personal computer and communication companies on Thursday announced its support for the efforts of Lucent Technologies and Rockwell Semiconductor Systems to establish interoperability between their respective V.flex(r)2 and K56Plus(tm) 56-kilobits-per-second (Kbps) modem technologies. The interoperable 56Kbps modem protocol will be called K56flex(tm). The group joins nearly 400 companies, including Internet service providers (ISPs), remote access server manufacturers and modem manufacturers, who already support Rockwell's K56Plus or Lucent's V.flex2 technology. The world's leading personal computer manufacturers that are supporting the K56flex technology include AST Computer, Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba Corp.
RAS vendors who support either K56Plus or V.flex2 technologies represent more than 70 percent of the worldwide enterprise access server market according to industry analysts. They include: 3Com, Ascend Communications Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., DIGITAL, Gandalf, Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc., Livingston Enterprises Inc., Microcom, Multi-Tech Systems Inc. and NetAccess. ISPs and on-line service providers (OSPs) supporting the new modem technology are CompuServe, Netcom, PSInet and UUNet Technologies Inc. This group of companies is joined by more than 270 other ISPs that have previously announced their support for K56Plus.
The web site will enable people all over the world to see live photos, 24 hours a day, of what is happening at the Wall. A camera located at Aish HaTorah's world headquarters building transmits a still photo once a minute.
Among features of the new web site:
Window on the Wall: A real-time snapshot every minute. Visitors can see the complete length of the Wall along the Western Wall Plaza.
Place a Note in the Wall: Using a Java applet, visitors can type out a prayer. When finished, the visitor sees prayer fold up and zoom into the wall. In reality, the prayer will be printed out in Jerusalem and then placed in the crevices of the Wall.
Bar Mitzvah at the Wall: Jews coming to Jerusalem to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah at the Wall can now share it with friends and family at home. Within two hours of the ceremony, 21 digitally processed pictures and the Bar Mitzvah speech will be placed on the family's private web page, linked to the site. The family can also take the digital photos home to use as computer screen savers.
http://www.circumnavigator.org
The Internet Circumnavigation Education Expedition (ICEE) is set to launch their trans-global expedition early next year. The boat will stay in constant contact (via the Internet) with elementary schools until its return on New Year's Eve 1999. Using sophisticated internet software, students can direct the crew to research and investigate anything along the itinerary. After launching from the U.S.A. in April of 1997, the boat will island hop the rest of that year, traveling through several Hawaiian islands, the Society Islands, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. The following year sees New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Suez, Greece and Italy. The 1999 home stretch includes stops in France (via canal), England, Portugal, New York, Minneapolis (again via canal and river), New Orleans and Panama.
With digital cameras, sound recording devices and a satellite hook-up to the Internet, the boat's crew will be able to transfer all their experiences to the students in real time. It's a somewhat futuristic spin on the notion of a field trip. The boat, a 15 meter trawler designed specifically for trans- oceanic navigation, acts as a floating communications hub and information lab. The trip's website is updated daily. Water testing instruments check global pollution levels, and staff journalists chronicle the journey.
Lighthouse Productions released the Beta Test Version of the Internet Table of Contents -- the first Table of Contents on the entire World Wide Web. Companies and individuals can list their web pages in the Internet Table of Contents for free, and see their Web Site added instantly, thus ensuring that their pages will be categorized and found by the general public in a more user friendly way.
"The Internet is composed of more than 50 million pages of documents, multimedia, demos, brochures, etc., and growing by thousands of new pages each day! Until today, there has not been any systematic way to categorize the World Wide Web in a format familiar to all people who surf the web. Everyone is familiar with a Table of Contents. The first thing we do when buying a new book is to open the book to its Table of Contents to locate the kind of information and its location in the book. With the Internet Table Of Contents, the entire Internet is now organized so that anyone, regardless of their computer skills, can see it at a glance.
CheckFree Corporation (www.checkfree.com) and Microsoft Corporation will combine technologies so that customers can connect to their financial institutions and bank through the World Wide Web in the same way they currently operate personal finance software. CheckFree's BankStreet Web product will feature Microsoft's ActiveX technology, letting banks insert a more sophisticated user interface into their website, with features like those of personal finance packages such as Microsoft Money. In its initial deployment, banking and bill-payment controls will support log-in, balance reporting, account registers, account transfers, the ability to initiate or modify payments and establish new merchant relationships.
CheckFree already allows banks to use their own brand names on BankStreet Web, CheckFree's front-end software package for electronic banking and bill payment over the Internet. ActiveX's addition to BankStreet Web gives banks the ability to offer easier, more flexible and more interactive options to their customers. With this technology, banks deliver uniquely branded, wholly interactive, remote delivery products. "The combining of these technologies allows people to choose some of the best available banking features on the Internet," said Ted Spooner, vice president, Web development, of CheckFree Corp. "ActiveX takes pieces of personal financial programs and makes them appear within the user's web browser. Users will be able to interact with their banks over the Internet in a very easy way."
Money in long-forgotten bank accounts adds up to more than $20 billion in the United States and Canada, and banks and governments often do not try very hard to return it to the original owners or their heirs. Until now, there was no easy, systematic way to find out if any of the unclaimed money rightfully belonged to you. But a new World Wide Web site offers a one-stop service where consumers can test names for free to see if they match with any of more than 17 million names with the $5 billion total of lost money being held for them.
The number of home personal computers connected to online services will leap to 66.6 million worldwide by the turn of the century, fueled by increased PC sales and higher-bandwidth connections to better content, a new study by Jupiter Communications predicts. The study, which puts today's worldwide online service usage at 23.4 million users, the rapid growth will be fueled in part by the European and Asian markets."The global market for online services is in a position to grow tremendously over the next five years," said Kurt Abrahamson, managing director of Jupiter, in a statement. Jupiter's research comes from a report released Nov. 18, titled "World Online Markets."
Abrahamson said the growth can be pegged to "improvements we're seeing in the telecommunications infrastructure and the growth of PC availability worldwide, plus the amazing consumer demand for online [services]." Currently, the North American market holds the bulk of online service users, at 15.4 million households. Europe's subscriber count this year is 3.7 million households, followed by Asia, with 3.4 million homes. By 2000, the North American online market will jump to 38.2 million homes, followed by Europe with 16.5 million and Asia with 10 million, according to the study. Germany, with 2,000 online households now, will rise to 6,900 homes by 2000, Jupiter predicted. Another gainer: the U.K., which Jupiter expects to mushroom to 4,300 online households over the next four years, from 682 now.In Asia and the Pacific Rim, the fastest gainers appear to be Japan and Australia/New Zealand, according to the study. Japan, with 2.6 million online households now, will scoot up to 7.1 million by 2000, while Australia/New Zealand will jump from 500,000 now to 2 million in four years. South Korea is also poised for rapid growth, the study shows: At 114,000 online homes now, the country will run up to 600,000 by the year 2000.
Comcast announced the launch of Comcast@Home, a high-speed Internet service, to customers in the Baltimore metropolitan area. The new service will be provided in conjunction with @Home Network, a pioneering provider of high-speed interactive services via cable infrastructure based in Mountain View, California.
The Baltimore metropolitan area is the first in the nation to receive the Comcast@Home service. This high-speed Internet access service is the first to be offered by a cable company in the state of Maryland and one of the few multi-megabit residential services being offered for sale in the world. Comcast is today beginning to offer its interactive service to residential customers in portions of Baltimore County where Comcast's fiber optic upgrade has been completed. The service will be expanded to Howard County in upcoming months.
Through the use of @Home Network's high speed national backbone, a cable modem, and the hybrid cable infrastructure, this service offers unparalleled speed to its users. Comcast encourages its customers to stay connected 24 hours a day with instant access to multimedia entertainment, news, and information pertaining to the Baltimore area. Comcast@Home features local content, including 3-D multimedia tours of local museums such as The Walters Art Gallery, and a partnership allowing users to go online with Baltimore Magazine. Comcast@Home does not require a telephone line, so many customers will also save money by not paying for an extra phone line in their home or paying for dial-up charges. The service does not interfere with cable television reception.
Comcast@Home delivers 24-hour unlimited broadband Internet access and national and local content directly to a user's personal computer via a coaxial cable connection, a cable modem and the industry leading Netscape browser. The data transmission speed of the cable modem is hundreds of times faster than traditional dial-up phone modems and approximately 75 times faster than an ISDN line. (Integrated Services Digital Network, or ISDN lines, are used for the transfer of data over telephone lines.) Faster speed allows customers to more thoroughly enjoy multimedia content such as video and audio clips and 3-D virtual reality images. In addition to unlimited Internet access and content, Comcast@Home supplies customers with communications tools such as e-mail and chat rooms, and professionally trained customer service support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Comcast@Home Internet service costs $39.95 a month for Comcast Cable customers and $59.95 a month for non-cable customers for unlimited access to the Internet, full use of the modem, and the @Home online services, which include e-mail, chat and news groups. Standard installation will cost $175.00. The installation will be performed by professional installers from Comcast and CompUSA, one of the leading computer service companies in the country. (For a limited time only, Comcast is offering a discounted installation fee of $95.00.)
CyberPOP(SM) will provide fast Internet access at speeds of 28.8 kbps and above. GTE introduced its CyberPOP(SM) service to help Internet and Online Service Providers (ISPs and OSPs) cost effectively expand their high-speed, dial-up networks and grow their customer base. CyberPOP, a data aggregation service that provides central-office-based remote access for ISPs and OSPs, creates a "point of presence" for companies that operate in, or near, GTE's 28-state serving territory. "By creating the CyberPOP solution, GTE will enable Internet and Online Service Providers to offer cost-effective and timely access in many new markets," said Larry Sparrow, president-Carrier Markets for GTE Telephone Operations. "CyberPOP will enable companies to significantly reduce their capital expenditures, and gain a competitive advantage by speeding up the time it takes for them to expand their Internet network."
Within each local calling area, companies using GTE's CyberPOP service can deliver Internet access to consumers at speeds up to 28.8 kbps, and also has the capability to support the newer 56 kbps modems. To accommodate the demand for higher bandwidth, GTE can also provide Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), which allows rapid, high-quality transmission of voice, video and data over a single telephone line at speeds 10 times faster than a conventional modem. CyberPOP supports multiple standard Internet protocols including TCP/IP, IPX, PPP, Multilink PPP, SLIP, CSLIP, Telnet, Dynamic Address Per Call, Static Address Per Call, UDP, ARP and ICMP. CyberPOP supports several modem types including V.34, V.32 and V.32bis, and will also incorporate the emerging 56 kbps analog modems. GTE's service currently offers equipment from multiple platforms including Cisco Systems, Bay Networks, Ascend and US Robotics.
The most effective, creative and pioneering uses of the information highway.
Branded Software Online Major software reseller Egghead Inc. has made the move to selling brand-name programs online via Web download.
U.S. Interactive has partnered with Sky Alland Marketing to offer a service that allows customers to speak immediately with an online service representative, talk via Internet telephone, and request product information or a telephone call back through a company's Web site. WebAssist icons placed on a Web site link users with customer service staff of Sky Alland Marketing, Columbia, Md. The service costs $2,000 to $5,000 per month plus startup charges, said Daniel Endy, chief technical officer for U.S. Interactive, which has offices in New York and in Malvern, Pa.
Tracking Your Ads We've rounded up and reviewed five of the most efficient ways to count your click-throughs.
Talk is cheap ... but it sure drives traffic. Guerrilla marketer Tor Hyams on the delicate art of dropping one's URL
He created, hosts and maintains over 300 WWW pages and Web sites
the latest being the:
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