InformationWeek

Final Report From Internet World

CompuServe Introduces Graphical Net Access

Companies doing business on the Internet can look for another big influx of users from the consumer sector. CompuServe introduced free, full Internet access April 10, along with free Web browsing software for its 2.8 million members, effective immediately..

CompuServe members enrolled in the service's $9.95 per month standard pricing plan automatically will receive three free hours of Intenet access per month. Additional hours will be billed at $2.50 per hour. For high-volume users, CompuServe is introducing the Internet Club, with 20 monthly hours of Internet service at $15, and additional time billed at $1.95 per hour.

The company also introduced the CompuServe Net Launcher, which consists of Spry Mosaic and the CompuServe Internet dialer. The dialer works with any Internet browser that's compliant with Microsoft's standard for Internet connectivity through Windows, including other vendors' browsers, such as Mosaic implementations and Netscape.

CompuServe is the second major online service provider to offer graphical access to the Web. Prodigy introduced a graphical interface several months ago. However, CompuServe is the first to offer users a choice of browsers; Prodigy's relies on its own, proprietary browser.

CompuServe also plans to upgrade its dial-in network to handle Internet traffic, increasing the connection speed available to improve throughput for Internet applications that contain large image and sound files. CompuServe hopes to convert its 42,000 dial ports w orldwide to V.34-compliant 28.8 Kbps local-dial access. It will increase the number of ports to 85,000, and initiate rollout of ISDN services. Those plans will start at the beginning of CompuServe's fiscal year, May 1, and continue for 1 year.

CommerceNet Experiments With Web Site Certification

CommerceNet launched a pilot program April 10 that would allow companies doing business on the Internet to prove that their Net sites actually belong to them.

CommerceNet, based in Menlo Park, Calif., set up a Certification Authority pilot program, to give out electronic tags to members. The tags will function as the digital equivalent of ID cards, certifiying that a particular Web site belongs to the corporation that says it created the site. The technology also can be used by employees to certify that they are legitimate representatives of a company. The electronic tags will function as business cards, letterheads and notarizations, says Jay Tenenbaum, CEO of CommerceNet.

The consortium will run the program as a pilot, open only to its members. Eventually it hopes to see the technology used by financial services companies, such as Visa or Wells Fargo Bank. "We want to jump-start commerce," says Tenebaum. "[It will] get us started as a role model to show members how they can do it."

CommerceNet was founded a year ago, with a mission of accelerating business development on the Internet. It has more than a hundred member companies, including American Express, Apple, Bank of America, CompuServe, and others.

Yahoo Students to Go Full-Time

The students who run one of the most popular Web directories online said April 10 that they plan to take a leave of absence from their studies to run it full-time.

Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo--who call themselves "Chief Yahoos"--say they have obtained funding from venture capitalists Sequoia Capital, to maintain Yahoo . Yahoo fun ctions as sort of a Yellow Pages to the Web, cataloging more than 10,000 sites by content, business, college, musem, or library. It records an average 200,000 hits per day.

Sequoia Capital, based in Menlo Park, Calif., invests in medical and high-technology firms.

-- Mitch Wagner