Electronic Commerce: Foundations for the Future- Track Descriptions

Track 1: Internet Payments
Chair: Bill Densmore, Clickshare Service Corp.
What are the needs?
An agenda-setting session especially for CEOs, senior-level strategists and line-authority decision-makers in the information-services, portal, ISP and online-services industries. As roles change, old business models and customer relationships for financing information are changing or dying. What infrastructure is needed to replace them?
Session 1.1: Financing Information
The Information Age is blurring the barriers among those who make information and those who help distribute it. Publishers now own cable systems; telephone companies are eyeing the publication of multimedia content and local advertising; hybrid enterprises spawned since 1995 in a pure digital environment now command the adulation of Wall Street and the imagination of consumers. Are these new-media hybrids going to be creators, publishers, distributors, audience-owners, or all in one? How can the need of the traditional publishing and telecommunications industries to grown and thrive be reconciled against the aggressive and innovative efforts of the Internet interlopers? And most importantly, with these changing roles, what happens to the traditional models for financing information creation, aggregation and delivery? What’s on your agenda? What should be? Can you shape the industry’s future? What needs to be in place to make it happen? This is an agenda-setting session for the rest of the IIPC conference track leading to Friday’s concluding "Next Steps" roundtable. Don’t miss either.
Roundtable discussion: Steve Crocker, co-founder, CyberCash Inc., and Steven G. Mott,principal of BetterByDesign.COM, moderators.
Session 1.2: Collaboration in the Digital Age
Digital information is portable and fungible. It crosses borders and marketing boundaries with equal aplomb. The functional barriers to entry of the past -- central presses, broadcast licenses, movie theater ownership and physical distribution networks – may be diminishing in value. What matters now is who owns the customer. And this brings traditionally collaborative industries into potential conflict with each other in a mortal test to see who can drive customer satisfaction and retention. Where do these industries want to go and what partners and infrastructures do they need to get there?
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION with Daniel Gervais, vice president, Copyright Clearance Center Inc., Richard Weisgrau, executive director, American Society of Media Photographers, Inc., CommerceNet Consortium,Patrick Grant, E-check project manager, Financial Services Technology Consortium and senior system consultant, BankBoston, and Thierry Michel, coordinator, micropayments working group of the World Wide Web Consortium.
Session 1.3: Defining User Needs: What's the Marketplace?
What is it going to take to create a marketplace for the sale of digital information? Will personalized advertising carry the load? What about subscriptions? Per-query payments? will advertisers need demographic information about users? How can it be delivered? Is all information going to end up free? How can the oflks who"own" the users make money on those user relationships? And most important, how will payments be handled?
PANEL discussion with William A. Opet, president,corporate network services, PSINet Inc.; Carter Glass, research manager Thomson [Corp.] Technology Labs; Charles Terry, president/CEO, Comtex Scientific Corp., Cory Eaves, director of e-commerce products, Lycos Inc., Rachel Hager, director, new media, Gruner & Jahr USA; and another panelist TBA.
Session 1.4: Defining User Needs: Vendor Solutions
While credit cards are carrying much of the early traffic in Net-enabled information payments, they are not a complete answer. Transaction costs make purchases of under about $1.00 un-economic and some consumers remain concerned about passing credit card information to multiple web sites. Many web startups are working on alternate solutions which rely on credit cards or other direct facilities for batch or off-line periodic payment, while using new technologies for the over-the-net poertion. A sample of such companies tell how their solutions - and others- respond to the marketplace needs.
PANEL with Q&A. Panelists include Daniel Chan, industry marketing manager, QPass Inc.; Gary Angel, VP-worldwide sales, TrivNet Inc., Amir Herzberg, manager, E-Business & Security Technologies, IBM; Mark Manasse, lead developer, Compaq Computer Corp. Millicent project; Brian Smiga, vp-marketing and business development, 1ClickCharge.COM (Cha Technologies Inc.)
Session 1.5: What's the Value of Digital Information?
Publishers, software companies and other multimedia and new-media content owners are testing new approaches to the pricing, bundling and sale of digital information -- and considering experiments with others. In this fast-paced and up-to-the-minute overview, participants in these new approaches described what works and what doesn’t -- and compare their experiences to traditional delivery channels.
Roundtable discussion with Chris Wheeler, ActivMedia, Peter Zollman, Interactive News Solutions, Art Hutchinson, senior consultant, Northeast Consulting Resources Inc., Ray Sczudlo, partner, Weil Gotschal & Manges, Washington, D.C.; Neil Skene, consultant, former senior VP/editor, Individual Inc. and president, Congressional Quarterly and one other panelist in entertainment, software, new media, multimedia, banking, telecommunications, ISPs, business/specialty publishing, book/journal publishing or newspaper/magazine publishing.
Session 1.6: Information Pricing: Bundling and by-the-byte - Are they Compatible?
A lively roundtable discussing/debate among academic and industry thinkers on the future of information pricing informed by both the actual results described in Session No. 1.3 and the assumptions which can be made from consumer behavior in physical-commerce settings.
DISCUSSION SETUP -- The industrial age and the rise of relatively cheap, efficient transportation permitted the gradual unbundling of physical goods and the increasing atomization of product categories to respond to a seeming insatiable consumer demand for choice in the marketplace. The onset of a ubiquitous "transportation" infrastructure -- the Internet - - seems destined to do the same for information. What is the future of "subscriptions" in such an environment? How will relationships among competing information owners and providers change? Despite all the talk about "micropayments," why have such schemes failed to ignite so far? Is the traditional publishing role imperiled or will publishing develop as a different sort of retail aggregation service focused primarily around saving the time of information consumers? Topics might include: Classical economic demand models in physical world pricing; bundling models and how they compare with the emerging digital information marketplace; modeling a digital information marketplace for the study of consumer behavior in a closed system.
FORMAT: Panel with Peter Cassidy, TriArche Research Group; Barry C. Field, economics professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Rajiv Dewan, professor, University of Rochester Simon School of Business Administration; and others.
What Tools are Available?
The competitive reality of the Internet imposes significant new challenges and opportunities on traditional content providers. Information must be updated more quickly and made available in a variety of formats and "layers" of complexity. Data compiled for one purpose must be readily convertible for archiving or for re-purposing. Next- generation publishing systems need to be able to input from standard PC-based protocols, output in HTML or its progeny (XML etc.) and still feed traditional pre-press and broadcast/entertainment systems. At the same time, users no longer arrive at the "doorstep" or receive physical products in the same old ways. How do you manage these new customer channels and relationships? The afternoon is devoted to a survey of emerging technologies to handle these questions.
Session 1.7: New Rules, New Tools: Managing Users
From managing user demographics and privacy to personalization to making sense of terabytes of "hit" data, the Internet has given information vendors -- and direct marketers -- a new set of opportunities and headac hes. A sampling of technology vendors provide product-neutral summaries of these and other issues in user management.
DISCUSSION SETUP: It's 11 o'clock: Do you know where your customer is? The Internet is the is the mother lode of data mines. Finding customers involves almost no incremental cost and personalizing the relationship with them is increasingly a technical, less a logistical, issue. But its easy for your competitor to recruit your customers, too. Now, privacy doesn't just benefit the consumer. Protecting your customer relationship from prying competitors -- or collaborators -- could mean the difference between survival and being "disintermediated" out of existence.
Panel including: Eric Josowitz, VP-product strategy, Vignette Corp.; Donald Eastlake III, senior researcher, IBM; Bill Densmore, president, Clickshare Service Corp.; and other panelists TBA.
Session 1.8: New Rules, New Tools: Managing Content
For traditional publishers, just preparing information for digital delivery has meant daunting restructuring of people and technology. But here comes the hard part: Developing ways to provide it across multiple channels, some owned, some not. But how can you control illegal re-use of information on the Internet -- the worlds most efficient "photocopier"? Do you need to? Does the internet give syndication a new lease on life? Panelists representing digital payment, copyright-management and copyright control efforts summarize the state of their efforts.
DISCUSSION SETUP: Many content owners are understandably paranoid about allowing releasing their valuable intellectual property onto the Internet with so much uncertainty about how it can -- or will -- be redistributed. Are the risks of pirate use any greater than those faced in traditional channels? Is there really any satisfactory way to "lock up the copy machines" which avoids curbing democracy's free-market for ideas? The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes its a U.S. felony to tamper with mechanisms used to protect copyright. What mechanisms are covered? A 1974 Supreme Court decision established that photocopying copyrighted material violated the law. What have been the costs and benefits of the publishing industry's collaborative solution, the Copyright Clearance Center Inc.? What options are there for "porting" that solution to the management of sale of multiple digital copies transferred across the Internet? Is the issue making legal copying easy, or making illegal copying hard, or both? Controlling content: Lock it up -- The first solution to Internet copyright control has been technological -- the o-called "secure container." IBM tried Cryptolopes. Current vendors face significant adoption hurdles and lingering challenges to the validity of the claim that it is possible to use technology to definitively inhibit the anti-social impulse to steal what you do not pay for. The "digital watermark" has been talked about for years, but how long before it is ready for prime time? Would tampering with such a watermark be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? If a standard for identifying the ownership and pricing of digital information objects were to emerge, who could enforce it?
Panel including Keith Loris, CEO, SoftLock.Com [SoftLock Services Inc.], Kelly P. Kroll, director of marketing, Reciprocal Inc. [f/k/a Rights Exchange Inc.]; Lloyd Brodsky, Thomson Technology Labs; Alan Ellman, president, ScreamingMedia Inc., and Lindsay Moir, president, TragoeS Inc. Brief presentations with moderator.
How Do We Get There?
Session 1.9: What have we learned? An interactive newsroom
Two journalists who have observed the two-day IIPC track will be asked to"interview" the audience and participants in an open discussion. They will objectively summarize what they have heard at the end of the session and post their written reports to the IIPC web site. Track participants can answer the writers’ questions, offer their own questions -- or their own summaries.
JOURNALIST FACILITATORS: Eric Brown, free-lance technical writer and former editor New Media Magazine; Mike Stroud, writer, Wired.COM, CBS MarketWatch, formerly with Bloomberg L.P., and Broadcasting & Cable
Session 1.10: What happens next? Forming an action agenda
Talk is cheap. Now comes the hard part. The convenors of the Internet Information Payments Collaborative invite track participants to observe -- and participate -- as they chart the next steps for the still-forming organization. Will the IIPC conduct or fund research? . . . consumer trialing? . . . .will it be a resource or technology clearinghouse? What will the structure be? The ownership? Membership? Financing?
FACLITIATORS: Dr. Leslie A. Ball, associate dean, information technology, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Stephen G. Mott, president BetterByDesign.COM
Vendor Networking Session
Vendor-attendees and participants in the IIPC track may schedule information networking meetings with individual potential partners, customers and collaborators during and after the plenary session in a room to be provided.
TRACK 2: Technology/Research
A set of interlocking technologies form much of the foundation of ecommerce. These technologies ensure valid and secure transactions, convert vast databases into business intelligence, and turn isolated customers and suppliers into interconnected user communities. Understanding and managing these technologies is central to exploiting ecommerce. Sessions in this track will outline central organizing principles, describe major technologies, highlight frequent implementation pitfalls, and identify unresolved technical challenges.
Chair: David Jensen, Computer Science Department, University of Massachusetts
Sessions 2.1 & 2.2: Software Quality, Reliability, and Security
Most businesses currently rely on complex software for applications such as accounting and inventory control. Ecommerce intensifies this reliance on software, placing software at all the critical connections of an enterprise — between the enterprise and its customers and suppliers, and among separate divisions of an enterprise. The full potential of ecommerce can only be exploited with software that is high-quality, reliable, and secure.
Verifying Software Quality
Lori Clarke, Professor of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts
E-Commerce Security: Weak Links, Best Defenses
Anup K. Ghosh, Reliable Software Technologies
Panel Discussion: Strategies for Software Quality in the Electronic Enterprise
Lori Clarke, Anup K. Ghosh
Sessions 2.3 & 2.4: Online Communities and Interactions
Many of the most successful electronic enterprises are exploiting the power of online communities. Companies such as Amazon.com and eBay are building customer loyalty and unique competitive advantage by structuring online interaction and leveraging the resulting knowledge. However, successful online communities are difficult to foster without careful attention to the needs, interests, and interaction patterns of customers.
Facilitating Online User Interaction Or Internet Commerce Futures, Camelot or Blade Runner
Gregg Vesonder, department head, Online Platforms Research and Advanced Technology, AT&T Research
Panel Discussion: The Future of Online Communities and Commerce
Gregg Vesonder; Lee Osterweil, co-director ICEE and professor of Computer Science, UMass Amherst; David Jensen
Sessions 2.5 & 2.6: Knowledge Discovery and Management
Technologies for networking and electronic record-keeping have deposited unprecedented amounts of information on executives' doorsteps. Integrating this information into business decisions requires executives to organize raw information, turn it into useful knowledge, and managing that knowledge once it is created.. Fortunately, powerful new tools are being developed for these applications, providing compelling competitive advantages for enterprises that know how to use them.
Data Mining for Business Intelligence
Chidinand Apte, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corporation.
Information Organization and Knowledge Management
James Allan, assistant professor of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts
Panel Discussion: Information and Knowledge in the Electronic Enterprise
James Allan, Chidinand Apte, David Jensen
TRACK 3: Business Issues
The economy is changing in ways that we never imagined as a result of eCommerce. This track will focus on those issues by exploring new business directions and the role of the media and venture capitalists in this change.
Chair: Mark Weinberger, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts
Session 3.1: Supply Chain: The New Frontier
Organizations that have adapted their supply chains to e-business are achieving enormous returns on investment. Why is an electronic supply chain different from a traditional supply chain? What types of ROIs are possible? What business model is appropriate?
Is Your Organization E-Smart? A business model for supply chain management on the web
Speaker: Al Bolet, senior principal, Kurt Salmon Associates.
Case Studies: An Apparel Company and a Consumer Electronics Company
John Dacey, partner, Whittman-Hart, Inc.
Session 3.2: Attacking and Keeping eCommerce Customers
The landscape is littered with Internet-based companies seeking their fortune. Yet, the true marketeer knows that customer loyalty is the only thing that matters. How do we get them? How do we keep them? Answers to these questions are just beginning to be developed.
An Investigation of Factors Influencing Online Store Loyalty
Vanitha Swaminathan, assistant professor, and Andy Rohm, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Topic to be announced
Jay Fiore, director, corporate and electronic marketing, Open Market, Inc.
Session 3.3: Future Directions: Our Crystal Ball
The economies of Massachusetts and other states are being changed by eBusiness. What changes are occurring? How will they impact your business? In this session new research into the Massachusetts economy will be discussed as well as an industry sage providing predictions as to the future of eBusiness for the country.
E-business Enabled Paradigm Shift
Nirmal Pal, director, special projects, consulting group, IBM Global Services
Session 3.4: Funding the Growth: A View from the Venture Capitalists
AOL, Amazon.com, eBay, how many others have venture capitalists funded? What are they funding now? What will they be funding tomorrow? These questions and others will be the focus of this panel discussion.
Panel Discussion: Matt Harris, managing director, The Berkshires Capital Investors, moderator; Jonathan Gorham, president, Gorham Associates, Angelo Santinelli, North Bridge Venture Partners
TRACK 4: Education: Building the eCommerce Curriculum
Never before has a technology been so far ahead of educational institutions. Most colleges and universities are just now understanding that they need to add courses and majors in this fast moving field. But they cannot go through an academic process that takes years to implement changes. It’s now Just-In-Time education.
Chair: Kathleen DeBevec, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts
Session 4.1: Two Universities, Two Approaches, Same Goal
This session will focus on what two universities are doing and how that compares to the rest of the academic world.
Putting eCommerce First: The New Focus for Accounting Information Systems and Marketing
Janis Gogan, assistant professor, Bentley College
Building an eCommerce Curriculum With A Little Help From Our Friends
Kaimei Zheng, director of information management, and Les Ball, co-director ICEE and associate dean for information technology, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts
Session 4.2: Delivering Education "Any Time, Any Place
The Internet provides opportunities for different educational delivery systems. Many of these systems are adaptable to universities' courses, short course, and life-long learning programs. In this sesion, the focus is on why and how organizations are moving to these new models of education.
Migration of Education from the Classroom to the Net: Some Practical Solutions
DeVilla Williams, regional manager, RealEducation, Inc.
Building Education Programs Using Internet Technology: A Case Study
Robert Eaton, director of business development, ACSIOM, Inc.
Session 4.3: Managing the Education Process
Internet-based education is exploding and with the explosion are significant issues of managing the process. In this session participants will see a framework for managing the entire process as well as a process for managing individual students as they proceed through exercises and tests.
Collaborative Tools for Faculty and Students
Paul Cole, president, Vista, Inc.
On-line Assessment of Internet Education
David Hart, executive director CCBITT, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Session 4.4: University Initiatives in eCommerce
Panel discussion to include William Scherlis, CMU; Anindya Datta, Georgia Institute of Technology; MIT; Lee Osterweil, UMass Amherst
Final Plenary Panel
This panel will summarize the key issues raised during the course of the Conference, and use them to project the expected course of development of Electronic Commerce over the near and intermediate term. The issues identified are expected to become core focal points for the UMass Interdisciplinary Center for Electronic Enterprise. Attendees are strongly urged to be active participants in this discussion.
Panelists include: Stuart Feldman, Blaise Heltai, Lee Osterweil, Les Ball