On the Internet, no one needs to know how small your business is
Andrew Singleton
Corporations both great and small have invaded the Internet in a virtual land rush. Fortunately, this new universe is big and accessible: Anybody can stake a claim. Retail space on New York's Fifth Avenue may have limited availability and sky-high prices, but any business can have a Fifth Avenue address on the Internet.
Space is not a problem. Even though the Internet's current 4 billion IP addresses, which identify a given computer, may one day get used up, a standards committee is currently working on an addressing method known as IPnext generation, which will add a few bytes to each address and satisfy any possible galactic demand.
While this committee busily clears space, an organic growth known
as the WWW (World Wide Web), or simply the Web, is obliterating distance. On the Web, no destination is more than a few mouse-clicks away.
The Web is an endless expanse of hypertext. Each hypertext document resides on a server and has links to other documents. These linked documents can be located on any server joined to the Internet, whether they're on the same server or on different servers in different countries.
Here's a typical scenario: A user reading a document from the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) server in Illinois selects a link that reaches across the Atlantic and grabs a document from the CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) server in Switzerland. Because the Internet was originally a government-subsidized research tool, the majority of the information and software available on it is free. CERN (the creator of the WWW), NCSA (the creator of the Mosaic browser), and many other individuals and organizations offer free Web software.
The player
s in Internet commerce are small companies. Prominent service providers, such as BBN Internet Services (Cambridge, MA) (i.e., Nearnet and Barrnet) and Alternet (Falls Church, VA), have revenues of $10 million to $20 million per year (about 1/5000 of AT&T's annual revenues). Retailing giant Home Shopping Network recently bought the Internet Shopping Network, the most prominent direct-marketing company on the Internet. The deal was front-page news in national publications such as the New York Times and USA Today. At the time, the Internet Shopping Network had just eight employees and one network server.
Businesses want to use the Web for a number of reasons. Because it was designed as a publishing medium, it holds a particular interest for publishers. On-line distribution services, such as CompuServe, Lexis/Nexis, and Reuters, can take more than half of the revenues from each sale. With Internet distribution on the Web, a small publisher can cut out the middleman and capture a much greater revenue share,
as well as maintain a unique look and feel. Furthermore, Web distribution is faster than producing and distributing a book, magazine, newsletter, or CD-ROM. Timeliness is especially important for newsletters and financial analysis.
The multimedia capabilities of the Web, which enable the delivery of pictures and sound as well as text, make it a great venue for distributing marketing literature. Many corporations provide what is known as a home page, which has the company's logo and motto and a menu of choices for background information, product information, and news. Background information often includes pictures and resumes of the company's principal officers. A news section might include a list, in reverse chronological order, of product announcements. Product information can be expansive, including such items as a full catalog, service examples and endorsements, and technical specifications.
In addition to catalogs, order forms can be distributed on-line as well. Direct marketers on the Inte
rnet allow customers to submit an order by simply pushing a button and filling out a form. A password authorizes a customer to run up a tab, and encrypted transactions allow customers to submit a credit card number or even pay with "digital cash" (which I'll describe in detail later). This type of shopping is gratifying for the consumer and provides an extremely low overhead for the vendor.
The Internet also makes after-sales support more efficient. Vendors can distribute product documentation on the Web and provide support by E-mail. To help get sales transactions started, prospective customers can often send E-mail to info@the target vendor.
Building the Virtual Storefront
The following steps describe how you can set up a home page on the Web to display your company's marketing material, offer goods and services for sale, and collect information or orders from clients.
Step 1: Install a Web browser
. To do your initial research, you'll need one ess
ential tool: a Web browser. These browsers are often based on the Mosaic GUI front end (
see the screens
). Refer to one of the many available introductory books about the Internet and find a table that lists Internet servicve providers. Select a provider that offers 14.4-Kbps or 28.8-Kbps dial-up SLIP or PPP service.
A Web browser gives you access to the sources listed in this article by their URLs (uniform resource locators). The URL http://www.store.com/catalog.html, for example, has three parts: a server protocol, a host name, and a source name. When you type this URL, it seeks out an http server on the computer www.store.com and asks for the file catalog.html.
Step 2: Get a good name
. Every company on the Internet has a name. In the name money.com, for instance, money is reserved by a company as a domain name; .com indicates that it is a commercial organization. Individual computers at an organization use prefixes; for example, one computer at this compa
ny might have the name vault.money.com.
It's wise to reserve your name promptly. The U.S. government pays InterNIC to register these names on a first-come, first-served basis. Your Internet service provider can check to see whether your desired name has already been taken and submit an on-line name request for you. For more information on reserving names, see http://www.internic.net.
Step 3: Select a service provider
. You must find an Internet service provider to connect your server with the world. Since this vendor will be a combination of landlord and essential utility, it's important for you to be comfortable with your choice. A provider should be able to give you satisfactory technical support, especially in the early stages.
Service providers can be big or small. Big service providers have a regional or nationwide presence and lease their own networks to carry Internet traffic from your local POP (point of presence) to the interchanges. These providers maintain space
-age mission-control consoles, called Network Operation Centers, and they can track down the cause of any errors that occur in network transmission. Small service providers rely on Sprint to carry their traffic across the country and typically have a single POP maintained by a couple of hackers. They can't track down errors as well as a Network Operation Center can, but they cost less and can give you personal attention (see "Making the Internet Connection").
Step 4: Consider connectivity alternatives
. To keep your server connected and open for business at all times, you need to use a leased line, a co-location, or host services. As recently as last year, the leased-line method was the only way to place a server on the Internet. You had to find an Internet service provider and pay a substantial lump sum to install a network port. Then you or your provider arranged with the local phone monopoly to provide a leased line from the provider to your office, paying another installation fee in
the process. Then you bought a router and plugged your server in. After a cost of approximately $15,000 and three months' worth of work, you were finally on-line (see "Connectivity Costs").
Once installed, a leased line is reliable and fast and gives your workstations seamless access to other network services. It remains the only practical way of providing high-volume connectivity for an office network.
With leased lines, you pay a fixed fee according to the size of your pipe. Leased lines come in several speeds, from 56 Kbps up through T1, or 1544 Kbps. The phone company uses these denominations for carrying digitized voice conversations, where 56 Kbps carries a single conversation and T1 carries 24 conversations.
The least expensive and easiest alternative is a 56-Kbps line. Although 56 Kbps does not seem like much bandwidth--an ordinary modem can carry almost the same amount of data at 28.8 Kbps compressed--it is appropriate for a small Web server. If you become a heavy Internet user,
however, you should proceed directly to T1.
Several trends have recently evolved to make leased-line service more palatable for small businesses. Competition among providers has reduced the installation fee to as little as $400. The local phone companies face competition as well, from local fiber networks installed by Teleport Communications Group (Staten Island, NY) and MFS Telecomm (Oakbrook Terrace, IL); this may give you a choice of carriers.
By popular demand, many Internet service providers now offer much less expensive ways, such as co-location and host services, to open up shop on the Internet. Co-location involves placing a server at the service provider's site. Host services include FTP, Gopher, and Web servers maintained by the Internet provider. Both of these options eliminate the expense of communications equipment and a leased phone line.
The big service providers would rather sell you a leased line and all the extras and collect the installation charge, but smaller provide
rs can give you co-location services for as lit-tle as $150 a month plus a per-byte usage fee. Host services can cost even less.
With these services, the server is located in someone else's office, so you just provide the published content of your company's information from your office or home. To update the remote server, you dial up the Internet with your modem or ISDN account and then use FTP to send new or improved hypertext files. Your provider should be able to route any E-mail responses to your dial-up account.
Step 5: Set up a Web server
. Once you are connected to the Internet, you need to run a piece of software known as an HTTP server (also called a Web server). Many Web servers with similar capabilities are listed for downloading at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW.Daemon/Overview.html. (Note that many URLs are case-sensitive.) The two most popular ones are written in C for Unix computers--one from CERN and another from NCSA.
Traditionally, Web servers run on
Unix workstations, and you can find binary versions for machines from DEC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun. A budget-minded small business should consider Linux, a free Unix clone that runs on PCs.
Unix machines come with Internet daemons, such as FTP and Telnet, already installed. They have powerful script languages for handling forms and database requests, and they can handle numerous users. The main disadvantage of these daemons, however, is that you must have a good knowledge of Unix to find and edit their many configuration files.
If you find the prospect of becoming a system administrator for a Unix machine daunting, the EMWAC (European Microsoft Windows NTAcademic Consortium) HTTP Server for Windows NT offers an alternative. This server installs itself as a "service process," the NT jargon for a daemon, the first time you run it. You then configure it with a single dialog box in the NT control panel. It comes with readable documentation and a WAIS (Wide Area Information Se
rvice) text-search engine.
The EMWAC HTTP server has drawbacks; it's slower than a Unix server, and it suffers from the lack of a good script language in NT. You must program the scripts in C++, using the examples provided. But it's capable of handling multiple users, and it's easy to install and use. You can download it from EMWAC at ftp://emwac.ed.ac.uk/pub/https/hsi386.zip.
A new breed of commercial servers is designed to control access and extract payment from customers. Commercial servers cost from $1000 to $25,000, but they feature easy installation, technical support, authentication, and encryption. Authentication is used to verify the identity of a customer for confidentiality or billing purposes. Encryption is used to guarantee the security of information, such as bank account and credit card numbers, and to provide digital signatures on agreements, such as order forms. As of this writing, Netscape Communications (Mountain View, CA, http://home.mcom.com) and Enterprise Integration Techn
ologies (MenloPark, CA, http://www.eit.com) have announced their intention to offer these features. However, the authentication and encryption features work only with matching versions of Mosaic.
Step 6: Design your Web service
. After you get your server up and running, the task of designing your literature begins. Web documents are formatted using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Fortunately, HTML consists of a small number of keywords and is much simpler to use than it might sound. You can get a tutorial from http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/HTMLPrimer.html.
You'll want to use graphics in your documents to appear polished and larger than life. Get a good computer drawing package and a video frame grabber for taking pictures. If you decide to work with an independent designer, make sure that he or she can produce digital pictures.
An HTTP server does just two things: Send files out to a client and call scripts and programs on your server computer. For instance
, after a client fills out a form, a script can take the information and store it in a file or a database. The script might also generate a fax or E-mail response.
Sophisticated publishers use scripts to generate documents on-the-fly from databases. My company has used this technique to publish large financial databases with millions of potential pages. Other firms use database scripts to look up and display catalog information. You can find some sample database publishing applications and tools at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb/demo.html.
Step 7: Close the loop with electronic commerce
. Big institutions are betting that electronic commerce will soon energize the Internet. Electronic commerce includes pay-per-view publishing; industrial EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for ordering and billing; home banking; trading and betting; and on-line shopping. You need no real estate and only minimal amounts of labor to participate in electronic commerce; it thus has the potential to b
enefit small businesses by lowering fixed costs.
Several payment mechanisms are competing to finance on-line shopping and pay-per-view publishing on the Internet. In the simplest version, a customer fills in a credit card number on an order form to complete a non-face-to-face transaction, which is similar to placing an order over the telephone. Encrypted Mosaic browsers and servers are designed to support such transactions by making it safer to send credit card numbers over public networks.
A more sophisticated mechanism uses a payment server maintained by a bank where the customer has an account. The customer uses encryption software, along with a public-key certificate, to digitally sign a payment authorization. The vendor receiving this authorization then redeems it for money with the payment server. This system is more secure than others because vendors don't obtain customers' credit card numbers. It can also support the smaller, more numerous transactions that would be required for pay-per-
view.
A more radical scheme is the aforementioned concept of digital cash, which is currently being offered by DigiCash (Palo Alto, CA, and Amsterdam, http://www.digicash.nl). Digital cash consists of anonymous electronic tokens that can be exchanged via encryption software and redeemed for real cash at participating banks. In practice, digital cash is similar to the payment-server mechanism, since you need to redeem each token at a payment server to check its continued validity.
Step 8: Promote your site
. Just having a server isn't enough; you want people to notice it. One way to invite attention to your server is to put some useful, free information on it and then announce it in a few selected Usenet newsgroups that are relevant to your business.
Post an announcement to the NCSA what's new page, whats-new@ncsa.uiuc.edu. Get your suppliers and customers to link your home page to theirs. Be sure to put your E-mail address and Web URL on all your business cards and literat
ure. Then stake your claim.
CONNECTIVITY COSTS
Unix workstation server $5000-$15,000
NT/Unix/Linux PC server $2500
Router $1000
CSU/DSU $1000-$2000
For a 56-Kbps telephone line:
CSU/DSU (interface hardware
for a digital phone line) $400
Leased-telephone-line installation $50-$400
Internet-provider installation Up to $4000
Leased-line charges (per month) $100-$300
Internet-provider charges (per month) $150-$600
For a T1 telephone line:
CSU/DSU $1500
Leased-telephone-line installation $400-$1700
Internet-provider installation Up to $5000
Leased-line charges (per month) $400-$1000
Internet-provider charges (per month) $
1000-$4000
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AIR Mosaic, from Spry
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GWHIS,from Quadralay.
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Andrew Singleton (Dublin, NH) is president of Money.Com, a provider of payment services and professional financial information services on the Internet. You can contact him on the Internet at
asingleton@money.com
or on BIX c/o "editors."
The Virtual Storefront
