[11555] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
MOSAIC and Internet Marketing/Advertising
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Micheal Strangelove)
Thu Apr 7 16:43:38 1994
From: mstrange@fonorola.net (Micheal Strangelove)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: sackman@plains.nodak.edu
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 94 14:09:17 EDT
MOSAIC and Internet Marketing/Advertising:
A special report
THE INTERNET BUSINESS JOURNAL issue 1.9
We have printed a few thousand extra copies of the
March issue of THE INTERNET BUSINESS JOURNAL, which is
a special report on the use of MOSAIC as a marketing
tool.
For your free sample copy, contact
MSTRANGE@Fonorola.net and include your postal address,
company name, and title.
This special report looks at Mosaic resources and
FAQ's, the issue of credit cards by e-mail, and
explores Mosaic store fronts, including the ELECTRIC
PRESS, GRANT's FLORIST and GREENHOUSE, DIGITAL Corp.,
APPLE COMPUTER Inc., COSTA TRAVEL, LENS EXPRESS,
OSLONETT, GLOBAL REAL ESTATE, and other sites of
interest to the virtual consumer.
For those holding Internet business conferences and
seminars, we will provide any number of free sample
copies.
Extract follow:
The Superhighway is Here
It should come as little surprise that within a matter
of months after the Internet established itself within
the landscape of popular culture and, furthermore,
embedded itself within the political agenda of a
number of countries, that now we stand witness to the
birth of the global, hypermedia, hypertextual
Internet. When I wrote the first edition of the
Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters three
years ago (1991, Association of Research Libraries),
speculation on the possibilities of such a future
Internet sounded to many like science fiction.
Mosaic confirms the assertion that the Information
Superhighway is in many ways already here, although
still largely untraveled by entrepreneurs and the
corporate world. Indeed, there are significant
obstacles yet to be overcome by those who would build
the Information Superhighway. Messy political,
legislative, and technical obstacles are destined to
ensure that those awaiting the great interactive hope
of a new Wired Order will very likely continue to wait
till the end of this millennium, along with other
eschatological segments of society. In the meantime, a
fast maturing multimedia Internet has not only marked
the beginning of global, interactive entertainment,
commerce, and communication, it may also prove to be
the path most trodden by the common man, now and in
the next millennium. Certainly, the promised
Superhighway will be a road mainly traveled by a much
smaller, more exclusive community of consumers.
Consider the following: for all intents and purposes,
the commercial Internet is only one year old. Last
year, in 1993, the business world was informed of this
new wonder-child. And here we are still early in 1994
and we see the Internet growing into a multimedia,
interactive, global shopping mall. Through the
Internet, an ever increasing percentage of 20 million
consumers can see products in full colour, listen to
sound samples, read hypermedia magazines, watch video
clips, order a growing variety of items, including;
flowers, watches, books, magazine subscriptions,
medical advice, computers, vacations, 50,000 dollar or
5 million dollar homes, purchase consumer items with
their credit cards, get support from online companies,
and even play interactive, mutliplayer games. All
this, and our little commercial Internet is only one
year old. Given that so much is possible now, one can
only wonder what the Internet will enable marketers to
do in five or ten years.
Entrepreneurs are daily breaking new ground and the
slow moving corporate world is finally waking up to
the obvious potential inherent in Mosaic and a
hypermedia Internet (sales managers at Microsoft
Canada were almost giddy after I demonstrated to them
what Mosaic represented as a marketing tool). The most
impressive and comprehensive use of the Internet as a
marketing tool is presently seen in Digital
Corporation's Mosaic pages. Digital has managed to
capture all aspects of the combined potential inherent
in Mosaic and the Internet: complete product, service,
and performance information, online support, software
archives, and online ordering. Digital has even
managed to use the Internet as a medium for test
driving products. If there was a reward to offer for
innovative and comprehensive use of the Internet as a
business tool both the Editor and the Publisher of The
Internet Business Journal would vote Digital the
winner.
As this issue was being prepared, the Internet
community alerted us to yet one more innovative use of
Mosaic. A new multimedia magazine called Internaut
began distribution over the Internet as a FTP
accessible binary program. Internet users can retrieve
this free magazine and view it through a Mosaic
browser (even if they do not have an Internet account
that supports Mosaic). Internaut is the first magazine
of its kind, and features a number of notable articles
in its premiere issue, including: "How the Internet
Came to Be," "An Introduction to Cable Internet," and
"CU-SeeMe: Video Conferencing over the Internet". To
retrieve the first issue of Internaut, FTP to
ftp.netcom.com and get the file internt1.zip from the
/pub/mailcom/internaut/ directory.
Mosaic-style interfaces are turning the Internet into
a catalyst of innovation and a field of opportunity
that history seldom holds forth. The commercial
potential afforded by Internet technology is proving
to be limited only by one's vision.
Michael Strangelove
Publisher, The Internet Business Journal
Author, How to Advertise on the Internet
Mstrange@fonorola.Net
Copyright (C) 1994, SIE Inc., all rights reserved.
