Consumer Requirements Drive Shift to Dis-aggregated Payment And 'Virtual Information Products', Says Clickshare Executive.

Business/Technology Editors

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 5, 2001

Selling Content Establishes a New Definition of Markets; Form of

Delivery Perceived as Less Important

Virtual information products, driven by consumer needs rather than traditional physical form, are making payment for Internet content inevitable, according to Nell Fields, president of Clickshare Service Corp. The new payment infrastructure is inevitable if the Internet is to thrive in its role as the new medium for education, entertainment, and information, Fields said in remarks prepared for the "Pay Per View" panel at the Internet Content West conference here.

"The day of Internet free-for-all has passed," said Fields. "The challenge now is to produce a fair payment model. While some publications and services are easily sold on the Internet, people who want to purchase just one song, read just one article, or view just one page of a detailed research report are often daunted by complex pricing structures or the absence of a good pay-per-view business model."

And, Fields adds, "They don't want everybody knowing what they're reading, seeing, or buying."

Clickshare provides a mechanism for privacy-protected purchasing of digital goods. Typical applications range from a la carte reading of newspaper articles to delivery of weather information, sports results, gaming, or other goods and services that can be delivered to any device, anywhere.

Fields says the challenge for publishers of all types is to stop identifying markets in terms of existing product lines. Instead, they should define markets in terms of customer needs.

"The untethered information consumer has a set of needs -- immediacy, customization, localization, compactness -- which content providers couldn't satisfy a few years ago, with any feasible technology," says Fields. "Now they can. This makes the concept of a fixed physical product -- books, newspapers, CD-ROMs, periodicals - too limiting. Today, it's about connecting customers to the information they need, when they need it and in the form they need it. When you make that connection a beautiful thing happens. It's called commerce."

As a result of decoupling the consumer's need from the physical product, new payment mechanisms are required, those that can handle the creation of "virtual products" having no tangible form or substance until the instant a consumer demands them. And the parts of the products may come from many different suppliers.

"Your Palm Pilot home page may have information resources gathered from multiple suppliers - and it's created in real time," says Fields. "Each needs to be paid their piece of the action. This creates the need for a wholesale-retail, aggregation approach to content sales."

Fields was part of a panel at Internet Content West, currently taking place (June 5-6) at the Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles. The conference brings together the online content industry's established leaders, brightest innovators and venture capitalists, including keynote speeches from the industry legends including Ted Leonsis, VC AOL Inc, Nick Butterworth, CEO, MTVi and Larry Page, Founder and CEO, Google.com.

About Clickshare

Clickshare Service Corporation, http://www.clickshare.com, provides an Internet commerce platform for privacy-protected purchasing of text, music, video, software, and other products and services. It allows a consumer to have one account at a most-trusted website and buy from other websites without having to pass around a credit-card number, register or give out personal information.

Clickshare licenses its technology free to content- and user-owning websites, much as credit cards work through banks and merchants, making money by taking a small cut of each sale that it brokers. It points consumers to "home bases" where they can establish their single Clickshare-enabled buying account. One such example is Clickshare's own "home base" service at http://home.clickshare.com/.