 September 2000
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More Web Users Looking For Health Info Online by Steve Gold Newsbytes. Research firm Harris Interactive later today will publish a report that shows that more people are turning to the Web for online health information. Online health information is nothing new, of course, as CompuServe pioneered mass market access with its Medline and Paperchase access services in the late 1980s. However, Harris Interactive's report shows how the Web has moved online health information access into the mainstream. 
In just 24 months, the report said, the number of Americans looking
for health information online has soared.
For its research, Harris took a poll of 1,001 adults between May 26 and June 10, revealing that around 56 percent of respondents were hooking up to the Internet on a regular basis. In addition, 86 percent of Internet users said they are using the Web to research health care or specific diseases - up from 71 percent in 1998. On top of this, 40 percent of those surveyed also said they researched health information on the Web on an ad-hoc basis, while 13 percent said they researched health issues on a regular basis for themselves and members of their immediate family. Harris Interactive's Web site is at http://www.harrisinteractive.com/ Internet Hears Women Roar By Steve Gold Newsbytes - A report due to be published later today has come up with the interesting conclusion that women now outnumber men on the Internet. The report, from Media Metrix and Jupiter Communications, two research companies currently merging with each other, said that the figures confirm that the Internet has come a long way from the days when it was a male-dominated service. The study concluded that not only do women outnumber men, but their numbers are actually growing faster. The F/M ratios on the Net are a tad "ageist," however, as the report found that women aged between 18 and 24 are actually in decline, confirming the nerd-like image of a male teenager/twenty-something sitting in front of his PC, while his female counterparts are out getting a life. Anne Rickert, co-author of the report, said that women in the college age group appear to have more offline interests, and more offline business to take care of. Rickert concluded that almost everyone has a life offline, but some age groups find their offline lives are better served by online resources. For the 18 to 24 age group, however, aside from academics and some shopping, the Web perhaps does not directly relate to their lives, she said. The figures, which relate to the first three months of the year in the US, show that females accounted for 50.4 percent of the total US Web audience, marking the first time that males have been outnumbered. The report said that if teenagers go online for social reasons, as females get older, they appear to make more practical use of their time online, logging on for information about health, child care, vacations and financial planning. This perhaps accounts for the fact that, while the total number of Web users grew by 22.4 percent during the past year, the number of female Web users grew by 34.9 percent. The good news for men reading this with hairs prickling the backs of their necks is that, although several female Web portals, such as Women.com and Oxygen.com have large numbers of viewers, it is the gender-neutral Internet portals that are the most popular. Still, the most surprising aspect of the study was that several women's portals - Women.com and IVillage - turned out to have males comprising nearly a third of their audience. Jupiter Communications is at http://www.jup.com/ GOP Convention Struggled For Online Audience By Brian Krebs Newsbytes - Despite an unprecedented level of online media coverage and a virtual cornucopia of hi-tech gadgetry to convince voters to tune in to this year's Republican National Convention, a new study found that relatively few voters bothered to participate. The study, released today by Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, attributed the low turnout in part to a saturated online media market and a host of technical difficulties with many of the new technologies used to cover the event. The report notes that political parties, interest groups, activists and the news media had lain more than 6,600 miles of fiber optic cable at the convention complex in Philadelphia, establishing an Internet "beachhead" built to accommodate up to 70,200 lines for data and voice streaming. Citing recent statistics from PC Data Online, however, the study pointed to a 14 percent drop in traffic for the top four online news sites during the week of the convention as an indicator that the convention failed to live up to the hype that preceded it. While the convention hosted a dizzying array of viewing and archiving technologies that viewers could access via the Web - including numerous Web cams and a behind-the-scenes look at television coverage of the event - many of those outlets were poorly organized and provided only sputtering content, the report observed. The report places much of the blame for the low turnout on the GOP itself, which it said largely opted not to take advantage of the convention's online coverage: Signs touting GOP sites such as http://www.rnc.org , http://www.georgebush.com , and http://www.gop.net were non-existent, and none of the major speakers issued invitations to visit those sites. Although the Bush campaign reportedly plans to use the Internet for it's get-out-the-vote drive in the fall and already has begun placing banner ads on various political Web sites, the report surmises that the GOP is still a bit gun-shy about counting on the Internet to win them the election. "It seems that the Bush campaign is more concerned with the e-mail side of the Internet than the interactivity of the World Wide Web," the report said. "It may be that the Bush campaign calculated that embracing the Internet carried too great a risk, since a political message placed on the Net can be forwarded, repackaged, and re-sequenced by countless others, including the press and Bush opponents." It remains to be seen whether the Democratic convention - also replete with techno-gadgets to woo the would-be voter - will suffer the same indifference from Web-savvy voters. Sheila Krumholz, research director for the Center for Responsive Politics, said that. while Democrats will probably spend roughly the same amount - if not more - than the GOP on making their convention accessible via the Internet, the star-studded cast of Hollywood stars slated to attend the event will likely draw a much larger audience. "I can't imagine people will tune in much more unless there's some conflict or interesting difference involved," Krumholz said. "But then again, when you look at the glitz and glamour of the personalities that are being included in the festivities in Los Angeles, it's likely that Hollywood is going to give a little more of a show by putting some of its panache to good use." The full report can be found online at http://www.vanishingvoter.org/ 16.2 Million Teleworkers Expected By 2005 By Sylvia Dennis Newsbytes - While just a few million teleworkers could be identified across Europe in 1994, the figure will top the 10 million mark and head on toward 16.2 million by the time 2005 rolls around. That's the analysis of research conducted in preparation for the Telework 2000 event scheduled for this September in London. The report, "Telework in Europe - Status Quo and Potential," from the Electronic Commerce and Telework Trends in Europe (ECaTT) research initiative, said that by 2005, over 10.8 percent of the European workforce will be involved in one way or another with teleworking. Commenting on the research, Peter Johnston, head of the Information Society directorate with the European Union (EU), said that teleworkers have become a dynamic segment of the European workforce. "With the dramatic increase in their numbers they create a new force for significant social and economic impact," he said, adding that the adoption of new ways of working will be key to the ability of European businesses to complete in the global information society. The research was conducted by an international team of consultants led by Empirica in Bonn, Germany, with the support of the EU, and results from 10 European countries. Johnston plans to publish the results of the research by ECaTT at the Seventh European teleworking conference in London on September 13/15. Other results of the survey showed that in general, employees are more enthusiastic about teleworking than the firms they work for - around 90 percent of Swedes, for example, said they are interested in working from home. Business managers, meanwhile, said that they were concerned about the data protection and security aspects of teleworking, along with issues such as productivity and quality of work, as well as management systems and supervision. Telework 2000's Web site is at http://www.telework2000.com/ Microsoft Plans Reorganization to Focus On the Net By Steve Gold Newsbytes - Microsoft [NASDAQ:MSFT] is working on a major shuffle of its operations to allow it to focus more on Internet strategies and business, news reports said. Today's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) notes that the shuffle will be the software giant's third in 18 months, but will create a new division to oversee the Microsoft.NET initiative, which was announced in June. The WSJ said that the restructuring was announced to Microsoft staffers in a company-wide e-mail on Aug. 9, in which Steve Ballmer, the firm's CEO, said that just as the Windows platform has powered the growth of the PC industry over the past 20 years, the firm is now well-positioned to create software and services that will power tomorrow's Internet and take advantage of significant opportunities in wireless, new devices, small business, games and TV. Although Microsoft UK & Europe is making a firm no comment on the WSJ article, sources said that the software giant's application service provider (ASP) project, which has been on extensive trial since the beginning of the year, has been a success. The ASP project, which revolves around offering Microsoft applications "for rent" across the Internet, running on remote servers, has been launched on both sides of the Atlantic by a number of ASPs. Originally announced in February under the Applications2GO banner (http://www.applications2go.com ), Microsoft has been working with Compaq and Esoft Global on the rentware initiative. Currently, Microsoft said, many organizations purchase a license for their software, which they then install on a group of machines within their offices. In the future, the software giant predicts, organizations will move to a software rental model, paying a set amount of money for rental and support of a package on a per-user, per-month basis. Under Applications2GO, rentware can be installed on either a LAN or WAN basis, embracing the Internet where possible, with organizations electing to run their applications on a remote server - hosted by a third-party company - using Internet slave terminals on user's desks. Microsoft has been experimenting with this concept for Internet access to Windows 2000 applications on its Web site, but the plan with Compaq and Esoft goes much further, moving all three partners firmly into the ASP marketplace. The consortium said that at the heart of the Applications2GO strategy is the ASP model, which the companies define as the concept of delivering application software over the Internet as a service rather than as a product. The companies said that for customers of business software, ASP will bring about two major changes: firstly, in the way applications are deployed and supported, and, secondly, in the way software is financed. Typically, for example, applications will be charged on a price per user per month basis - effectively a rental payment. The benefits to businesses include guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs), improved cash-flow through reduced capital outlay, reduced time-to-application benefits and application plus software upgrade flexibility. The Applications2GO companies said that as the ASP market evolves, RentWare will make it possible for large and small organizations alike to deploy low volumes of sophisticated applications that would previously have been unobtainable due to the high initial outlay and software license costs. Against this backdrop, the firms said, software developers will see an increase in the size of their potential customer base. Compaq's plan is to offer its hardware for the RentWare services to run on, while Microsoft is planning to diversify away from its traditional operating system and license-based applications software base over to the RentWare platform. Esoft Global, meanwhile, is billed as Europe's first Internet ASP and, as such, will act as the "glue" to hold the services together. Microsoft's Web site is at http://www.microsoft.com . AOL Latin America IPO Goes Live By Martin Stone Newsbytes - The initial public offering (IPO) of the America Online Inc. [NYSE:AOL] Latin American venture, postponed last Tuesday, is slated to go live on Nasdaq today at $8 a share, a price reportedly reflecting weak market conditions and a less than rosy outlook for AOL Latin America. The Associated Press noted that shares were originally scheduled to hit the market last week at $15 to $17, but price estimates were lowered to $8 to $10, causing the postponement. The sale of 25 million shares should raise seed capital for AOL Latin America, a partnership with Cisneros Group, a large media organization based in Venezuela. The AP noted that while the Latin American Web market is growing fast, AOL has entered late, and will focus on three countries: Mexico, where it launched in July; Argentina, where it is due to go up this summer; and Brazil, where it launched last year. The Brazilian operation is an alliance with Banco Itau, which markets a customized edition to the bank's 7 million-plus customers. The main competitors include StarMedia Network Inc., and Terra Networks SA, the Internet unit of Spanish telecom Telefonica. AOL Mexico is at http://www.aol.com.mx . Starmedia is at http://www.starmedia.com . Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com © Post-Newsweek Business Information, 2000. All rights reserved. iBiz
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