Infozech -- Software for Telecom Service Providers Fax: 91-11- 6411455, Tel: 91-11-6414784; 91-11-6414785 in US Contact: 408-490-2840, 2090 Hillsdale Circle, Boulder, CO-80303 Microsoft Certified Solution Provider Visit us at http://www.infozech.com **************************** Telcomine: A Telecom & Technology Newsletter http://www.infozech.com/telcomine.html *************************************************** Telcomine (http://www.infozech.com/telcomine.html), a monthly newsletter from Infozech. Telcomine brings you the latest trends and developments in frontline IT Technologies. To subscribe send a mail to nl@infozech.com ************************************************* *****TELCOMINE************ Wealth of Information about Telecommunications Volume 2,No 3, March 1999 IN THIS ISSUE 1. THE MAGIC INTERNET WORLD OF THE 21ST CENTURY In a special article to Telcomine, Carol Wadell who offers eShowcase Product Listing software, takes a peep into Internet's super fast magic world of the next century. 2. THE INTERNET - IS IT BALLOONING OR BURSTING? Is Internet still expanding like a balloon? Or is it a bubble waiting to burst any moment? While, on the one hand, from children to grown ups, the world seems to have gone Internet crazy, on the other, Wall Street is in jitters over a possible crash in shares of giant Internet companies. 3. GERMAN FIRM'S "FREE INTERNET ACCESS" A THREAT TO OTHERS America Online Europe, a joint venture between America Online, the No 1 online service, and Bertelsmann, the world's third-largest media company accuses Deutsche Telekom, the German Telecom major, of using its power to suppress competition in Europe's Internet market. 4. 13-YEAR OLD BILL GATES FAN AIMS FOR GUINNESS Bill Gates's India visit in 1997 inspires an 11 year old Indian boy to become within two years the world's youngest MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer). 5. TELECOM BAD-DEBT RISES TO $9 BILLION AND MORE In an era of intense competition, rising service revenues and burgeoning customer lists the $200 billion telecom industry is facing problems of severe bad debt. At $9 billion and rising, they are getting too big and messy to ignore. 6. FREE PRIVATE FAXES BY E-MAIL: ANYTIME, ANYWHERE Two new Internet-fax services are hoping to attract users with free or e-mail-routed delivery. eFax.com promises to route faxes to user's email account giving him the much deserved privacy. On the other hand Fax4free.com has launched a free faxing service to anywhere in the United States. 7. HOME INTERNET: WOMEN WOULD HAVE IT ALL IN THE KITCHEN Would the kitchen of the future be the hub of the home network filled with 'multi-media' appliances that can connect to the Internet? If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a woman's heart could surely be her kitchen. 8. YOUR SECRETS ARE SAFE WITH YOUR VOICE AS PASSWORD Do you have secrets on your hard disk, which you would like to save from prying eyes. Keeping a password is ineffective. Any hacker worth his salt can turn your network password into toast. Try SafetyLatch, an affordable biometrics security system that uses your voice as password to identify you. 9. ARTIFICIAL BRAIN TO PICK YOUR INVESTMENTS A software brain is about to be launched to scan the Internet and tell owners which shares to buy and sell. 10. EBILL'S NEW CONQUEST - A FORAY INTO CANADA Infozech's billing and customer care solution has been chosen to bill for the long distance services of M/S Sonic Networks, a firm showing a lot of promise in the recently opened up Canadian Telecom market. 11. THIRD PARTY VERIFIERS KEEP CARRIERS OUT OF HOT SEAT The regulatory fines for slamming - changing a person's telecommunications carrier without his consent - are growing and lawmakers have been pushing to make it a crime punishable by law. To keep out of the hot seat service providers are increasingly employing third party verification services to confirm selection of their services by new subscribers. 12. MAILBOX HOW TELCOMINE HELPS READERS A reader benefits after reading about "CallCompare' - a free online service which claims to cut monthly phone bills by as much as 35% - in Telcomine. ****************************************** If you have found Telcomine useful, please consider telling somebody else about it. Executive Editor: Seema Dhawan E-mail: Telcomine@infozech.com Internet: http://www.infozech.com/telcomine.html Fax: 408-490-2840; Voice Mail: 408-490-2842 Please visit us at http://www.infozech.com ********************************************* The Magic Internet World of the 21st Century ********************************************* In a special article to Telcomine, Carol Wadell who offers eShowcase Product Listing software, takes a peep into Internet's magic world of the next century. Here's how YOU can take advantage of powerful trends that will influence online business in the months ahead. It is a truism that Internet business reinvents itself every four months. Businesses have to constantly scout the horizon to stay up with changes and insure the progress of their firm. What fast moving trends will influence your online biz in the months ahead? Much faster modems and a changing Internet audience will be tops. The Net Will Become More Like TV. When @Home bought Excite.com recently for almost $7 billion I had to stop and think about our future. @Home's cable modems let Internet surfers download your web site 33 times faster than those with a fast 56K modem. That allows web sites to feature smooth flowing video, making a web page look more like a TV show. Excite immediately announced there will be a different version of their site for people on super-fast cable modems. The banner ads on this site will look more like TV ads. Millions More With New Expectations. Early in 1999 Nielsen, the famous TV ratings company, released a new survey showing almost half of Americans are surfing the Internet each week. Compare those huge numbers to the much more exclusive 17% that was on the Net little more than a year ago. The big new Internet audience has different expectations. They want speed and convenience. They won't wait for big graphics to slowly load. They see dead links and missing pages as a sign the business doesn't care about them. A 404 error is like going into a store where the clerk ignores you. This big new crowd of Internet users also demands a very clear ordering system. They want to know where their order is through every step of the ordering process. They also get frustrated and click away if your order process contains too many steps or pages. You may have to revise your site toward a more sophisticated system. Powerful web page and order system creation tools make this as easy as a few mouse clicks. The latest generation of software tools make it even easier to sell/show your products on the web. One example is eShowcase. Eshowcase allows anyone to quickly create a professional online "catalog" - complete with photos, and descriptions. The ability to create your own online catalog, in just minutes, opens up tremendous possibilities for businesses like auto dealerships (who sell up to 20% of their autos from the Internet), art galleries, antique stores, collectors, jewelers, pet stores, and any business that shows products with descriptions and photos. Carol Wadell can be contacted at Email: workshop@intrex.net http://www.WorkshopInc.com/eshowcase.htm ********************************************* The Internet: Is it Ballooning or Bursting? ********************************************* Is Internet still expanding like a balloon? Or is it a bubble waiting to burst any moment? While, on the one hand, from children to grown ups, the world seems to have gone Internet crazy, on the other, Wall Street is in jitters over a possible crash in shares of giant Internet companies. With each passing day the mystery grows. Having put unparalleled information at the disposal of the consumer, the Internet has been losing ground in the stock market. Powerful Internet brands like the Amazon.com, which in some investor's minds are next only to Microsoft and Intel, have started to slide. And where Amazon goes, other Internet companies might follow. In complete contrast, Internet's popularity grows and it has emerged as the No1 "addictive social danger". The most perturbed are women who are rushing to divorce courts against husbands spending upto 16 hours a day on the Internet. According to Mark Griffiths, one of Britain's leading researchers into Internet use, "A small but significant number of people do blame the Internet for the break-up of their marriage." The reason for this strange paradox of rising demand and falling value seems to be that like an advancing flood Internet is spreading out in all directions at once - much too diversified for any business house to keep track of its changing routes and patterns. ******************************************** German Firm's "Free Internet Access" a Threat to Others ******************************************** America Online Europe, a joint venture between America Online, the No 1 online service, and Bertelsmann, the world's third-largest media company has accused Deutsche Telekom, the German Telecom major, of using its power to suppress competition in Europe's Internet market. AOL is trying to get phone companies to lower call charges, which would lower the cost of Internet access in Europe and increase its usage. According to the company, Deutsche Telekom has been using revenue from its phone service to unfairly subsidize its own Internet access service, T-Online. AOL has 2.4 million users in Europe for its Internet service compared with T-Online's 3 million users in Germany. The complaint comes in the wake of competition from companies such as Germany.net that began offering free Internet access to compensate for cost of local phone calls. Analysts say AOL is trying to preempt similar free services by big phone companies. "There is a great incentive in most European markets for companies to provide free Internet services," said Benjamin Ensor, an analyst at Fletcher Research. "In Europe, those in the best position to do so are the incumbent telecoms". However, Deutsche Telekom said its Internet service is an add-on service to its existing phone service rather than a separate business. Chief Executive Ron Sommer, responding to reports of the inquiry, said Deutsche Telekom is a "hard but fair competitor." ******************************************** 13-Year-old Bill Gates Fan Aims for Guinness ******************************************** Bill Gates's India visit in 1997 inspired Vibhor Garg, then 11, to become within two years the world's youngest MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer). An eighth standard student in New Delhi, Vibhor Garg, got his MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) certificate in July last year when he successfully completed his "implementation and Supporting Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0" exam on June 27, 1998. He has capped this achievement now by completing the much tougher MCSD Course at the age of 13. Vibhor's proud parents, are already picturing their 13- year old son's face staring out of the Guinness Book of World Records. 'I am sure this has to be a record of sorts," said Mr Garg, Vibhor's father. "I am in the process of finding out", he added. ********************************************** Telecom Bad-Debt Rises to $9 Billion and More ********************************************** In an era of intense competition, rising service revenues and burgeoning customer bases the $200 billion telecom industry is facing problems of severe bad debt. At $9 billion and rising, they are getting too big and messy to ignore. Analysts and consultants are warning that competition to bring in new customers is going to push bad debt levels even higher. According to Elizabeth Titan, senior principal consultant at American Management Systems Inc., "In our best estimates about 70 percent of telecom carriers aren't effectively managing the risk of taking on new customers." In the past, customers didn't have service options, so their providers simply cut them off if they didn't pay their bills. Not anymore. "It's not difficult to find a carrier that will take on a new customer no matter what a credit check reveals about the probability that the customer will not pay his bill," Titan says. "Startup companies are concentrating on getting customers signed up and getting a bill mailed out. Established companies are losing customers left and right, so they're not as particular as they once were about collecting deposits or putting customers on some sort of a prepaid plan to limit exposure." Growing competition will not eliminate credit risk. However, leading carriers have branded together to make the TRMA (Telecommunications Risk Management Association) which will help telecom companies in effectively managing the risk of taking on new customers. Its members include Ameritech Corp., AT&T, Bell Atlantic Corp., BellSouth Corp., GTE Corp., MCI WorldCom Inc., Sprint Corp and US West Inc. *********************************************** Free Private Faxes By E-Mail: Anytime, Anywhere *********************************************** Would you like to wait anxiously for your personal faxes, next to your fax machine or rather have it privately in your email? If personal and protected fax messages are your choice then eFax - the world's first "FREE" Internet fax service which routes faxes directly to your email box is the service for you. Signing in at eFax ( www.efax.com) is a simple process and involves little more than providing your email address. Once signed in the company assigns each user a PIN and a phone number, which serves as his fax phone number and used for the incoming faxes. Conventional paper faxes are received at the eFax service center (senders don't do anything special here), and translated into the digital form, protected by a password and forwarded to the customers email address. To grab the users attention, free faxing, it seems has become quite the vogue. Another company, this time Fax4free.com is promising the free faxing facility, but this is limited to faxes anywhere in the United States. The Fax4free service uses its own telecommunications network, not the Internet to ensure security and performance and will soon be able to upload files for a fee. ******************************************** Home Internet: Women Would Have It All In The Kitchen ******************************************* Would the kitchen of the future be the hub of the home network filled with 'multi-media' appliances that can connect to the Internet? If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a woman's heart could surely be her kitchen. The idea of home networking - centrally controlling all household appliances - is far from new, but the advent of the Internet has given it a new twist. Companies as big as IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco, a networking giant, have already leapt on to the home networking bandwagon. And on January 18, Philips, Sony and Sun Microsystems have agreed to link their protocols enabling net-savvy appliances to communicate with each other -- and their human masters. Now, connecting your fridge or cooker to the Internet may not be a distant possibility but a reachable reality. Samsung has already created an Internet capable microwave oven that can retrieve recipes from the corporate website. Similarly futurologists at the British based NCR-knowledge lab - an international banking services and equipment supplier have unveiled a microwave cooker that surfs the Internet, pays bills, transfers money, orders weekly shopping, and can be used to watch television - while the dinner is being cooked - making it a 'must have' multimedia appliance for today's home. NCR wants to capitalize on the familiarity of the cooker. Says Ms.Virginia Cartwright, NCR's Head of Corporate Affairs for Europe, "Lots of people use the kitchen as a place to write shopping lists and sort out their finances. The microwave's door is a readymade screen and a device that is familiar to people. They are using a computer but they don't realize it." *********************************************** Your Secrets Are Safe With Your Voice Password *********************************************** Do you have secrets on your hard disk, which you would like to save from prying eyes. Keeping a password is ineffective. Any hacker worth his salt can turn your network password into toast. Try SafetyLatch, an affordable biometrics security system that uses your voice as password to identify you. When you install it, SafetyLatch asks you to repeat this message three times: "My voice is my password." It analyzes the sound and turns it into a unique digital voiceprint. To sign on, you speak the password. If SafetyLatch recognizes your voice, it lets you select any folder on your hard drive for encryption and then scrambles the files inside. You won't notice any difference when you're working because SafetyLatch unscrambles files on the fly. But once you've logged off, any hacker who tries to call up the encrypted documents will see nothing but garbage. Unlike fingerprint or facial systems, which require additional hardware, SafetyLatch requires only that you have a computer running Windows 95/98 with a sound card (the package includes a microphone). The program uses an encryption algorithm called Blowfish, which has 448-bit keys - in other words it's virtually uncrackable. All this security means you could be locked out too if your sound card dies, you forget your microphone or a drive failure corrupts SafetyLatch's voice print record. ****************************************** Artificial Brain to Pick Your Investments ****************************************** A software brain is about to be launched to scan the Internet and tell owners which shares to buy and sell. Intelligenesis, an American artificial- intelligence company, claims to have developed a system based on the human brain that can scan thousands of newswires and market reports to pick out companies that are likely to do well. The system called Webmind is based on the way the human brain operates. Says Liza Pazer, the President of Intelligenesis, "As our system scans newswires it looks for meanings in sentences and links similar data together in the same way the brain does. For instance, if you were looking for information on a particular company, the system would look not just at that company but also at companies in similar areas. It would then use all this data to predict how the company will perform." Initially, the system will be available only to Wall Street traders. Tests of a prototype have shown a success rate of 90 percent in predicting the Dow Jones index. Wall Street's best traders had a success rate of only 63 percent. ***************************************** ebill's New Conquest: A Foray into Canada ***************************************** Infozech's billing and customer care solution, eBill, has been chosen to bill for the long distance services of M/S Sonic Networks, a firm showing a lot of promise in the recently opened up Canadian Telecom market. "With this our foray into the recently deregulated telecom market of Canada starts," said Mr Ankur Lal, President of Infozech. "It is a pleasure to add long distance to the list of services catered to by eBill. Quite excited about opportunities in Canada, he added, "ebill offers huge opportunities for Canadian Telecom companies. We are currently talking to several telecom companies and hope to strike other deals soon". eBill will support the debit card functions of M/S Sonic Networks. It would allow their customers to pay them via credit cards. Customers can also know their current account information via an automated fax back system. eBill provides software solutions for telecom services like Internet Telephony, Internet fax services, toll-free numbers, calling cards, Internet services and callback. Details on eBill can be found at http://www.infozech.com/solution.html ***************************************** Third Party Verifiers Keep Carriers Out of Hot Seat **************************************** The regulatory fines for slamming - changing a person's telecommunications carrier without his consent - are growing and lawmakers have been pushing to make it a crime punishable by law. In April, the FCC fined Virginia-based Fletcher Companies, a group of long distance carriers a whooping, $5.6 million and revoked its operating license for its slamming practices. To keep out of the hot seat service providers are increasingly employing third party verification services to confirm selection of their services by new subscribers. A record two million third party verification (TPV) transactions were conducted by VoiceLog LLC - a leading provider of automated third party verification - since the company's founding and over 1 million in 1998 itself. With the recent adoption of new anti-slamming rules from the FCC, companies of the like of VoiceLog are seeing a rosy 1999. They are coming out with flexible verification processes for different kinds of telecom sales. VoiceLog recently announced the release of Voicelog.com, a simple, effective way to verify Internet-based orders of any kind. When a customer completes an order, either through the worldwide web, or email, the company receiving the order sends an email with the customer's telephone number to VoiceLog. VoiceLog then calls the customer and plays a verification script, asking for customer verification. After the customer verifies the order, VoiceLog sends a confirmation back to the company to process the order. The total transaction takes less than a minute. ******** Mailbox ******** 1.HOW TELCOMINE HELPS READERS I heard about this company, "CallCompare", from the Telcomine site and they were amazing. It took awhile but I got 5 pages of the most amazing long distance information ever. I was paying 23 cents to AT&T, and because of advice from CallCompare, I switched to a company called Qwest for 8.9 cents. They were as good as advertised, thank you... - Pete, USA Thank you Pete - Editor 2. I am interested in knowing if you buy freelance pieces. If so, could you please send me a copy of your guidelines and a sample copy.- Wendy Schatzman,USA Telcomine is distributed free. All contributions to it are voluntary. - Editor 3. I am grateful to you for having subscribed me to your list, which I find very useful. I am an attorney in New York City, interested in Indian telecom developments, especially the legal issues. Mr. Noronoha from Goa sent me your contact address and information. - Vikram Raghavan, USA 4. I find Telcomine pretty interesting. I especially like the ability to scan quickly and zero in on what I want to look at. Nice job. - Paul Shannon, USA ****************************************** If you have found Telcomine useful, please consider telling somebody else about it. Executive Editor: Seema Dhawan E-mail: Telcomine@infozech.com Internet: http://www.infozech.com/telcomine.html Fax: 408-490-2840; Voice Mail: 408-490-2842 Please visit us at http://www.infozech.com ------=_NextPart_000_0001_01BEA5FA.3DECF8E0--