HiFusion offers free ISP service and an education portal

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, April, 2000

Free, filtered Internet service is a defining feature of HiFusion (Alexandria, VA), but the start-up is more than an ISP. It is also a personalized portal to the online information of interest to students, educators and parents. More than anything, HiFusion is a corporate response to issues, opportunities and shortfalls of the E-rate program.

Ira Fishman, ceo, started the company while working with Winslow Partners, a VC firm, after leaving his leadership position at Schools and Libraries Corporation. Fishman has also served on the Federal Communications Commission as special counsel and director of the Task Force on Education as well as at the White House as deputy assistant to the President for legislative affairs

Fishman was looking for a big idea that would further the mission of the E-rate. Seeing home access as a key component to the educational value of the Internet and recognizing the risks of the digital divide, Fishman molded a business plan around a free ISP service. Its draw is to be not just free service, but compelling content. The combination of ISP users and other web users accessing the web page as a portal, according to the plan, can generate a substantial audience for advertising and e-commerce revenue.

The offering has been put in place rapidly by a team with extensive experience. In the past few months, Fishman has been joined by Mickey Revenaugh, vp, education; Joe Scherer, vp, education sales; John Bell, vp, user experience; and Dean Kephart, vp, marketing. Revenaugh helped launch the E-rate as vp for outreach and was editor in chief of Electronic Learning, Teaching and Computers, Instructor, MiddleYears, and America's Agenda magazines at Scholastic Inc. Scherer was formerly vp of Kaplan Learning Services and has also worked for IBM, Computer Curriculum Corp. and Control Data Corp. Bell was creative director of Discovery.com. Kephart is well known in the educational technology industry from work as senior vp at Connors Communications.

The Development Calendar

HiFusion launched in early February with offerings for grades 6-12. Users of the grade six through 12 portal will likely be able to toggle back and forth between English and Spanish by the time this issue is printed. Within the next few months, HiFusion will include six portals. A K-5 portal is expected by mid-April. The current grades six to 12 portal will split into two portals in time for the next school year: grades six through eight and grades nine through 12. The "Grown-up" portal will split into three portals for parents, teachers and school leaders. All will be bilingual.

Features of the site include individualized news, email, instant messaging, and chat, as well as access to learning tools, homework assistance, and fun stuff for creativity and play. Filtering tools, which can only be used by those accessing the service through the free ISP, can currently be turned on or off for individual children by parents. That service will soon include various filtering levels. HiFusion is partnered with X-Stop (Orange, CA, www.xstop.com) for the server-based filtering technology.

A partnership with Education Planet (www.educationplanet.com) provides a taxonomy of teacher reviewed web sites. To help manage traffic, HiFusion will co-host much of this data. The site will soon announce partnerships for an encyclopedia, dictionary and web-research tool. Revenaugh is actively seeking new content partnerships.

HiFusion is just now assembling their teams for advertising sales and e-commerce. Kephart expects to see some implementation of these features later this spring with a more full-featured offering this fall. Ads and offers can be highly targeted for those people using the ISP service. The CD-ROM that lets people start their free ISP service also has available real estate that is for sale to appropriate sponsors and advertisers.

HiFusion is marketing the consumer service through the schools, primarily by having schools distribute the CD-ROMs that get families up and running. Schools clearly have an interest in extending the Internet's reach to the home, and HiFusion provides numerous tools and templates to help a school promote the offering.

The service also includes school to home connection tools, such as tools for teachers to post homework assignments and communicate with parents. Kephart says that the company recognizes that this is a competitive area, and school/home communications are not central to their business. Such tools, however, are important to their educational goals. Even so, HiFusion is designed so that a teacher does not have to do anything for a child to use it effectively for help in school.

HiFusion will also be working through community centers, especially with programs to help get hardware into the home. The company hopes to be able to offer financing on a reasonably powerful, $600 PC.

HiFusion is buying bandwidth from two leading backbone service providers, Level 3 Communications, Inc. (Broomfield, CO, www.level3.com) and Cable and Wireless USA (Vienna, VA, www.cwusa.com). That provides dial-up service for about 85% of the population. Revenaugh says the remaining 15% are not ruled out; it will just take an extra effort on HiFusion's part and a little time on the user's side to find an alternative solution.