Hitching a ride into cyberspace - online services; includes glossery and directory

Nation's Business, July, 1994 by Rosalind Resnick

Online services can link your company to an exciting world of marketing opportunities, financial data, and electronic chitchat.

Ted Kraus, 48, devoted his career to managing commercial real estate, but now, thanks to the high-tech magic of computers and moderns, he is on the cutting edge of electronic publishing.

Rupert Murdoch he's not. But Kraus, president of TKO Real Estate Advisory Group, in Mercerville, N.J., recently started an electronic listing service for real-estate professionals on the Internet, a fast-growing global computer network that has attracted 20 million users.

Kraus, who employs 22 people, was already publishing a national real-estate newsletter and directory, but the listing service on the Internet goes further. It allows real-estate professionals anywhere in the country to post offers to buy and sell commercial and residential properties. Close to 400 people have signed up for the listing service, Kraus says.

As Kraus points out, no one knows for sure how online services will evolve, but he is convinced they are tools worth mastering. "I'm not smart, but I can learn," he says.

Welcome to cyberspace, where small businesses can compete on an equal footing with corporate giants. Thanks to the growing popularity of computers and moderns, which allow the sending and receiving of information over telephone lines, millions of business people are tapping into marketing opportunities, financial data, and interactive services without leaving their chairs.

By dialing up mass-market online services such as Prodigy and CompuServe or business-oriented services such as Dialog, Data-Star, and Dow Jones

Rosalind Resnick is the author of Exploring the World of Online Services (Sybex, 1993), a beginner's guide for small businesses. She is also the author of the forthcoming Internet Business Guide: Riding the Information Superhighway to Profit, to be published by Prentice Hall this summer.

News/Retrieval, computer users can quickly and affordably access the latest market data, trademark filings, and stock quotes; shop for office equipment and supplies; get free technical support from leading hardware and software vendors; and even book a flight to Tokyo.

Like Kraus, other small businesses are discovering the Internet, a governmentspawned computer network that was once the exclusive domain of academics and government researchers. More recently, it has begun opening its doors to business users and has emerged as the prototype of the information superhighway.

For small-business users, the Internet's big draw is "free" electronic mail; once a commercial Internet-services provider connects you to the network for a basic fee--about $20 for small companies-there are no additional per-minute or per-message charges like those charged by CompuServe, MCI Mail, and other commercial networks. For the fiat fee, small businesses can tap into the Internet's global community of electronic-mail users to swap messages, make contacts, market products, search data bases, and engage in chat sessions. As a result, traffic on the Internet is growing at a rate of 15 percent a month; roughly half of the network's more than 20 million users worldwide are commercial accounts

"Small-business owners must dump the impression that the Internet is an academic service and that they're interlopers," says Michael Strangelove, editor and publisher of The Internet Business Journal, in Ottawa, Ontario. "To my mind, the Internet is the small-business user's most powerful secret weapon, but it won't be a secret for long."

For all its many marvels, however, the Internet is still not quite ready for broad marketing. Unlike commercial online services such as Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online, the Internet has no 800 number to call for a starter kit, no technical support staff to consult when problems or questions arise.

What's more, Internet computers "talk" to each other in UNIX, a computer operating system with which most computer users have only a glancing familiarity. Imagine New York City without street signs, and you begin to get an idea of what it's like to journey through the Internet if you don't know what you're doing. Nonetheless, for small-business owners, the online world can be a veritable gold mine.

Services other than the Internet are more user-friendly, which is part of the reason for their growth. Five years ago, fewer than 1 million Americans subscribed to commercial online services. Today, Prodigy, the IBM-Sears venture that is the nation's largest online service, has more than 2 million users. Together, the nation's five largest commercial online services--Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, America Online, and Delphi--have more than 4 million subscribers. Most of them are personal-computer users who log on to a network for everything from sending electronic mail to managing their investments and businesses.

By 1997, close to 10 million people nationwide will subscribe to commercial online services, according to forecasts by SIMBA Information/Communications Trends, a Wilton, Conn., market-research firm. And that's not counting the millions of people joining the Internet.