Payment services for global online systems including Internet
| Date | 01 February 1995 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045352 |
| Published date | 01 February 1995 |
| Pages | 127-141 |
| Author | Bill Seebeck |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Conference Presentation
Payment services for
global online systems
including Internet*
Bill Seebeck
Grant/Seebeck International, 91 Wolfpit
Road,
Wilton, CT 06897-3412, USA
I am the Managing Director of Grant/Seebeck Interna-
tional, an online consulting company based in the United
States. I am pleased today to be the Chairperson of a ses-
sion on electronic payment
services.
For the last three days
you have had a wonderful time going about looking at the
stands and seeing what
is
happening in the online business
and in the Internet. You have seen a lot of great products,
but today we hope to answer a question. At the end of a
great meal and a great feast you are always presented with
a
bill,
and the question
is,
how am I going to pay for what I
have just seen? Our panel is going to try to answer that
question.
We have a distinguished panel. All of us have been
around the online business for a very long time. We have
been here since it was a little business in which we had to
convince people, publishers, information providers that
they could actually make money in the electronic informa-
tion business. A lot of people back in the late 70s and early
80s believed that the electronic information business was a
business in which they would not make money, and so
these people have been around since then. I am happy to
introduce to you our panel.
Hilary Thomas is the President of
ISED
Corporation. We
know her well as having been the President of Minitel USA;
she was responsible for a number of businesses in the early
days of the online business, primarily in the communications
and online area. To her right is Jim Kollegger, Chairman and
Chief Executive Officer of Genesys Partners which is the
leading venture capitalist business in the United States for the
online industry. Jim had two businesses — one was ElC/In-
telligence and the other
was
Folio. Both of these entities were
very successful enterprises and ventures and both ended up in
the
world of Reed Elsevier. Finally, David Lennon
is
the Sales
Director for GENIOS in Germany, a very successful eco-
nomic online service.
All of us have had to deal with the many issues that the
online people provide, and the changing environments. What
we are trying to do today, and all of
us
for some time, is to
focus on what we think is one of the key remaining blocking
areas to the success of the Internet and online, which is, how
do you pay for what we are trying to sell?
Effects of networking
Before we examine this critical issue, though, I want to go
back in history: I feel the history provides us with a perspec-
tive both to the present and for the future. Last week I was
having
a
conversation back
in
the States with my Italian baker.
He says a lot of things that I find very interesting and we were
talking about
technology.
He
was reflecting on having told his
children about what technology was like for
him
when he was
growing up in the 1950s. He told his children how he used to
watch radio, and the children laughed at him. They said,
'Poppa, how could you watch radio?' He said, I don't know.
We
just seemed to turn and stare at the light from the dial of
the radio and we watched it, as if it was a person.
Well, since the introduction of online services in the 1970s
we to have been staring at our monitors, very much like the
radio days of the
1950s.
Today, however, we are beginning to
see into our online
services,
going beyond text and into graph-
ics,
sound, video, and directly interacting with other people
who like ourselves are connected to the service. We are, as a
result, networking with one another.
Networking is something that we humans do naturally. We
are,
after all, social beings, bom to interact. It
is
why I believe
that the Internet has taken off so quickly, creating a life form
— I repeat that, a life form — of its own, because the most
common person can understand what it is about. It is about
human networking.
But the Internet and global online services have done more
than provide a place to buy a variety of goods and services.
Unknowingly, I believe, they have created a network where
people have created a new global society for the Internet, and
that structure has its own rules, its own understandings, its
own politics, its own communications and its own commerce.
It is a new society, and this new society has burst forth out of
necessity — not just because we are offering great products
and services but because we have collapsed the information
float. What do I mean by that?
Well, as an example, it used to be that if I sent you a letter,
it would take three to five days for you to receive it, which
meant that you had time before you had to act on that letter;
you set and ordered your life accordingly. You had plenty of
* Edited transcript of panel session at the
18th
International Online
Information
Meeting,
London, 8 December
1994.
Chairman: Bill
Seebeck,
Managing
Director,
Grant/Seebeck International.
The Electronic Library, Vol. 13, No. 2, April 1995 127
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