Subject: Trip to WAIS From: rexb@dowjones.com eDate: Tue, 04 Nov 93 14:33:56 PDT

Message-ID: <366@imagen.UUCP>

Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Interoffice Memo

To: Mike Rauch
From: Rex Ballard
Date: November 2, 1993
Subject: Trip Report to San Francisco

October 19:

Arrived at WAIS Inc., at about 9:40 and met John Duhring, who gave me a quick tour of the
facilities while we waited for the others to arrive.  Mike Bloom, Mike Compoly, Mark Feffer, and Greg
Gerdy arrived by 9:50 and we started the meeting at about 9:55.
Greg Gerdy reviewed the history of the relationship between Dow Jones and the principles of WAIS Inc.
including the DowQuest project.  He then described the planned relationship with WAIS Inc.
John Duhring reviewed the recent history of the Internet and the recent growth in the Internet.  The one
caveat was that his information was already out of date.  WAIS Inc. has been directly connected to the
Internet since December 1991.  Current figures given included:
Breakdown:
Commercial Users   51%    (currently estimated at 75%)
R&D		29%   ( number not decreased, but now only 15%)
Education	20%   ( now about 10%)

Population:
1,776,000 computer hosts (counts only hosts connected 24 hours per day, 7 days per
week), Now almost 3 million.  Over 60 million users have access to Internet in some
form (E-Mail, News, File Transfer) through direct connection (SLIP, PPP, Frame Relay,
or ATM)  or indirect connection (Compuserve, Delphi, PSI, Fidonet, Genie, America
On-Line...) with various levels of service.
Average 250 gigabytes per day in traffic.


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11/02/93
Page 2

Related Projects:
Network Navigator from O'Reilly signed 6000 subscribers for 16,000 pages on the first
day.  By October 1993, they were up to 45,000 pages per day.  Subscriptions start at
$5000/year for corporations and organizations.
John also showed us the computer room.  This included the Internet connection hub (about 8"x11"x3")
and the customer interface box (about the size of a modem).  WAIS also provides ethernet service to other
companies in their office building.  There were also several servers managed by WAIS as client servers.

Technologies:

We then began to distinguish the various types of connectivity that were available.  For example, many of
those who have access to the Internet only have access in the form of E-Mail to known recipients.  Others
have access to E-Mail, New, and File Transfer, but do not have access to interactive connections.  There
are those who have terminal access, but can only access the network in character (ASCII) mode.  Then
there are those directly connected to the Internet through dial-up or dedicated line service using Internet
communications protocols such as SLIP or PPP.  The quality and pricing of such Internet connectivity
varies from region to region.
We identified these directly connected customers as the "Low Hanging Fruit".  These customers are more
sophisticated to begin with and are in a position to make optimal use of the interactive WAIS clients and
servers.  Many of these clients are already using the "General Public License" version of WAIS.  The
Freeware version is slower and limited in its ability to serve users.  The commercial version adds security,
billing, auditing, and accounting capability.  The commercial version also provides better performance
and the ability to serve more users and larger databases.

Demonstrations:

John then gave demonstrations of WAIS, Gopher, and Worldwide Web.  The commercial client and
server offered some interesting features including multimedia retrieval.  The examples shown included
photographs of crystals from the Smithsonian Institute and spoken announcements from Digital Research.
It wasn't much of a leap to consider the possibilities of advertising such as a Diamond Ring from a jewelry
store, or a radio commercial.  We discussed the possibility of Dow Jones referring to targeted advertising.
This was possible.  Wais can deliver GIF, TIFF, and MIME (Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions), and
QuickTime formats as well as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files.

Lunch:

At lunch, we discussed the overall direction of the information industry and some of the trends among
Internet users.  We discussed some of the trends coming up in electronic publishing.

Global Village

We went to Apple to discuss the Global Village project.  This project is Apple's strategy for providing
high quality Macintosh oriented user interfaces coupled with wide-area network (Internet) capability.  The
primary issues revolved around customer service and support.  The different character of Macintosh users
compared to Dow Jones users was noteworthy.  The Macintosh users often required more support in terms
of basic functions.

Driving

While driving from WAIS to Apple and Apple to WAIS, I was able to work with Mike Compoly to
develop a simple non-technical explanation of Internet.  He had a fairly good understanding of why
Internet and TCP/IP markets were able to grow so rapidly.  He also had a better sense of what was needed
to support customers coming through the Internet.


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11/02/93
Page 3

Dinner

We went to dinner at fisherman's wharf.  Mike Bloom paid the check.  We talked about some of the
various ways that Dow Jones could take advantage of the Internet and some of the economics and logistics
of serving Internet customers.  We also discussed some of the new technologies that are coming as a result
of the high speed 1 megabit  and 24 megabit bandwidths.  There was also an electronic publishing
exposition going on in which WAIS was making a presentation.  Essentially the challenge is now making
the several hundred terabytes of information available to the millions of users (possibly 250 million by the
end of 1994 -- including Europe, India, and Asia) in a way that will not overwhelm them, but in a way
that gives them a few megabytes of information which can have the greatest impact on their business and
personal lives.  The simple examples of Jobs, Housing, Transportation, and "Personals" are examples of
what drives the growth of the Internet.

October 21

We began the meeting with a discussion of how to handle accounting and billing information.  John
focused primarily on a strategy based exclusively on a single user per Internet address.  This raised a
concern over multiple users using the same host to access the server.  The question of how to best track
the billing and accounting was left to WAIS to work out.  The questions of customer service, including
who would set up accounts, were also described.  John recommended an on-line or E-Mail "form", which
could be followed up with a confirmation phone call if necessary.
Mike Bloom had several questions with regard to the international characteristics.  One of the main
concerns was the "culture" of the Internet, both here in the U.S. and in Europe.  Europe has been building
commercial TCP/IP networks for several years now.  Encryption was most significant issuefor
international.  In the U.S., there was a concern about the hostility toward "Advertising".  The specific
concern is "Mass Mailings" to individual mail accounts based on capturing a "List".  John was quick to
distinguish the difference between this type of "Mail Barrage", and the type of user requested information
characterized by WAIS and the interactive "News" groups.  Internet etiquette, and technical contraints
require that users only receive information in response to a request.
We broke the discussion into two groups.  I reviewed the certification with their programmer, Harry
Morris.  One interesting twist is that they are working on a cooperation between Ensemble and WAIS.
Ensemble will forward the DowVision messages in TCP/IP packets to WAIS.  This is part of a larger
"quid pro quo" agreement between them.  This may mean that we will want to certify Ensemble as a
TCP/IP relay as well as certifying the Ensemble Database.  There may be several interdependency issues.
This is especially true if both client databases must acknowledge the packets before the DowVision
packets are acknowledged.

Summary
Action Items

1.  Contract - The contract needs to be signed.

2.  DowVision Certification 
We will need to receive more detail than usual on the Internet
Protocol being used between the "Modem" and the servers.  Since this server will
eventually be installed at Dow Jones, we want to be sure that we can duplicate the
protocol being used between Ensemble and WAIS.
WAIS was also less concerned about the "Real Time" characteristics of DowVision.
They may simply choose to capture 5 minutes worth of data and transfer these capture
files across the network.  WAIS and Ensemble may be good candidates for the new tool-
kit and broadcast integrator, even if in a relatively "Raw" form.


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11/02/93
Page 4


3.  Customer Service and Billing.
There needs to be some sort of system that identifies specific users.  This is similar to
the "Logit" code in current Dow Jones products.  In addition, we will probably want to
provide a "subscription kit" which can be distributed via Internet (A WAIS server can
also function as an File transfer server) the alternative may be a flat rate per server.  The
user may be willing to set up billing directly through his credit card if the number is
encrypted when it is sent to Dow Jones.

4.  User Interfaces.
Currently, the focus is on the real-time connected customer connected via a SLIP link or
dedicated Frame Relay link.  A "mail" or similar interface designed to minimize the
time spent on the dial-up link.  In the Eastern States business users are charged a
premium for using analog modem links for more than a certain length of time.  This is
an incentive to upgrade to digital service.  The main reason is that they can transmit
almost 6 times as much traffic, and they can use "idle time", time the user spends
reviewing information.  A single 56Kb circuit can actually service over 180 users if each
reads 1000 bytes and spends 30 seconds reviewing it.
Strategically, we may want to create a presence by supporting a "Mail" interface where
one connection provides the headlines from a search and the second downloads selected
articles.

5.  Latency.
Currently, the WAIS interface to graphics is somewhat slow, even at 56Kb.  Most of this
appears to be server latency.  It still requires 16 seconds to download a 100KByte
illustration (GIF file).  The current client just has the user wait.  The user needs to be
able to queue up multiple illustrations and read them as they come in so that he has the
sense of being "busy" rather than "waiting".

6.  Build demo software here.
WAIS offers their demonstration software over FTP.  We should get an MS-Windows
client and an X-11 Client as well as the local SunOS and HP servers.  The version
WAIS will provide can provide better indexing of Metadata, Category Codes, and
Company Codes.  Clients (with Dow Jones Logo) could provide a custom TextManager
type interface.

7.  Internet Connectivity
Real-time interactive Internet connectivity is critical.  This will make it possible to
communicate with both WAIS and Ensemble as well as several other Alliance
Developers.  We can test their servers and clients for "Look and Feel" issues and have
many of the customer service issues handled without having to make as many trips.
We need to have Mike Kardasz, Mike Bloom, and Mike Compoly and Rex Ballard in
close communication.  This will help everyone get a better sense of what the customer
will be encountering as they connect.  It will also help us to determine what support for
fire-walls and gateway management are necessary.  WAIS will also be able to help us
look at interactive fire-wall gateways.  We can also explore security options used by
other major corporations such as Kerberos (Used with IBM Mainframes), DES
(Military), or Clipper (the security chip "blessed" by U.S. Law Enforcement).
The key here is that we want to be at least a few steps ahead of customers making the
transition from E-Mail to full service Internet.  Dow Jones also has 65,000 Internet host
addresses (1 class B address) and connection to several X.25 networks.   Each of these
connections is worth a minimum of $100/month.