Big Blue announced the commercial availability of its custom news delivery service called InfoSage. The service delivers news twice a day to a customer's email address or personal Web page, pulling headlines from more than 2,200 publications for $24.95 per month. The service also includes an archive search and a stock tracker.
At the same time, IBM is getting involved in electronic commerce. The company has already signed up L.L. Bean as the first retailer to set up an electronic catalog on its Net.Commerce system to help businesses create secure sites on the Internet.
The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games has been ofering Olympic tickets over the Internet with Net.Commerce since March 10 and has sold 32,000 tickets so far, according to IBM.
Other IBM announcements included:
--the release of a beta version of the Internet Connection Phone
telephony software that allows Internet voice communications via
an existing Internet access connection.
--delivery of the Lotus Notes: Newsstand on
the Web.
--a demonstration of an early version of the Secure payment
system, which IBM has been developing with MasterCard and
Visa to implement the
Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol.
--the demonstration of Java versions of several IBM development tools, including VisualAge for Smalltalk
and C++.
