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More Than 100 Attendees Study Future of Ecommerce and Information Payments At
Three-Day Summit Beginning Wednesday in Boston
Event Kicks Off UMass Initiative; Sponsors Include IBM, Clickshare

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 15, 1999--
Researchers, publishers and Internet commerce companies will learn the latest
on how the information superhighway will be better paved for consumers during
a three-day conference kicking off on Wednesday in Boston.

The "Electronic Commerce: Foundations for the Future" summit is the kickoff
of a University of Massachusetts initiative to better connect its business
school and computer-science curriculums to the explosion in Internet
commerce.

At the same time, the more than 100 attendees from the United States and as
far away as France and Israel are expected to propose forming a new research
group. The Internet Information Payments Collaborative, or IIPC.NET would
come up with a standard for making it easy to buy and sell information on the
Internet -- including text, sound and pictures.

"I have been surprised to learn that nearly 40-percent of the attendees are
CEOs or CFOs of their companies," said Dr. Leslie D. Ball, associate dean,
information-technology initiatives at the UMass Isenberg School of Management
in Amherst. "The program covers business issues to technology, to education
and includes a major section on payments."

Among topics expected to be on the table are a just-announced initiative to
come up with a standard way for web surfers to send their billing and
credit-card information among different web sites. The so-called ECML
initiative is designed to eliminate consumers having to re-enter such
information at each new website they visit.

International Business Machines Corp., and Clickshare Service Corp., a
Williamstown, Mass.-based ecommerce startup, are among sponsors of the event.

The conference is taking place at the BankBoston Conference Center, 100
Federal Street, in downtown Boston, through Friday afternoon. UMass President
William Bulger keynotes the event with an address at 9 a.m. on Wednesday.
Other speakers and panelists are from Fleet Bank, IBM, Lycos Inc., AT&T and
the World Wide Web Consortium based at MIT.

Walk-in registration is available at $795 for the three-day event. For more
information or for press inquiries call the conference program office in
Amherst at 413/545-2484, or after Wednesday, at the Suissotel, One Avenue de
Lafayette, in Boston, at 617/451-2600, or send EMail to register@iipc.net.

KEYWORD: MASSACHUSETTS
BW0218 JUN 15,1999
8:01 PACIFIC
11:01 EASTERN

# posted by newshare @ 8:52 AM