A heady mix of US government sponsorship and corporate clout plans to stage a world’s fair in cyberspace next year. The Internet 1996 World Exposition will be designed to educate the unitiated into the delights of the Internet. The fair will be played out on computers systems in the US, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands and Thailand and will be backed by corporate sponsors including MCI Communications Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Quantum Corp. It will include a number of virtual pavilions. The Reinventing Government Pavilion will include a database of all US patents, trademarks and Securities & Exchange Commission filings while the Global Schoolhouse Pavilion will feature live video broadcasts from Washington’s Kennedy Center and cameos of swimming fish at the Tokyo Aquarium. Other electronic displays will address small business use of the Internet and a Town Hall feature that will broadcast monthly video sessions from the National Press Club in Washington. Another pavilion, ToasterNet, will broadcast the winners of technology-invention contests at trade shows sponsored by Japan’s Softbank Corp. Quantum is donating the $500,000 worth of disk storage for the event which it says will amount to more than 1Tb of storage space. The Internet Multicasting Service, a main organiser of the event, says it plans to establish a high speed T-3 telecommunications link up to all computer systems involved which will remain in place after the event as a public resource. SSDS Consulting Inc, based in Englewood, Colorado is donating a technical engineer to work on the project full time.
