Following its acquisition of Folio Corp back in February (CI No 3,107), Open Market Inc has teamed up with Witney, Oxfordshire, UK-based Catalyst Electronic Publishing Ltd to take its commercial information services to the UK. Using software developed by Folio, users can buy information over the internet, such as magazines, books, legal documents and so on, purchasing just the areas they are interested in. Users can either buy an entire transaction system – TransAct – which costs around $170,000, or they can just buy the front end of the system, for around $10,000 and then pay an annual subscription fee to third party commerce service providers. Greg Pope, Open Market’s international vice president of sales, says the company already has a number of large service providers on its books, especially in the telecommunications sector, including AT&T Corp, MCI Communications Corp and British Telecommunications Plc. Catalyst believes the main markets that will use the service will be in the medical, legal, financial and tax market sectors.
