What do you get if you cross the Internet with a traditional on-line service? Answer – UKOnline, scheduled to launch this summer. Over the last year or two the Internet community and the traditional on-line services providers have been eyeing each other nervously. Each would really rather that the other didn’t exist, but despite differences in ethos, and billing schemes, it has always been clear that their worlds would collide.
Net-heads
The start-up company UKOnline Ltd is the first post-collision on-line service. The content of the service looks similar to what we have seen before, albeit that UKOnline is specifically aimed at the family market and specifically not at Net-heads or computer-philes. The company is more likely to advertise in motorcycle enthusiast and women’s magazines than the personal computer titles as it aims to be an information service filled with general news and entertainment information, articles on home, garden, hobbies and education, arranged into electronic magazines. It is even employing specialist journalists and editors to run these. Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA’s Telemedia has spent an undisclosed sum on 51% of the service’s shares. Marco de Benedetti, and Elserino Piol, Telemedia’s managing director and chairman respectively, join UKOnline’s board. Other members include Dr Hermann Hauser, with 15% and Tim King, UKOnline’s managing director with 10%. The rest of the shares are split between employees. Discussion and chat groups, dubbed clubs, will run alongside the magazines; these will be similar to Compuserve’s CIX’s conferences or Usenet Newsgroups. In addition, the service will offer generalised Internet access, coupled with parental safeguards. So the more salacious Usenet Newsgroups will not be carried, and parents will be able to disable generalised Web access from their children’s sub- accounts. But where Compuserve, America Online Inc, or Apple Computer Inc’s eWorld are built upon proprietary back-end engines, and are accessed through bespoke front-end clients, UKOnline has chosen to modify existing Internet services. The clubs, for example, are simply local Usenet Newsgroups, and magazines, newsfeeds, presented in the form of Web pages, fed by a modified CERN Centre of European Centre for Research into Nucleonics HTTPD Web server. To try to make the service friendly for novice users, the company has commissioned a modified Web browser from US company Teknema Inc. Rather like Netscape, this browser, called Tiber, is designed as a one-stop tool for accessing UKOnline’s services, so it is used to read and comment in the clubs, for sending mail or browsing Web-pages elsewhere on the Net.
By Chris Rose
In fact, it looks much like any other Web browser, apart from its use of a white background, and has a permanent image cache, used to hold UKOnline’s most-used icons. Unfortunately, Tiber does not support Netscape extensions to HyperText Markup Language, instead opting for its own proprietary flags and tags, which are used by UKOnline to give more control over the visual interface. The curious corollary of building the system this way however, is that power users do not have to use Tiber if they don’t want to; it’s quite possible to use UKOnline via your favourite Newsreader, mail package and Web browser. But its core target audience will look on Tiber as the face of UKOnline. It is not just the technology that has been borrowed from the Internet, the billing strategy has too. Here, for the first time, is an on-line service that does not have any connect charges. Buy a family account and you get four separate user-IDs – there are various access and time-limit controls that can be applied to the children’s IDs. This costs ú15 a month for unlimited usage. Customers that already have access to the Internet can access the new service for just ú15 a quarter. At those kinds of prices, the company admits that it will need a mass membership to make it into profit and is aiming to have as many members as Compuserve in the UK, standing at 125,000 currently, with
in three years. But the firm is not simply going to rely on revenue from connections, it is also going to try and tempt advertisers onto the service, that’s non-intrusive advertising, the company added. Olivetti Telemedia will be watching the Shepton Mallet, Somerset-based venture closely. Its fortunes will dictate whether the technology and the approach is duplicated in other territories. Telemedia’s existing on-l ine venture, Italia Online is run on much more traditional lines, but UKOnline’s Dr Tim King says it’s fair to say that Italians view his service as a test-bed. In mustering a wide range of content specifically aimed at the UK, non-technical family the company has certainly spotted a potential niche. The idea of tapping into both parental interest in, and anxiety about, the Internet is also potentially very smart indeed.
Cosseted
But is this curious hybrid of Internet technology, plus content and control, really the future of the on-line service, or indeed of Internet providers? After one has played with the beta service for a couple of days, it seems questionable. UKOnline’s avowed intention is to go after the non-Netty: the technologically-naive user. But compared with the cosseted, graphical environments that the likes of eWorld and Compuserve’s CIM front-ends provide, a Web browser-based service looks unfriendly and limited. While competing services have complete control over their proprietary software environments, UKOnline is trying to use standard components as far as possible. It is a laudable aim and enables the company to offer a seamless Internet Service, but there is the danger that it is trying to push the standards too far. The company says that between now and the launch (probably in August) its Tiber browser will be improved considerably. But a good deal of work is required to transform the Web browser into the kind of slick tool that will satisfy the naive user. If the company doesn’t get this right then there is the possibility that it will be viewed as a service simply ahead of its time, and ahead of the technology. UKOnline can be found at http://www.ukonline.co.uk. It is currently seeking UK beta testers.
