Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

Executing E-fulfillment 171
mailbox. However, it is really the regular delivery of such e-mail, as
with e-mail newsletters sent on a periodic basis, that turns e-mail into a
push vehicle.
Push technology is most often defined as the process of pushing
Web pages to someone’s computer. The acknowledged pioneer of push
is PointCast Inc., which was acquired in May 1999 by Launchpad
Technologies, developer of the eWallet consumer shopping utility and
an Idealab! Company. The acquisition led to the formation of a new
company combining PointCast and eWallet called EntryPoint
(www.entrypoint.com). In the Fall of 2000, Entrypoint merged with
Internet Financial Network to become Infogate (www.infogate.com).
Infogate is a free, advertising-supported service that provides a personalized
bar that sits on a user’s desktop. Infogate offers instant access
to news and information, e-commerce, resources, and search
capabilities. A customized ticker delivers headline news and stock data
to the desktop.
The push concept is not without its problems and controversies. In
fact, by mid-1998, several push technology vendors had gone out of
business, and of the remaining companies, some had moved away from
the push label. One of the reasons push may have run into trouble was
that it ran into a technology wall. Early derivations of push were slow
and intrusive. Because most targeted end users were in corporations or
other organizations, information was sent across the Internet through a
corporate network to the end user’s desktop. The problem was that
large files were being transferred, in some cases several times a day, to a
corporate end user. If many corporate end users were using a push service,
it was the corporate network that had to handle the load.
Despite these apparent shortcomings, push technology has been
somewhat rejuvenated by new and improved products and services. In
its new market-driven form, push technology could once again be an
important way of reaching prospects, customers, and other constituents
on an automatic, ongoing basis.
How would you apply push technology to your own electronic fulfillment?
Instead of offering prospects or customers a few promotion
pages to review when they visit your Web site or sending a periodic
e-mail newsletter to their electronic mailboxes, you could deliver personalized
Web pages with highly valued information to prospects and
customers on a regular, complimentary basis. Prospects or customers
would not have to go anywhere to gain access to the information they
want—it would simply appear on their computer desktops.