Clickshare Service Corp., a privately held Williamstown firm that is building an online purchasing exchange for digital content, has closed on a $500,000 angel financing round, with investors including David Duffield, founder and chairman of PeopleSoft Inc.

With roots in the publishing industry, Clickshare was established in anticipation of an explosion in the market for digital content. The company will offer consumers the ability to buy content -- music, books, newspaper articles, streaming video, etc. -- from many websites through a single website account, without having to pass around a credit card number, fill out forms or give up personal information.

Clickshare CEO James B. Shaffer said, "We are enormously fortunate to have assembled a core group of smart-money investors as we take the Clickshare exchange service into beta testing. Our goal is to become the ubiquitous exchange for digital content. Clickshare will make it easier for proprietors and consumers of digital content to do business with each other in a privacy-protected environment, like bringing the Swiss bank account concept to cyberspace."

Joining Duffield in Clickshare's series A preferred round are Margaret L. Taylor, CEO of Venture Builders; 25-year software veteran Michael Kaiser, who has served with Andersen Consulting and more recently as a PeopleSoft executive; and Sam S. McKeel, retired publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Sun-Times.

Earlier Clickshare investors included Thomas J. Rehwaldt, a co-founder of The Chicago Reader and Washington, D.C., City Paper.

Until joining Clickshare in October, Shaffer was chief executive of Guy Gannett Communications Inc., of Portland, Maine, a media holding company with television, newspaper, direct marketing and Internet operations in seven states. Earlier he was CFO of The Los Angeles Times and executive vice president of The Sun Times Co. of Chicago.

Among Clickshare's directors is Steve Mott, a former MasterCard executive who oversaw the credit-card firm's early e-commerce efforts and who is now an executive with Priceline.com's WebHouse Club affiliate. Other directors come from the computer hardware, academic and publishing fields.

Clickshare said the funds would be used for market development and for technology buildout with early-stage partners. Shaffer said Clickshare would be available full-scale next year.

The service includes payment aggregation, audience measurement, site-access control, personalization and privacy-protected demographic management. It provides portals and other proprietors with built-in customer bases, such as ISPs, wireless carriers, banks and affinity groups, with a way to strengthen and monetize their bond with customers.

"Clickshare solves three problems at once," said Shaffer. "First, many content sites are drowning in red ink because of the limitations of advertising revenue. Second, many sites with great 'eyeball' traffic are challenged to monetize their user relationships before they run out of money. And, lastly, some great content is being held off the Internet for lack of satisfactory packaging and revenue models."