WavePhore Launches Online Mall and E-Commerce Channel

WavePhore Inc. launched the WaveTop
Store
electronic commerce channel, and established nine initial merchants in the new
“broadcast mall.”

Consumers will now be able to obtain WaveTop’s broadcast delivery of
multimedia content to receive offers and place orders. Product offerings and
catalog-like content will be delivered to their desktops, without the hassle
of going online, the company said. Clearance of the actual transactions will
be completed using the consumer’s existing Web connection and the secure
methods implemented by each of the respective vendors.

“The launch of the WaveTop Store extends our successful content offerings,
which have been primarily information and entertainment content, to include
services which enhance and ease our customer’s day-to-day lives,” said Thom
Kozik, WavePhore WaveTop’s executive vice-president and general manager. “For
our vendors, this channel represents a new way to merchandise their products
without the limitations of slow connections or the costs of additional
infrastructure.”

With WaveTop’s broadcast capability, vendors can distribute rich, multimedia
presentations of their product offerings directly to the consumer’s PC with no
limitations due to slow connections, servers or Internet traffic, the company
said.

Vendors involved in the launch of the WaveTop Store include Godiva
Chocolatier, the Wall Street Journal, Barnes and Noble, Audio Book Club,
CompUSA, The Fragrance Counter, NextCard, Shop-at-Home and VideoMaker
magazine.

Distributed nationally via the unused portion of television signals from 264
PBS member stations around the country, WaveTop currently reaches more than
99 percent of U.S. households. The service requires a broadcast ready PC
(a standard
PC with a built-in TV tuner or equipped with an add-on TV tuner card).

WaveTop content providers include the on-line versions of People, Time,
Entertainment Weekly, Money, Fortune and Sports Illustrated for Kids and ZDNet
News, among others, and online versions of ComputerLife, Family PC and Yahoo
Internet Life.
Charter advertisers include companies such as Atlanta Bank, EMI Records,
Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., Kellogg Co., Lincoln-Mercury Inc., Mobil
Corp., Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., Salomon Smith Barney Holdings and Spiegel Inc.