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Feb 13-16, 2012

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News, trends and analysis

Quick Bits

Mission: Impossible?
America Online is serious about its network security. It's hired former CIA employee Tatiana Gau as its vice president of integrity assurance. Among Gau's responsibilities at AOL is developing an anti-cybercrime program.

Better Late Than Never
Iridium launched its first three satellites last month, falling just shy of its planned November 1996 launch. But don't expect calls from anywhere in the world on your mobile phone just yet--the satellites are merely testing components. With 63 more satellites to go, Iridium won't officially take off until 1998.

Mall Traffic
About $3 billion worth of business was conducted worldwide on the Internet in 1996, exceeding expectations, says a new IDC report. More than one-third of those sales were rung up on the Web, and IDC predicts that overall Internet commerce will reach $100 billion by the year 2000.

If there is something we ought to know, we welcome proposals for articles. Please e-mail us at H-REPORT@nwc.com.

Do-It-Yourself Insurance?
By Kelly Jackson Higgins There's always been something reassuring albeit hokey about receiving a birthday card from your insurance agent, but those cards could become a thing of the past. Given the wave of insurers offering information, quotes and even sales on the Web these days, you don't necessarily need an agent to help you purchase some policies.

Prodigy is the latest provider of online insurance shopping. At its new RightQuote site (www.rightquote.com/prodigy), some major term-life providers, including the American International Group (AIG) and CNA Insurance Cos., sell their pol icies. One of the first and best-known insurance sites is Insweb (www.insweb.com), a veritable insu rance shopping mall made up of major insurers including Nationwide Corp. and Zurich Kemper. There you can purchase property and casualty insurance in the state of Utah through the Insweb site, and term life insurance from Zurich Kemper, as well as get information on most major insurers and their products.

But the next big step for Insweb is offering the ability to compare quotes from different insurers using a network application running on the Web site, says Hussein Enan, Insweb's CEO.

But the insurance industry's killer app will be the ability to lower policy rates for products sold over the Web, Enan says. That hasn't happened yet, but it will if consumers do a lot of the policy- and quote-shopping online, rather than through agents. The savings could be anywhere from 10 percent to 15 percent, Enan says. As part of its st rategy, Insweb licenses insurance-policy rating software from the

Insurance Information Exchange, a consortium that provides IT services for the industry.

But not all insurers want to sell policies on the Web. The Guardian Life Insurance Co., for instance, just launched its own Web site (www.theguardian.com) with insurance and financial information, but has no plans for online purchasing. Enan says Insweb is interested in hosting only insurance companies with Web commerce plans.