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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
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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 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. | |
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Morphing TCP Technology For Space Travel by Christy Hudgins-Bonafield Internet Online products, resources and tips by Christy Hudgins-Bonafield Updated February 7, 1997 |


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.











