Cape and Scarborough above national average for web access

Published in the Current

Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth are among the most-wired towns in the U.S. Some of it is due to demographics, while part of the two towns’ connection to the Internet came by accident.

When TimeWarner Cable introduced its RoadRunner high-speed Internet access over cable television wires here in 1996, it was not because the company was looking for a test market, or even had much of a plan for the Portland area.

The system the company ordered for installation in San Diego was too small for that city.

Scrambling to find a home for equipment it couldn’t otherwise use, TimeWarner looked at Portland, and brought RoadRunner to Maine, according to Maine’s RoadRunner general manager, Rick Preti.

That ordering mistake kicked Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth into the elite bracket of high-speed, easy-installation Internet access early in the Internet boom, according to analyst Antony Parchment of Internet Commerce Systems in Scarborough.

The relative affluence of the two towns meant people could purchase Internet access. High educational levels of town residents meant they wanted to see what was out there on the newly-dubbed “information superhighway.”

Many people had moved to Maine for improved quality of life, but wanted to continue
working in their previous career fields.

The Internet allowed them to do that, and high-speed connectivity made it even easier. Rather than a one-lane dirt road full of potholes, the Internet over a cable connection was at least a two-way street covered in blacktop.

“We were fortunate,” Parchment said. And there was a ready market of ex-city people.
“People had made their lifestyle choices and wanted to be in Maine,” Parchment said.

It caught on, and passed via word-of-mouth among Internet users in the area.

“Now people are hooked,” Parchment said.

And Internet access in both Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth is well above national norms.

One-fourth of the households in the two towns are connected to RoadRunner, Preti said.

Business advantage
One Scarborough business is capitalizing on the Internet connectivity in town.

Rob Doehler of Scarborough’s Foodzy.com said his business would not be located in Scarborough if the town’s demographics did not support an Internet food-ordering business.

With a high concentration of families in which both parents work, and with a high household disposable income, Scarborough is well-positioned to support a food take-out and delivery business which accepts orders over the Internet, he said.

Foodzy.com, Doehler said, takes advantage of the Internet to allow busy professionals to order healthy food quickly. It is an example of his vision for the next phase of Internet business development.

“The Internet at this stage needs to come to the brick-and-mortar business,” Doehler said. The real potential, he said, is to make transactions between existing customers of existing businesses more efficient.

People can order food on-line or over the phone, and can either pick it up or have it delivered in Scarborough.

Customers can also come in and eat at the Foodzy.com store on Route 1.

Other local businesses say the Internet has a positive impact on them, too. Car dealerships traditionally draw most of their business from local residents, but Michael Pierter of Scarborough-based Portland Volvo said he gets interest from as far afield as Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Those prospective customers, he said, look at the dealership’s on-line used car inventory and call to express interest in a certain car.

“It opens up our inventory to a new group of people,” he said.

Many walk-in customers also are better informed as a result of the Internet, Pierter said. They have done on-line research into cars’ safety ratings, reliability and options packages, as well as prices.

“We have a fair amount of customers who do research before they come in,” he said.

Tom Hall of Hall Marketing in Scarborough said he has web development clients in various businesses, including retail stores, software dealers and consultants.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have,” Hall said.

He said a lot of people locally use the Internet to research items before purchasing, and many take advantage of Internet access at work.

“You’ll see a big spike (in web site traffic) from like 11:45 to 1:15,” Hall said, when people are at their desks eating lunch and checking out the web.

He said web site statistics also show local businesses can succeed on-line.

“Server stats show that businesses that offer local services are getting found” during Internet searches, Hall said.

Wired houses
Not only are most households in the two towns equipped with some form of Internet access, but more of those connections are high-speed hookups than would be expected by looking at national data.

RoadRunner, Preti said, has over 30,000 subscribers in Maine, serving 18 communities in Cumberland County, including Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth.

He would not give specific subscriber numbers in the two towns. He did say that out of the homes in Scarborough which are passed by cable service, 26 percent are subscribers to RoadRunner. In Cape Elizabeth, the subscriber base is between 28 and 29 percent of households passed by cable, he said.

This, he said, is “very high by national standards.”

Still, the medium has room for growth. By contrast, Preti said, 85 percent of homes passed by cable connections subscribe to cable television service.

Nua Internet Surveys show that 70.7 million households in the U.S. have Internet access, or just over two-thirds of all households nationwide.

Nua said less than 1 percent of Internet access in the U.S. is provided over cable television systems, which is due, in part, to the fact many areas are not served by cable Internet services. But the sector is growing, with cable Internet connections increasing 153 percent to 3.6 million in 2000, Nua statistics show.

Schools and government
Gary Lanoie, technology coordinator for Cape Elizabeth’s schools and for the town, has two mobile labs—carts with laptops and printers—which can move from classroom to classroom to assist with teaching.

“You can bring the technology to the classroom,” Lanoie said.

Teachers and parents use the web site extensively, Lanoie said, to get information about school activities and programs. “We try to keep things current and up-to-date,”
Lanoie said.

Both Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth have extensive town government web sites, providing 24-hour access to forms and information, as well as databases of town ordinances.

Stephen Tewhey, Scarborough’s director of information systems, which is also a school-town combination position, said the town will be expanding its four-year-old web site, offering real-time signups for community services events. Tewhey said the town will continue to put meeting agendas and minutes on the web, as well as other information.

“We really want to be able to put the public information out where the public is able to view it,” Tewhey said.

He said town residents do use the web sites, often in the evening when town offices are closed. And people notice if there’s a delay.

“The few times that we have been late putting out agendas, the phone rings,” he said.

The Scarborough Police Department also uses the Internet to distribute information. The department has a list of e-mail addresses to which community officer Joe Giacomantonio sends road closings, emergency advisories and general information.

The list is constantly growing, Giacomantonio said, and now includes between 30 and 40 addresses.

OSA becomes ManageSoft

Published in Interface Tech News

NASHUA, N.H. ‹ Open Software Associates changed its name to ManageSoft Corporation on Oct. 1 in an effort to clarify its brand and message. The move was underscored by the renaming of the company's flagship NetDeploy Global product‹ now ManageSoft version 6.0 ‹ the major change of which is in the name.

Bob Thaler, director of product marketing, said the decision stemmed from market research that produced disappointing results.

"We found that we were limited in our marketing reach," Thaler said. "We needed to develop a name and brand that was more closely related to what we do."

With the help of branding consultant Jack Trout, who heads up Old Greenwich, Conn.-based Trout & Partners, the company chose a new name, to showcase its focus on software management and deployment.

While the names have changed, not much about the product or the company is new, Thaler said. The software employs the metaphor of a warehouse for software, showing users that there are receiving, inventory, picking, and shipping aspects to the program.

"It is a place where a customer does everything they need to do," he said, pointing out that the system can be set to deploy software over a network to remote users whenever they are connected. This allows reliable updating of laptops, as well as desktop machines, according to Thaler.

Neal Goldman, a research director at the Boston-based Yankee Group, said the product doesn't seem to have any major improvements over its competition. He said there are existing software-audit programs and those that deploy software, but they are largely independent and used in that way.

"Not everybody has both (systems)," Goldman said, although he liked the warehouse model for its possibilities. "If you could actually return stuff to the warehouse (that would be new)," he added.

According to Goldman, the market for this type of software is not large. "It's never been a huge market in terms of absolute dollars," he explained. Software auditing is less than a $400 million business, and other aspects of the ManageSoft software are included in larger systems-management packages like OpenView, he said.

Sycamore aims to buoy sales with Insight launch

Published in Interface Tech News

CHELMSFORD, Mass. ‹ In a bid to keep customers buying during a time of declining capital expenditures, Sycamore Networks released in early October its SILVX InSight product, which integrates planning, design, and testing for optical networks.

InSight was designed to work with Sycamore's existing network management system, SILVX NMS, to take an inventory of existing network infrastructure, and propose upgrades and equipment purchases to improve the efficiency of carrier networks.

"It's a simulated network," said Wade Rubinstein, Sycamore's director of professional services. "It's much cheaper to put this software on a PC than to buy another switch."

The key to InSight, according to company officials, is a database that includes specifications on networking hardware, permitting capacity planning and load simulation, as well as cost-benefit analysis and testing prior to purchase.

Analyst Maribel Dolinov of Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, said the database could be hard to keep updated. "You can't just call up a company and ask for its specs," she said.

With monthly updates to its database, Sycamore said it will be able to keep current, enabling the linking and design possibilities the company identified as its target service.

"We want to enhance productivity and help the next generation of intelligent optical networks," Rubinstein said.

The driving force behind the product's release, is a good idea, Dolinov said. Across the networking industry, she said, "sales are becoming much more complex." Not only are orders smaller and more specific, but they're reducing in volume and dollar amounts, she added.

In Dolinov's view, another specter looming on the horizon for optical networking is a revelation like the recent one from Qwest, stating that it is finished building its network.

"That's a scary sort of thing for an equipment provider," Dolinov said. Further, she continued, if a supplier is feeling a crunch from one customer, it's hard to make up the difference in new business right now.

"At the end of the day," Dolinov said, "tools are still pretty company specific."

MerryGo borrows P2P name for Internet timeshare exchange

Published in Interface Tech News

MANCHESTER, N.H. ‹ MerryGo launched its new Web site in late September. It will use a peer-to-peer (P2P) method, permitting owners of timeshare properties to deal directly with each other, rather than going through a difficult-to-use central clearinghouse system which is not available on the Internet.

MerryGo is not harnessing the power of computers, but the power of individuals, and is providing central-server traffic direction on its Web site.

The standard timeshare exchange process involves a large group of people, each of whom has an asset: a week of time at a timeshare resort property. Those people pay annual membership fees to resorts and to associations that permit them to exchange their time at one location for someone else's time at another spot.

At present, that process is complex and overly centralized, said Forrest Milkowski, company co-founder and executive vice president for sales and marketing at MerryGo. "We're going to change the way the timeshare industry works," Milkowski said.

That's a big statement for a two-person company targeting the $1.5 billion timeshare exchange sector, but mirrors the changes P2P technology has threatened in the music industry via sites like Napster.

MerryGo's service involves one-to-one trading, with owners posting properties on MerryGo's searchable site. When they find an interesting property, prospective exchangers can e-mail the timeshare owners directly.

Milkowski said this way is not only cheaper, with fees based on transactions rather than annual memberships, but more personal. "I can actually contact the person who owns the property," he said.

This permits travel tips to be passed on from person to person, including which restaurants are the nicest or directions to a pleasant picnic spot. Milkowski said MerryGo's method takes the information out of the hands of a telephone representative for a large company and puts it into the hands of timeshare owners and exchangers.

The company is also partnering with major timeshare resort companies to offer discounts for vacationers exchanging within one company's properties, rather than seeking out other destinations. Although Milkowski said MerryGo Web site visitors would be free to choose any location that fits their needs.

Things that go bump in the night

Published in the Current

Scarborough’s Black Point Inn plays host not only to visitors from out of state, but from the realm of the paranormal, employees say.

The hotel, the last of close to a dozen of the original inns in Prouts Neck, has a lot of ghost stories surrounding it, according to housekeeping supervisor Angel Bechtold.

One recounts that a kitchen worker lived in the employees’ dormitory above the barn, now the garage. When the man’s fiancée broke up with him, he hanged himself. Now his spirit, Bechtold said, haunts the room he lived in.

“I have lived in that dorm and have felt things in the dorm, right beneath the widow’s walk,” she said.

While living there, she said, she would make her bed in the morning and come back to find it unmade after work. Smaller items, like a hairbrush, would be moved around, too.

“It’s pretty haunted,” Bechtold said.

She said she has experienced various presences in the inn and its outbuildings, but mostly during the winter when fewer people are around. At busier times, she said, taking care of guests distracts her from any ghosts which may be around.

She said she has never felt unsafe in the inn, but has been unsettled a few times.

“It’s like a creepy feeling, but nothing scary,” Bechtold said. “Walking through you can get really creeped out.”

Because the inn is so old, she said, it is more likely to have ghosts in it.

One housekeeper, Bechtold said, hears whispers and a cat meowing in the attic, which is used as a storage area.

Several small children have talked of ghosts when on the third floor of the main building, she said, including the young child of an employee, barely able to talk, who pointed up at the widow’s walk and said “ghost.”

Whether it’s because of battles between whites and Native Americans in the 18th century, or ghosts from the area’s other hotels needing a new home after those inns were torn down, or events at the Black Point Inn itself, Bechtold said there’s something there, but only for those who believe in ghosts.

She said she knows people who do not believe in ghosts and they haven’t seen or heard anything they can’t explain.

“I think if you believe, it’s really there,” Bechtold said.

Cape Elizabeth is also home to a haunted house, the Gothic-style Beckett’s Castle, at 7 Singles Road.

Built from 1871 to 1874 by publisher Sylvester Beckett, the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but not for being haunted.

Indeed, the current owner, Nancey Harvey, said, “The previous owners said it was haunted, but (the ghosts) have gone away with me.”

But if it is no longer haunted by ghosts, the house is perhaps haunted by its own former haunting. Harvey said she gets frequent calls inquiring about the house being haunted.

The ghosts which previously inhabited the house were said to be Beckett himself and possibly a child. Among their antics were creating cold spots in the house, removing sheets and blankets from beds, moving paintings and never allowing one door to remain closed, even when nailed shut.

Beckett built the house largely with his own hands, according to the building’s listing in the National Register, from local fieldstone. Its trademark feature is a three-story tower in the southeast corner of the building. It is a four-bedroom house with a parlor, dining room and kitchen. The house has a number of diamond-shaped and triangular windows.