Private-label, browser-based creation of user web sites on your site, or outsource the entire editing/hosting service to Trellix. Aimed at sites with 200,000 members or more. Second-generation features. "With Trellix Web, even adults can create a web page. You no longer have to have your children do it for you!" Used by Tripod Site Builder.

Browser-based office suite written in Java. Compatible with Microsoft Office!

Browser-based spreadsheets, presentations, and embeddable apps for your web site.

An easy-to-use browser-based database, patterned after the venerable FileMarker.

Upload your data to the 1010data web servers and use their data analysis tools.

Lawyer advises law practices to adopt eServices with caution. What about security, availability, and and functionality?

I mentioned Mailstart before as a web site for accessing your regular POP-email account while on the road. Now, thanks to WebApps, here are two more such services: Molly Mail and Mail2Web

HotVoice.com: Gateway numbers in 43 countries. Free services. "Send and receive voicemail and fax messages anywhere in the world with a local phone call."

X-drive, Driveway, MySpace.com and I-drive extend your hard disk space into the net.

Many eservices are free to the user - funded by advertising. Another option is sponsorship.

High bandwidth is coming....

Andi Valache (avalachi@tuiasi.ro), a Roumanian Network engineer who had just immigrated to Canada wrote me recently about my personal home page. In looking at his web site, I came upon this essay on Leaving Your Country For Good. Reading it reminded me again that bandwidth is not enough for thriving eServices - you also need a free and civil society to host the service.

Turns out I know a lot of immigrants. My friend Vince moved to Anguilla from the USA; he has has a web site about moving to another country, votewithyourfeet.com, with country rankings.

Another friend Eugene immigrated from Kiev to California with his family when he was about 6. He is now about 30 and a UCLA Law professor. When Eugene was about 13, he and his father Vladimir started a software company Vesoft that was quite successful.

Another friend Alfredo moved his family to Sun Valley Idaho from Guatemala (after building an international software firm called Adager in that country). Alfredo has posted Eugune's computer papers on his web site, listed at the end after his own papers, under "Vesoft":

Another friend Tad escaped from Poland in 1981 with his family and ended up in Canada, where he and his wife are computer engineers. They now own a house in North Vancouver and another in Hawaii, one child writes state-of-the-art computer games and the other is even more talented, and Tad goes back to Poland to give seminars on self-esteem: his web site.

Speaks your text to someone on their phone number!

Another web-based project manager.

Do you want to accept credit cards on the web? Then you won't have a customer signature. So if the card is bad, you take the loss, not VISA or MasterCard. If you had a signature, the credit card company takes the loss. Another problem is consumer chargeback where the customer repudiates the charge. Chargeback rates above 1% cause the card companies concern and ecommerce sites are rumored to have rates of 4% or more. And fraud is a major problem on the net.

If you are a high-volume order processer, you need your own merchant account and the special software on your server to manage credit cards and communicate with one of the card clearinghouses. Article.

If you are a startup or don't expect huge volumes, you can just accept the card numbers on a form (using SSL encryption makes the customers feel better) and process them manually. The downside of this is that you can't authorize the order in real-time and it will be very costly for a large volume.

The next option is to use a web-based credit card processor. In this case they have the merchant account and they take you on as a sub-merchant. Your web site connects with their web site to handle the charge and they send you a check every so often. When the customer gets the bill, the charge may be to "Internet Credit Inc." instead of your company.

InternetSecure is a top of the line service that can accept US and C$. Most others charge only in US$. Charges appear as "Your company name via Internet Secure". They charge an upfront fee plus a small fee per transaction. Many other services have no upfront fee put charge 10% or more per transaction.

CCSlide.com has no startup fee and no monthly minimum. They also provide a shopping cart system that you customize to look like your site (not needed if you only have 1 or 2 items you sell). They charge 5.9% plus a 5.9% security holdover, paid out the following period (i.e., against chargebacks!).

There are lots of other services, some of which also provide processing by phone and fax. For example, Kagi even accepts cash! Many of these services began business helping sell software over the Net: SetSystems, Digital River, Reg.Net, RegNow, RegSoft and DigiBuy.

Add webmail, chat, discussion groups and search to your site using their servers Extreme customization makes it look just like your site. Free, but it carries banner ads - you split the ad-views.

DNS (Domain Name Services) is one of those arcane Internet services that is essential, complex, and easy to get wrong. Now EasyDNS will allow you to maintain all your domain names yourself through a browser interface, rather than depending on a busy UNIX guru.

They also register domain names for $30 through OpenSRS, forwarding of your web site domain and your email, plus more. Think of it as the first step toward being your own ISP.

Can you charge for any eServices these days? More and more are being offered for free. I used to point at Fax Services as a business that could extract fees from users, but now even Fax-to-Email services have gone "free" (see the Washington Post about eFax, Jfax and CallWave). Of course, they do hope to sell you premium services, but it is amazing they can give you your own fax number for free.

Would you trust a free fax number enough to put it on your business card? How do you know the service will still be there after you excitedly distribute cards to your clients and suppliers? (See Jakob Nielsen on web trust and decide what you think.)

Collecting Eyeballs. The standard explanation behind free services is that they are collecting eyeballs which will be sold for millions to a Wall Street Internet darling, but sometimes there may be other, less obvious sources of revenue. All the services I could find still charge you to send a fax over the Internet, although their charges are much less than regular phone rates, especially when faxing outside the USA. And of course some attach ads to your faxes.

This RCFOC article suggests that free fax-to-email services are actually collecting termination fees on long distance calls to your US fax number. This could be true, since the free services do not give you a choice of area codes.

International Service? That same article goes on to complain that you can't get a free fax number in Portugal. True, but for $12.50 per month, Jfax will provide you with a local number in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and several other major cities. The number can receive faxes or voice mail, and delivers it in your email. Jfax does not offer numbers in Portugal (perhaps the market is still too small, the Internet too primitive, or the telecom industry too regulated), but most firms will deliver a fax over the net to almost any country, including Portugal, and Faxsav has a representative there for sending from PC to fax.

I personally have used FaxSav (now part of Netmoves.com) for two years to send faxes over the Internet to all corners of the globe and have been very happy with the price and the service. One of my compatriots who travels continuously is happily using Jfax to receive fax and voice mail messages regardless of where he is (as long as he can get an email connection!).

The simple way in which Hotmail was hacked open in August 1999 dramatically raised the issue of security and privacy of eServices. The Internet is an open universe where servers and the data on them are only secured through a serious, sustained effort. High-end business application servers such as Corio often insist that the client use a secure leased line or implement Virtual Private Networks.

But free web services, such as email and calendaring, use plain vanilla TCP/IP and are often developed and enhanced at a frantic pace. It would not be suprising then if some of them were insecure. In August 1999, Hotmail was wide open for 10 hours -- anyone could read anyone else's email without a password, as long as they knew their user name. Did this security lapse set back eServices seriously? This article in Salon magazine thinks so. Or are users not as demanding of free services as we think they ought to be? For each free service or convenience, you give up a little bit of information about yourself. According to the Economist magazine the future may be like the past, when few except the rich enjoyed much privacy. Click here to read their article, "The End of Privacy: the Surveillance Society".

More eServices...Click Here.