shipped via air to the destination city. A personal experience of one of the authors had a book order being placed at approximately 10:00 p.m.; the book was picked up by UPS at the Amazon.com warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky at 2:30 a.m. where it was transported to the Louisville hub of UPS. The book package was shipped via air to the airport in Austin, TX where it arrived at 5:30 a.m. and at 7:00 a.m. it left the UPS facility at the Austin airport by truck for delivery to the author’s home address. It arrived at approximately 10:00 a.m. A total of approximately 12 hours to purchase a book and have it delivered to a home address. The ubiquitous nature of the overnight courier delivery service, coupled with Web access for shopping and order placement, provides a model through which the full range of the human needs hierarchy can be addressed, in at least many instances.

Service portals cover a wide range of business models, but perhaps one of the most successful is eBay. This Web portal provides a service of connecting consumers to content providers through the mechanism of an auction. A provider can offer specific items for sale through the eBay.com Web site. Consumers interested in any of the items can place a bid. Once the auction period terminates, the highest bidder is allowed to purchase the item. The item is then shipped via some surface delivery system to the purchasers’ shipping address. Obviously, this business model requires some special consideration in order to establish a satisfactory level of trust to entice the consumer to pay for an item with confidence that it will then be shipped and will be in satisfactory condition when it arrives. Mechanisms to establish this trust comprise a significant aspect of the service provided by eBay.

So, having glossed through a variety of specific systems, let’s step back and delve into some of the basic aspects of the access models used to connect consumers and providers.

Content Access Models

Brokers allow for consumers and providers to get together, matching appetites to sustenance. Within the physical ecosystem, the interaction mechanisms can vary, depending on whether the access model consists of the consumer going to a marketplace or the provider bringing goods or services directly to the consumer (e.g. a door-to-door salesperson). Within the Internet context, there tend to be two rather distinct access models: a PUSH model and a PULL model. The PUSH model is fairly well characterized by text messaging, facsimile transmission or standard telephony. The PULL model is relatively well characterized by voice-mail and Web pages. Electronic mail is illustrative of a hybrid of the two that we might characterize as a “PUSH me – PULL you” model. In a rather humorous article published in the New York Times Magazine on March 23, 1997, James Gleick reviewed the PULL model as the dominant model of Web access at the time, and he also considered the then emerging PUSH model for Web information. He suggested the quick demise of this latter model because, as he put it “Push implies interruption and salesmanship. Pull implies choice.” His characterization, while certainly cogent, does not appropriately assess the financial power derived from the provision of advertising through the PUSH model. As it has thus far transpired, the truly emergent model has been the combination that he expressed in the title of his article, “Push Me, Pull You.”

In the PUSH model, the content provider is the originator of the interaction and subsequently causes content to be sent to some receiver or consumer of that content. In text messaging, for example via a cellular telephone, a short string of text is sent from one telephone handset to another telephone handset. The originator of the message pushes the message into the network, using as the destination network address the telephone number of the telephone intended to

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