From: Robert Hettinga Subject: DCSB: Andrew Odlyzko; So, Where's All the Digital Cash? Date: Tuesday, August 10, 1999 10:56 AM The Digital Commerce Society of Boston Presents Dr. Andrew Odlyzko Head of the Mathematics and Cryptography Research AT&T Laboratories Why digital cash has not taken off (yet) Tuesday, September 7th, 1999 12 - 2 PM The Downtown Harvard Club of Boston One Federal Street, Boston, MA The arrival of digital cash has been predicted for a long time, but progress has been disappointing. To fully understand what has happened, and what the future will bring, it appears to be necessary to consider the important economic and psychological factors that have hampered acceptance of digital money. Content producers can usually get more revenues through various bundling strategies (subscriptions, site licensing, etc.) than through sales a la carte. Further, consumers have a strong preference for flat-rate pricing schemes. These factors suggest which methods might be most productive in speeding up penetration of electronic money. Andrew Odlyzko is Head of the Mathematics and Cryptography Research Department at AT&T Labs, and also Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo. He has done extensive research in technical areas such as computational complexity, cryptography, number theory, combinatorics, coding theory, analysis, and probability theory. In recent years he has also been working on electronic publishing, electronic commerce, and economics of data networks. He is the authors of such widely cited papers as "Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals," "The decline of unfettered research," and "The bumpy road of electronic commerce." He is also a coinventor of a micropayment system. His home page is . This meeting of the Digital Commerce Society of Boston will be held on Tuesday, September 7, 1999, from 12pm - 2pm at the Downtown Branch of the Harvard Club of Boston, on One Federal Street. The price for lunch is $35.00. This price includes lunch, room rental, various A/V hardware, and the speakers' lunch. The Harvard Club *does* have dress code: jackets and ties for men (and no sneakers or jeans), and "appropriate business attire" (whatever that means), for women. Fair warning: since we purchase these luncheons in advance, we will be unable to refund the price of your lunch if the Club finds you in violation of the dress code. We need to receive a company check, or money order, (or, if we *really* know you, a personal check) payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston", by Saturday, September 4th, or you won't be on the list for lunch. Checks payable to anyone else but The Harvard Club of Boston will have to be sent back. Checks should be sent to Robert Hettinga, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02131. Again, they *must* be made payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston", in the amount of $35.00. Please include your e-mail address so that we can send you a confirmation If anyone has questions, or has a problem with these arrangements (We've had to work with glacial A/P departments more than once, for instance), please let us know via e-mail, and we'll see if we can work something out. We are actively searching for future speakers. If you are in Boston on the first Tuesday of the month, and you are a principal in digital commerce, and would like to make a presentation to the Society, please send e-mail to the DCSB Program Committee, care of Robert Hettinga, . For more information about the Digital Commerce Society of Boston, send "info dcsb" in the body of a message to . If you want to subscribe to the DCSB e-mail list, send "subscribe dcsb" in the body of a message to . We look forward to seeing you there! Cheers, Robert Hettinga Moderator, The Digital Commerce Society of Boston Robert A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-request@ai.mit.edu" with one line of text: "help".