NETVILLAGE LLC

About Us

To succeed in e-commerce, you need to succeed in e-community.  Every site is fighting to attract and retain users. By adding our interactive e-community features, your site can grab their attention, keep them on the site, and encourage them to return

NetVillage is the leading provider of interactive communication and collaboration solutions for creating, hosting, and managing community-enabled B2B or B2C e-business web sites, portals, or special-interest vertical web communities.  We provide a complete set of tightly-integrated e-community and e-commerce services that provides solutions for businesses wishing to create revenue generating, special-interest virtual communities with a one-stop solution.

You can offer your customers a full menu of interactive services - chat rooms, discussion boards, shared document libraries, banner ads, auctions, classifieds, help wanted, member white pages, personals, polls, stores, databases, private spam-free community e-mail, and much, much more. In fact, there's no one that even comes close to offering as many plug-and-play applications under one roof.

Moreover, all applications are e-commerce enabled and completely integrated with our user management system, providing a seamless and completely managed community experience.

Best of all, as an e-community ASP, we host the entire system for you on our tier-1 AT&T managed network. We handle the technical details, freeing you to concentrate on your business.

Click here to see why netVillage is the leading provider of community solutions.

So feel free to look around.   Click on Benefits to see how community features and netVillage can help you create a truly engaging web site.  Our Services section will show you a comprehensive suite of products and services available from netVillage and it's partners you can use to create your community.  Then take a of live and demo sites to see netVillage in action!  Finally, when you are ready to get started, click Start!

At anytime, if you have a question, just pick up the phone and dial (301) 498-7797 and talk to one of our Community Building experts.

Benefits

Why Community?
It’s simple. To succeed in e-commerce, you need to succeed in e-community. Every site is fighting to attract and retain users. By adding interactive community features, your site can grab their attention, keep them on the site, and encourage them to return. The ability for interactive sites to keep users on their sites longer (three times the average according to Businessweek), extends the opportunity to get users interested in the site’s e-commerce initiatives. It is the combination of content and community that will make your site "sticky".

By engaging your customers with a netVillage interactive community site, you’ll realize the following benefits:

• Increase Traffic.  Community builds relationships between people, and once they have relationships with other members of your community, they come back. And traffic makes your online property a more valuable and important place for advertisers
• Increase Advertising Revenue. Community members segment themselves into interest groups, providing a ready-made audience for focused advertisements and other messages. For sites that support themselves with advertising and sponsorship, specialized communities provide the most powerful form of targeted advertising.
• Increase E-Commerce Revenue. CD-Now has found that return visitors buy 150 percent more product than first-time visitors. According to Forrester Research, members of a community are 36% more likely to buy than non-members.
• Build stronger customer relationships -Online communities help companies create and maintain a two-way dialogue with their best customers. Companies can use community to understand and respond to their wants and needs on an ongoing basis.
• Increase Brand Loyalty - Reports show that community members are more loyal to and remain customers of an e-business 50 percent longer than people who choose not to join these virtual marketplaces.
• Tap Market knowledge - Community provides an important source of consumer feedback on products and services, allow you to examine trends, and learn more about the behavior of your customers. Forget about commissioning expensive marketing research, communities are an opportunity to engage a real live focus group.
• Viral Growth - Through word-of-mouth marketing from community members your site acquires new users at no cost to you. Research indicates people share their experiences with colleagues and friends, since it's not uncommon for a community member to refer up to 20 new users to a business.
• Viral Marketing - Online communities bring your company closer to loyal customers or partners who strongly identify with your product or service, putting their energy and enthusiasm to helping you build your business faster.
• Higher Visitor-to-Customer Conversion Rates
• Highly Targeted E-marketing - Focused areas allow delivery of targeted messages to just the right members.
• Realize Cost savings - Leveraging chat and discussion forum technology for technical support can result in significant manpower cost savings.
• Cost Effective Content Strategy - Communities will generate its own relevant and authentic content. Member-generated content includes such things as postings of text, images, and sounds by members, polls and ratings, and shared best practices.
• Engage your customers - Forty percent of visitors to your web site want to connect with other visitors to discuss your content, services, and products, according to Jupiter Communications

Why Outsource? 

Everyone is realizing that static web pages are not enough. It is "community" that makes a site "sticky", and keeps users reading advertisements and purchasing products. The trend is clear, as evidenced by today's leading portals attempting to add community to their offering.

However, creating a community-enable web site "in-house" often requires a large investment in capital, technology, and hard to find software development talent. To create a complete online community typically requires leasing Internet bandwidth or co-locating at an ISP, finding and purchasing various software packages from different vendors (i.e. a shopping cart, an auction, chat room software, etc.), and acquiring hard-to-find software development talent to build the complete system and weave it all together. Typical costs for a site can range from $500,000-$1,000,000 and take 8 months to a year to complete. In today's fast-paced Internet economy, he who hesitates is lost.

NetVillage provides a one-stop-shop end-to-end whole product outsourced solution, freeing you to concentrate on your business and not the site infrastructure or technical details. By using our facilities, hardware, and manpower you can quickly get your business on the information superhighway.

NetVillage is an e-community Application Service Provider (ASP). ASPs enable customers to use mission critical enterprise applications in a better, faster, and more cost-effective manner. They do this by giving their customers access to the latest applications in a way that offers financial benefits, and which eliminates the customer's need to add staffing and resources that would otherwise be irrelevant to them.

Key Outsourcing Benefits:

Faster time-to-market
Access to expert technology people without having them in-house (cost of geeks)
In-depth application and community expertise
Better cost control

Faster time-to-market

One of the primary motivations for companies to outsource is the rapid time-to-market for going live with your service. In an age where being late to the Internet game may spell doom for your company, it's crucial to be able to deploy rapidly and cost-efficiently. Many of the small and medium-sized companies that do not have the infrastructure in place nor the manpower to staff their IT initiatives turn to netVillage for their solutions.

Access to expert IT people

It is increasingly hard to find and keep top technology talent in today's booming high-tech job market. Software developers, engineers, and consultants are in short supply and expensive to retain. Using netVillage keeps that expertise at your fingertips when you need it.

In-depth application and community expertise
Companies with little or no tech staff find that the experience and expertise offered by ASPs is crucial to opting for the outsourcing model. NetVillage's expertise and community tools pre-dates even the web - we when built online communities for dial-up services. We know what works, and what doesn't, in the community space.

Better cost control

Software and hardware require constant maintenance and upgrades that could ultimately prove cost prohibitive for many small and mid-market companies. The netVillage ASP model makes economic sense for companies with limited resources but rapid-growth aspirations, because it allows them to pay for advanced applications and their support infrastructures as they use them, rather than making large up-front investments. For large and small companies alike, paying one flat monthly fee over the term of a contract allows the customer a predictable cost model as well as a faster return on investment.

Is outsourcing for you?

If your company meets any of these criteria, outsourcing may be appropriate:
A need to deploy rapidly
Technology is not your core competency
Attracting and retaining tech staff is difficult
Start-up with little cash to make significant investment in technology
Need to dedicate personnel, cash, and focus to core business

Why netVillage?

Why netVillage?

netVillage provides the most comprehensive, secure, and robust community building solution on the planet. Our software, powering more online communities than all other providers combined, is clearly the right choice for creating your online interactive community. Here are some of our distinctions:

One Stop Shopping

We are unmatched in the breadth of plug-and-play integrated services we can incorporate into your community. From auctions to video broadcasting you can choose from a wealth of interactive plug-and-play community services. You can rest easy knowing when your system grows to need advanced services, they'll be there.

Completely Integrated Services

Probably the community services were designed and developed to work with each other from the ground up. Other providers cobble together software applications from multiple vendors (under the banner 'best of breed'), resulting in a hodgepodge mix of services and a disruptive, inconsistent community experience. Some of the advantages of services that seamlessly integrate with each other follow:

Single Login

Your community members should be able to switch effortlessly between services (for example, moving between the chat room and the discussion groups) without having to 'log-in' again. Multiple logins is disruptive and confusing to the user. It is the sign of poor integration.

Generally all of our competitors in the community building space offer the same basic 4 ‘interactive’ applications: calendar, discussion groups, member list, and chat rooms. Extended services such as auctions, shopping, polls, etc. are accomplished by linking to third party internet services. If a community host would like to add an interactive poll, for example, he would either have to link to an online poll vendor such as free-polls.com or develop it himself. Once a site has linked out of its community, it disrupts the community experience as the customer is now forced to ‘log-on’ once again to a new service. You even risk losing the customer while he is off in that system.

Retain Revenue Opportunities

Community providers that link to third party services to round out their solution throw your revenue opportunities away! For example, If your community discussion groups are handled by link to a national service (delphi.com, ezboard.com, etc.), they are receiving banner ad revenue while your customers are in that area, not you. When you link to outside services from within your community you have lost potential revenue opportunities from transaction fees and/or advertising banners the vendor site has usurped.

We address all of these issues by providing an unmatched selection of plug-and-play, tightly integrated applications that allow you, the community host, to control and retain every aspect and revenue opportunity of your online community.

Integrated e-commerce

Not only do our applications share authentication, they are all tied into our user management security and e-commerce ‘credits’ systems. A user can maintain an electronic wallet (in the form of 'credits' applied to his account) and use this currency across all community services. For example, he can deduct an amount to place a classified ad in the classifieds, and deduct some more later to download a file from the File Libraries - all without having to pull out his credit card each time. Besides providing customers the convenience of not having to use a credit card for every transaction, it provides a powerful mechanism by which For-Profit systems can charge for additional or premium services.

Feature Rich

Our community software has been developed and fine-tuned over many years. We've incorporated feed back from a very large customer base and as a result our software is highly configurable with a vast array of configuration features (5,000 at last count!). This gives you the flexibility to create your ideal online service. Click here to take a good look at the configuration options for each of our services and you'll see what we mean.

Powerful User Management & Security

All of the community services are integrated into our User Management System. Its purpose is to identify users, decide internally which activities and resources they can access, and possibly charge users for access to those areas. Our locks & keys approach to managing access rights gives you unparalleled power for member access and control. As mentioned by our customer Xerox: comes close

Credits-based E-Commerce Accounting

We offer a ‘Credits’ based e-commerce system across all community services. Credits are a community’s unit of currency. They are the mechanism by which For-Profit systems can charge for services. A user maintains an electronic wallet (in the form of 'credits' applied to his account) and use this currency across all community services. A user’s account can be posted a positive number of credits which is drawn down by the user’s activities on your system.

Rapid Time to Market

Other community builders can take months to get you online, we can get you up and running in days. In an age where being late to the Internet game may spell doom for your company, it's crucial to be able to deploy rapidly and cost-efficiently.

Experience

While other community builders have sprouted only within the last few months, netVillage's expertise and community tools pre-dates even the web - we then built online communities for dial-up services. netVillage is the most experienced online community software developer in the world. We know what works, and what doesn't, in the community space.

Interactive Community Services

To create a truly compelling interactive web community you'll need a combination of Interactive Community Services, Integrated e-commerce, both your specialized and supplemental content, and self-managed or outsourced moderation. You'll find all that available here from netVillage and its partners.

netVillage is unmatched in the number of turnkey interactive community features we can incorporate into your community. From auctions to video broadcasting you can choose from a wealth of interactive plug-and-play community services:

CRM & Community Building Tools

netVillage provides a complete set of integrated community and CRM web tools. From auctions to video broadcasting you can rest easy knowing when your system grows to need advanced services, they'll be there.

Integrated User Management & Security

All of the services are integrated into our User Management System. Its purpose is to identify users, decide internally which activities and resources they can access, and possibly charge users for access to those areas. Our locks & keys approach to managing access rights gives you unparalleled power for member access and control.

Integrated Credits-based E-Commerce Accounting

All our applications are tied into our user management security and e-commerce ‘credits’ systems. A user can maintain an electronic wallet (in the form of 'credits' applied to his account) and use this currency across all community services. In addition to providing the customer the convenience of not having to pull out a credit card for every transaction, it provides a powerful mechanism by which For-Profit systems can charge for additional or premium services.

User Signup & Registration process offers you the flexibility to prompt for up to 30 signup questions and demographics. Signup information can be integrated into our Ad Management services to provide highly targeted banner advertising.

Electronic Mail
Discussion Groups
Polls and Questionnaires
Member Registry

File Library for file storage and sharing over the web. Your members can store or share any type of file (documents, sound, video) in various categories. Each category can have its own description and security access restrictions to determine which users can view the library, download files, upload files for approval, and approve uploaded files. Features include keyword searching, listings by popularity, chronological listings, and wildcard file searches. A powerful improvement over ftp's limited implementation for file exchange.

Chat Rooms

Instant Messenger The netVillage Instant Messenger (IM) can make working with your extended team easier than ever before. It's not just about instant messaging, it's about using the Web to improve customer service, reduce travel costs, and create communities among your employees, customers, partners, and suppliers.

Web Meetings / Presentations

Community Link features the ability for communities to link chat rooms and message boards to other communities. Link to affinity groups while retaining control of your members (schools, church communities, business partners)

Ad Campaign Management system allows a community host to target specific demographics within the community.

Video on Demand / WebCasting allows you to setup live video broadcasting to members of your system or providing access to pre-recorded video files for viewing

On-Demand Live Help

Interact with customers directly from your web site. Unlike HumanClick, LivePerson, etc. our real-time help services also offer VIDEO chat.

Calendar / Reminders provides a feature rich calendar system wide to all your users and allow each user to have their own calendar and reminder services. A very powerful tool for user retention and keeping the membership informed

Auction system allows host to charge transaction fees and generate revenue within having to outsource to companies like e-bay. Address business needs such as liquidating excess inventory, increasing revenue for scare items and creating Internet marketplaces. Adding an Online Auction to your system can be an instant money maker!

Classified Ad system allows host to charge transaction fees and generate revenue. Offer more than picture classifieds. Imagine reader response when they can view a digital video demo of a product, a walk-through of a home, or a sound-bite of a piece of music!

Help Wanted database for job postings and resume searching.

Club Photo Album

Who’s Online Let all your members view users online.

Live Alerts / Friends List Allows your members to define a buddy list and more.

Generic Database application

Email Discussion Groups and List Servers

Information Server An Info Server is an e-mail automated attendant or "mail-back" service that allows people to request information about your company, services, or products without your intervention. They simply send an e-mail to your Info Server and materials are automatically sent back to them as e-mail.

Shopping Mall for e-commerce targeted to this community. Your online mall can have multiple stores, each with several departments and its own products. To increase selection of items and system revenue, you can rent space to other merchants. Associate multiple images, sound, and video clips with products in your store for multimedia sales presentation.

Affiliate Program Manager / Tell-a-friend While our affiliate program manager can be used simply to allow other members to send automated e-mails to their friends about your site, it can also be used to reward users for referring their friend with free credits/payments and/or class/service upgrades.

Credit Store This module provides a simple web form user can fill out to purchase credits/tokens on your system with a credit card. It is a service you can use to charge micropayments for goods and services on your site.

Remote Administration gives you total control over your community.

Integrated e-commerce, content, moderation.

Commerce Services

netVillage provides a wide array of e-commerce options to ensure your community's success. These services include:
online shopping mall
integrated e-commerce currency (credits) system
credit card & online check processing
merchant account services
fulfillment & warehousing services

Online Shopping Mall
Sell products or host stores with your own community shopping mall. This is not a nationally shared mall, but one you can brand to your own identity. As it is a mall, your mall, you can rent stores to community members or even companies interested in targeting your particular community! Stores can optionally use our credits-based currency system (described below) giving members a single source of payment processing and putting you in total control of currency flow.

Integrated credits-base e-commerce
Take advantage of our unique e-commerce ‘credits’ system. It's a way you can surcharge for premium areas in your online community. A user can maintain an electronic wallet (in the form of 'credits' applied to his account) and use this currency across all community services. Credits are drawn down automatically from this account for any fee-based services used on the system. For example, a customer can deduct an amount to place a classified ad or download a special file from the File Libraries - all without having to pull out his credit card each time.

Every service has built into it options for surcharging: Charge for a special event chat with a celebrity, participation in a special forum, even sending an email - the options are endless.

You can even reverse the process, and pay users for participation!

Our cross-service credits-based accounting system is extremely powerful and key for creating a profit-generating web community.

Credit Card and Online Check Processing
You can accept credit card payment across all services on your site. We've partnered with FullEcom (www.fullecom.com), a leading provider of processing services both in the U.S. and overseas, to provide you with a validated credit card transaction while simultaneously giving your customer an encrypted secure, simple, and completed sales transaction - all at a low cost.

Merchant Account Services
We've eliminated the hassle and big price tag of applying for your own merchant account (the ability to accept credit cards) through our relationships with fullecomm and their partners.

Fulfillment Services
We've also negotiated optional fulfillment and distribution services for your products. Call for details.

Content Services
Content is King! You need to keep and attract visitors, with targeted content that grabs your audience, keeps them on your site and coming back for more.

Internet Newsgroups Import
Add instant content to your message groups by importing directly from Internet newsgroups. Internet newsgroups are vast discussion threads broken into almost unlimited topic ranges. Typical web users are unaware or unable to access this data. With netVillage, you can Import this valuable content directly into your web site. Currently no other product can do this.

Supplemental Content
You can also supplement your specialized content with data from our partners below. Contact our sales department to take advantage of our volume discount pricing.

Consulting & Customization Services

In addition to comunity hosting, we also offer consultation and customization services to enable you to differentiate your business from the competition by providing superior products and services - from web-page design to unique application development.

Our software development staff has been in the "online" business since 1988. We aren't one of the new "Web Providers" birthed only within the past few months. Our satisfied clients range from entrepreneurial startups to Fortune 500 companies, giving us a cross-industry exposure that can provide valuable insight into options available in developing your online presence. All corporate projects are administered using proven project management methodologies. Deliverables are identified, milestones are set, and continuous project tracking takes place to ensure that progress is on schedule.

Moderation Services

Our partners in community moderation provide valuable management services. Managers and moderators are trained brand representatives who work daily to activate membership, increase participation, promote products, and enhance the online experience.

Training

While generally configuring and administrating our community toolset doesn't require a lot of effort or training, it doesn't hurt to have a seasoned community-building expert provide instruction, suggestions, and tips. Our expertise and community tools pre-dates even the web - we then built online communities for dial-up services. We know what works, and what doesn't, in the community space.

We provide on-site and in-house training which includes:
3 to 4 day training course for up to 3 students training manuals

If you are interested in training services please contact our sales department at 954-570-7676.

NetVillage: Objectives, Management, Customers

Management

Mr. Harold Van Arnem is Chairman of the Board of netVillage.com. Mr. Van Arnem has extensive experience in computing and telecom technology products and services. He founded ACTS Computer Corporation, a pioneer in on-line computer software and services, which became one of the largest computer service organizations in the USA. The company was a prime contractor with ARPA and the Institute for Advanced Computation in Sunnyvale, California and was credited with early design and implementation of ARPANET, forerunner of the Internet. Mr. Van Arnem formed a financial services company, VAFS, which acquired Finalco Group, Inc. After founding Libra, he co-founded Cybergate and acquired Locinfor and Olivetti DSI. As Chairman of the Board of Cybergate, Mr. Van Arnem successfully grew the company to become one of the top ten Internet integration companies in the world. He founded TOTALe Plc and as Chairman and CEO the company is the leading provider of on-line and hosted applications for the SMB community in Europe.

Mr. Nathan Hammond serves as President. He has over 15 years experience in software designing, developing, and delivering commercially available software products. He has been involved in all levels of management and application development from product concept, sales and marketing to application development and deployment. His particular emphasis is on online/Internet application development. In 1995 he founded Palantir Corporation to specialize in building extranet systems for large fortune 500 gas and electric utilities. At Palantir he developed a sophisticated client/server Gas Brokering / Nomination application using the netVillage Worldgroup technology. This system is considered the best in that industry. Hammond holds copyrights for over 20 commercially available software products ranging from online multi-player games to Internet databases. A Computer Science graduate from the University of Maryland, Hammond has run for-profit online community systems since the days of the early BBS (Bulletin Board Systems).

Mr. Stephen Bathurst, CTO, has over 20 years of experience in the Information Technology arena. Most recently, Mr. Bathurst was responsible for developing an e-Business strategy for a major Fortune 500 company, and defined the strategic blueprint that governs policies, procedures, statements of direction and guidelines to ensure success in e-Business. Mr. Bathurst has been involved in all phases of software production including architecture, design, and development. Further, he was responsible for defining an IT infrastructure strategy to ensure the most cost-effective use of IT resources. Mr. Bathurst lead the design and development of numerous enterprise-wide, client/server based applications.

In 1998 he founded SCB Consulting to provide software design and development services to corporate clients in central Maryland. Prior to that, he founded InfoNapse Systems in 1986, a software design and development firm specializing in OS/2 and DOS based applications software.

Mr. Bathurst's background includes 14 years in digital electronics, data communications and high-speed networking. Mr. Bathurst attended Villa Julie college in Maryland. He holds over 12 patents, trademarks, and copyrights for commercial computer software.

Mr. B. Joseph Vincent serves as Director of Marketing and Vice Chairman of the board of directors of netVillage.com. Mr. Vincent bring over 25 years of general management and senior executive experience in the computing and related high-technology industry to netVillage.com. He currently is a founder and vice-chairman of UCI Web Group, a major web design, development and professional services holding company which owns Online Focus (in Silicon Valley/Cupertinio CA.), Third Street Interactive (along Silicon Alley/Stanford Connecticut), and Sharkbytes (in Cincinnati, OH.) amongst other firms. Prior, he served as founder and Chief Operating Officer at Businesship International, a private, multi-national Saudi-American holding company with equities in information, education, distributive services, and related assets valued at over $3.5 billion dollars. Previously, Mr. Vincent held senior executive positions including president of The Communications Group, Senior Vice-President sales and marketing worldwide for Visual Graphics Corporation (AMEX), General Sales Manager Recognition Equipment Inc. (NYSE), and numerous management positions with Control Data Corporation (NYSE). Mr. Vincent currently serves on the boards of a number of public and private corporations and foundations including the Neighborhood Marketing Institute, MicroMotion Software Corp., and is a contributing editor to Integrated Marketing and Promotion magazine. He also served as past chairman of the United States Standards committee for OCR (X3A1) and United States Standards committee for keyboard design (X4A9).

 Mr. Ken Van Arnem, Sales Director, has over has over 27 years experience in the computer and high tech communications field, both in the U.S. and in Europe. His experience started in the late 60's with ACTS Computing, as Director of time-sharing services. He later worked for Honeywell Information Systems marketing their products to IBM system 8 base. As Vice President of Operations for Gemini Group, he was responsible for the return of off lease equipment into the secondary market. When Gemini acquired CyberGate, the largest and fast growing Internet Service Provider in the state of Florida, he was responsible for the relocation of CyberGate Operations to the Gemini facilities. This included the vast telephone network, servers, modems, hubs, routers and call center.He was President of Web Crafter's, Inc. This company developed web sites and database applications. It was the authorized system developer for CyberGate, AT&T, NetCom, MindSpring and many others.

Showcase Sites
 
Our satisfied clients range from entrepreneurial startups to fortune 500 companies.  Our cross-industry exposure can provide valuable insight into options in developing your online presence.

Case Studies
Match Factory
Planet Teen
EthnikCity
Dream Matches
Worldwide Bellydancer Community

Education and Non-profit Organizations
Computing Technology Industry Association
Hometown.net
Choice 2000 Charter School
Cherry Hill School District
Fifth Youth Services

Online Services
bytenet.com
The Jungle
Real MUD
Free Email Service
FollowMe Online

Internet Service Providers
SIGMABBS - Brazilian Internet Provider
Opus network - Trinidad
Quanta Internet - Paraguay
The End of the Net - Mexico

Business to Business exchanges/support sites
Dontbenext.com - Product Sales
Filewire secure file transfer Support
Chat software Product Support
DermDex Skin Care B2B Exchange

Entertainment Sites
Interactive Game Network
ChatWorld
RealMUD
Digital Playground Interactive
Point Blank
The Realm of Mirage.com
VR Dating

Other Customers
Eglin Airforce base
The Internal Revenue Service
Dayton Power & Light
Towne Services
International Air Transport Association
National Automobile Dealers and Associates Retirement Trust