In addition to the standard advantages offered by a typical Application Service Provider (ASP) NetVillage will differentiate itself by:

• offering an full range of interactive plug-and-play community applications. We are unmatched in the breadth of plug-and-play integrated add-ons we can incorporate into a community.
  
• providing enhanced user management to community hosts. Our locks/keys/classes approach to managing access rights gives the host of a user community unparalleled power for member access and control. As mentioned by our customer Xerox: "No one has anything that even comes close".
  
• Being first to market with a full solution. All of our competitors in the community building space generally offer only the same basic 4 "interactive" applications: calendar, discussion groups, member list, and chat rooms. Due to our unique history we can offer everything from auctions and classified ads to Video on Demand and client-less Webcasting - today. It would take at least 18 months for our competitors to integrate or develop these applications into their offering. This is the window we will use to establish ourselves as the market leader.

MARKET NEED

The most common option for a customer interested in building a special interest community is to contract a local ISP or Web Development Firm or to build the system in-house. However, setting up an online community usually requires a large investment in money, hardware, software, bandwidth, and software development talent. To create a complete online community typically requires leasing office space 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 small to medium site can range from $5,000-$250,000 according to International Data Corp, "WWW site installation costs".