NEW FEATURES

We have just completed an upgrade of the database system which is used to maintain and update the studyabroad.com web site. As a result we have some new features which we believe will make studyabroad.com even more useful to students.

1. Host City information--we are now able to list the city or cities in which a study abroad program takes place. Programs will continue to be listed by country, and then alphabetically by program provider name, however a new line of information now appears beneath the listing which shows the city in which the program takes place. We plan to add a "search-by-city" option in the future.

Please take a look at your free listings and help us update our data with city information.

2. New means to view language programs--we have set up a new "language program by language" menu which provides easier access to users interested in learning a particular language. This new menu is available as an option from the studyabroad.com Home Page. Language programs can still be located by country.

3. New country pages--We have added 6 new country pages which are available from our "Search by Country" menu. The following new country pages have been added: Nepal, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, Ukraine, and "Middle East-other." The sixth new country is the United States, added due to demand from students outside the US.

4. We have also eliminated some graphics from our Home Page which allows for faster loading. In addition, the main menu choices on our Home Page are now more descriptive, making the system easier to use.

Check out these changes and let us know what you think!

SYSTEM UPGRADES

We have recently taken several steps to make studyabroad.com more responsive and more dependable:

We are now a day or two away from final installation of our new 256k digital circuit. This "larger pipe" will allow quicker access to our information and should cut out "time-outs" and "server busy" problems which can occur during peak periods.

The 256k line is now in place and we are awaiting delivery of a router from our service provider which is in final testing. As soon as we receive the router, we will switch over to the faster circuit. This upgrade was originally to have been in place about a month ago, however the router was back-ordered, a result of the explosion of Internet usage and the subsequent demand for communications equipment. (See "STATE OF THE NET" below). We will continue to keep you informed regarding progress on this item.

We have also added an additional computer to our system. This machine will serve as a "live" back-up to our web server. If there was ever a failure of the primary server, we can quickly "switch on" the back-up machine and continue to serve our pages.

This second machine will also be used for some of the administrative jobs which were previously handled by the primary server. Switching these jobs from the primary server will free up all of its resources for serving web pages, making response times quicker.

In addition, we have subscribed to a service which allows us to provide 24 hour monitoring of our web site. We now offer around the clock maintenance with 15 minute response time in the event of server failure.

TRAFFIC REPORT

Traffic on the studyabroad.com server continues to grow at a remarkable rate. Since we launched our service in September, our number of pages served has grown at an average 14% every week! Here is a look at some stats comparing February with January.

Statistic

TOTAL PAGES SERVED
January: 36,487
February: 59,562 (+63%)

HIGHEST NUMBER OF PAGES IN A SINGLE DAY
January: 2,086 on 1/25/96
February: 2,851 on 2/13/96 (+37%)

NUMBER OF "ELECTRONIC POSTCARDS" SENT
January: 694
February: 1,070 (+54%)

MAJOR SEARCH SERVICE REFERRALS

Infoseek
January: 784
February: 1,507 (+92%)

Web Crawler
January: 1,120
February: 1,120 (flat)

Yahoo
January: 690
February: 963 (+40%)

Excite
January: 713
February: 920 (+29%)

Altavista
January: 391
February: 553 (+41%)

Lycos
January: 79
February: 181 (+129%)

Opentext
January: 69
February: 101 (+46%)

WHO VISITS OUR SITE?

While studyabroad.com is primarily a resource for students and educators in the U.S., a look at the hosts which have visited our web site in the month of February shows us that we are truly an international resource. 8.7% of our traffic this month came from outside of the United States. In fact, we know of a student from the Philippines who learned about a program in the U.K. via studyabroad.com and submitted an on-line application!

Here's a breakdown of our traffic by domain of the browser:
24,943 (56%) .edu --U.S. Educational
9,366 (21%) .com --U.S. Commercial
3,628 (8%) .net --Network
495 .org --Non-Profit
170 .gov --U.S. Government
23 .mil --U.S. Military
399 .us --United States

1,099 .ca --Canada
514 .se --Sweden
511 .no --Norway
411 .uk --United Kingdom
285 .jp --Japan
250 .dk --Denmark
210 .fi --Finland
191 .sg --Singapore
163 .mx --Mexico
140 .nl --Netherlands
136 .au --Australia
122 .be --Belgium
121 .fr --France
117 .at --Austria
90 .es --Spain
73 .cr --Costa Rica

The Remaining 704 pages were served to hosts in 34 additional countries.

NOTE: A certain number of browsers come to us without their names translated. In other words their host machine is not set up to identify itself when users browse the web, so to us, they're just numbers. In February 15,420 of the pages we served were served to "unknowns." The percentages above are for "known" domains.

NEW CUSTOMERS

studyabroad.com would like to welcome the following sponsors to our system. These are new advertisers since our last newsletter:

Bond University
Bowling Green State University
Budapest Semester in Mathematics (St. Olaf College)
College Consortium for Study Abroad
Findhorn College
Forester Instituto Internacional
Friends World Program
IPEE Language School
Jerusalem Fellowships
Missouri Western State College
SUNY New Paltz
US-China Cultural Exchange Center
Walkabout Travel Gear

UTILIZING THE TECHNOLOGY

Perhaps one of the greatest advantages to promoting study abroad programs on-line vs. in print is the interactive nature of the medium. Students who browse customer information on the studyabroad.com web site can express interest in a program, and request further information with the click of a button.

studyabroad.com offers customers the "electronic postcard," an on-line form which students can fill out from their web browsers and send via e-mail. The postcard is easy to use, reliable and travels instantaneously. In essence, it works just like the paper "reply" card which you may be attaching to your posters.

Our customers who have been utilizing the "electronic postcard" have been pleased. One of our master sponsors is reporting receipt of about 7 inquiries per day, and the quality of the inquiries is perceived to be better than average.

Two of our advertisers have taken this technology a step further and are now accepting applications on-line. Both have waived application fees for on-line applications. One of the advertisers has had the on-line application available since the beginning of the year and has received 5 applications so far. The other on-line application has been available for just about two weeks and none have been submitted yet.

Both advertisers using the on-line application are receiving the applicant's data in the form of an e-mail message which is generated from a form on a web page. They are then taking the data and transferring it onto paper and returning it via regular mail to the student for a hard copy signature. Since the e-mail travels instantaneously, the hard copy application can in many cases be waiting in the student's mailbox within a day or two.

One of the biggest potential benefits of using the electronic postcard and the on-line application is the capacity to import data directly from the on-line form into a database. In a database, the information can be safely and systematically stored, viewed, retrieved, sorted, followed up on, and printed as needed. We have a great deal of experience in developing databases and would be happy to work with any organization interested in setting up such a system.

The development of the Internet has been amazing. There is no doubt in our minds that this medium will significantly impact the future of commerce worldwide. Many major developments have occurred in just in the past few months, here are some highlights:

Microsoft announced a multi-million dollar strategy to become a significant, if not the dominant player in the Internet business. Their Microsoft Network (MSN) will be recast as an Internet Service Provider, not just a support system to their software libraries. MSN will do battle with America Online, CompuServe and thousands of little service providers. They have introduced a net browser to compete with Netscape, introduced server software, purchased several standard-setting web authoring software companies and incorporated Internet access tools into most of their current software products.

The US government has signed into law revolutionary telecommunications reform. Today, most of us have one or two communications ports into our homes or offices. Most are telephone and cable TV and are currently analog technology. The high-tech communications backbones of the world are digital (fiber optics, satellite and microwave). There is currently a higher demand for communications capacity than there is supply, and without reform, the problem was projected to worsen. The new telecommunications act allows anyone to deliver communications services from these high tech, high speed backbones (highways) to your desk. Over the next several years we should see an explosion of alternative communications delivery systems such as cable modems, digital telephones, 2-way microwave dishes and low cost digital cellular service. These will help deliver high speed telecommunications across the country and should help address the huge capacity demand that the Internet has helped create.

The major telephone carriers have not been watching, they have been wiring. MCI and Sprint have been large suppliers to the Internet's backbone and now have been joined by AT&T. AT&T just announced that it will offer each of its 60 million residential customers five free hours of Internet access each month. Unlimited access will be offered at $19.95 per month. The potential impact of this volume is staggering. America Online is the world's largest Internet access provider and on-line service with over four million customers. With one announcement and a "whole lotta" modems, AT&T may soon overtake them and significantly increase Internet traffic.

Adding to this dramatic news is a continual stream of press releases about new services, new technologies and new mergers. It is estimated that 27% of the US economy is covered by the telecommunications reform act. We believe that communications technology is the future of doing business and are proud to offer a service that is state-of-the-art as well as state-of-the-industry. The value of our service is not only in providing web pages, but also in offering a comprehensive, well publicized, on-line marketing system.

Send Feedback to:
webmaster@studyabroad.com

(610) 364-0400
http://www.studyabroad.com