We know how the value chain can be sliced to optimize any element, presenting opportunities and threats. We've got a number of teams (but not yet enough) working on Internet-related efforts both to attack existing value chains and/or new market needs. "Kaplan is using the Web to offer more effective, convenient, and personalized learning. By making high-quality education accessible to a broader population, we are helping people build their own success stories." Jonathan Grayer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Kaplan, Inc. kaplan.com kaplan.com's goal is to serve as a portal to Kaplan's network of educational services. Organized around four distinct businesses - kaptest, KaplanCollege, eSCORE, and BrassRing - kaplan.com is positioned to be a leading provider of educational services to those who pursue life-long learning opportunities online and off. KaplanCollege.com KaplanCollege.com aims to be the leading provider of online education for working professionals who are looking to advance their careers. Consisting of the first online law school (Concord University School of Law) as well as programs in paralegal studies, legal nurse consulting, and criminal justice, KaplanCollege.com will greatly expand its online offerings in the spring of 2000, adding programs in nursing, education, information technology, real estate, business, and management. eSCORE.com SCORE! launched eSCORE.com, the first educational services site on the Web for parents, designed to help them understand and nurture their child's individual learning needs. Emphasizing a highly customized site experience and direct contact between parents and education specialists, eSCORE.com has created a new e-education category, one that blends the best of the Internet with interactive person-to-person services. kaptest.com Launched in September 1999, kaptest.com is the premier e-commerce website providing college-bound and graduate-school-bound students nationally recognized, comprehensive test-preparation products and services. During the year, kaptest introduced online prep courses for the GMAT, GRE, LSAT, NCLEX-RN, CPA, and SAT, as well as a college admissions course and an application essay review service. Q: What exactly does HireSystems do? Besemer: In a nutshell, HireSystems helps companies hire better people faster. We use technology to shorten the time it takes to do everything in the internal hiring process: identify the right candidates, and get the candidates through the selection procedure. Q: How has HireSystems changed the hiring process? Besemer: It used to be that all the resumes for a certain job would go to human resources. Then human resources would go through the stacks of resumes, identify a few candidates, and send those resumes off to the hiring manager. It could take a long time. HireSystems can process every candidate's resume within 24 hours and deliver an electronic folder of the most likely prospects, not only to the human resources manager, but to the hiring manager's computer as well. Before the Web, you also had to install hardware and software at every hiring manager's or recruiter's desk. That, too, was very costly and time-consuming. It could easily be six months until someone was up and running. With the Web, all you need is a browser and an Internet connection. Q: How are you able to process so much information so efficiently? Besemer: We have 300 part-time employees who work from their homes using the Internet. They break down every candidate's resume into a structured data format. This makes it easier and faster to identify the best candidate. It also enables companies to analyze their candidate pool. That's really important. For example, a company can determine how many resumes came from a particular source, and of these candidates, how many were hired. So the company can make better decisions about where to invest its recruitment dollars. Q: What makes you better than your competitors? Besemer: First, our "secret sauce" - the quality with which we summarize candidate information. Second, our reputation for service. Software companies just drop off their software and disappear. As an Internet company, we service each customer day after day, month after month. But even among Internet vendors, we have a much better reputation for service. Q: How fast are you growing? Besemer: We're about five times the size we were a year ago in every metric: revenue, number of customers, number of employees. Q: What makes you different from most application service providers? Besemer: Unlike most ASPs, we use the Internet both for the front-end - what the client does - and the back-end - what we do to process a resume. That's important because it doesn't take much to be an application service provider. You can build a Web application in six months, right? What's special about HireSystems is the quality with which we handle the candidate data in our factory. Nobody could build that in six months or more. The broadband highway isn't just for city slickers. It's coming soon to Ada, OK, Pascagoula, MS, Prescott, AZ, and 40 other non-urban Cable ONE markets long before it passes most urban homes. We take great pride in serving mid-market towns that have been forgotten and bypassed by the bigger telecommunication companies. Cable ONE has survived to become the 9th largest cable operator in the United States and passes more than one million homes in these all-American towns. With 55 percent PC penetration, these towns barely lag behind the national average. And just like all other PC users today, they want Internet access and they want it fast. That's a great opportunity for Cable ONE. An important question we faced was when to launch this new service. We didn't want the high cost and obsolescence risk of the early proprietary cable modem technologies. On the other hand, we didn't want to wait for high-speed cable modem technology to be standardized and perfected before we could build our market share and our ISP know-how. So two years ago we launched CableONE.net as a traditional dial-up ISP. It's now available to 70 percent of our customers, and we're adding over 1,000 new customers per month. Our Kirksville, MO, system already has 21 percent penetration, and several other systems are approaching double-digit dial-up ISP penetration. With this experience we have built an Internet management and state-of-the-art central help desk called Solutions Center to provide the necessary friendly customer support. Today, with Cable Labs-certified standardized modems, customers can confidently buy high-speed cable modems that are as widely compatible as PC telephone modems are today. In fact, many major PC manufacturers now ship new PCs with a cable modem option. But for most customers, plug and play USB port modems will be the way to go, making customer self-installation a snap. Soon, many of our customers will have a choice of traditional dial-up or high-speed, always-on CableONE.net. In April we will launch cable modem service in four test markets: Ada, OK, Sioux City, IA, Fargo, ND, and Biloxi, MS. After thorough technical tests and marketing trials, cable modems will be rolled out in one to two systems per month beginning in October. Thirty percent of our customers will have access to the high-speed service by the end of 2000, 73 percent in 2001, and 87 percent in 2002. Cable ONE is excited about the new revenue growth and market value that high-speed cable modems will bring to The Washington Post Company, but nothing can match the excitement of the towns we serve that had feared being bypassed by the Internet superhighway. They will be on the good side of the digital divide. This is a great opportunity to solidify our already strong customer relationships!