iNATION VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES FOR INTERNET BUSINESS.

A Breed Apart.

A new breed of Internet community is opening new local and national opportunities. The iNation opportunity features a unique network of virtual communities that combines personal and business environments into comprehensive, synergistic and interactive societies. In essence, the community network is building and evolving to a virtual nation based on choices and needs of individuals within US cities and beyond. The communities provide seamless information and marketing forums with unique appeal. Unique because they offer branded environments for enterprise and special interests. Unique because they form a natural, real world media base in place of offensive pop up and banner media so common on the Internet. Unique because the community environments are organic and evolving based on user and member preferences. iNation offers an integrated mix of traditional marketing, Internet technology and interactive communication techniques into its community structure and network. The community network is supported by a growing media universe of search engine ranked special interest websites that provide credibility and built-in mass audience drawing power. One system bridges all the Internet-to-traditional personal and business gaps. iNation: a breed apart.

The Core Neighborhood

There are three essential types of places in every person's life: the place they live, the place they work, and the places they gather for personal and social interactivity. The third type of place traditionally involved local cafes, beauty shops, pubs, and town squares. It is a neighborhood connection that built relationships and a sense of belonging.

When the automobile-centric, suburban, high rise, fat food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many of these "third places," the social fabric of existing communities became thin and de-personalized. The Internet is a kind of Third Place, on a hyper, McDonaldized scale. In the traditional community, we search through out a pool of neighbors and professional colleagues, of acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances -- in order to find people who share our values and interests. In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favorite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with those who share our passions, interests, and personal or business needs.

City And Business Neighborhoods

A neighborhood is a close geographic social unit. A community based on proximity. The Internet provides a platform for expanding and transcending geographic constraints. It bridges physical gaps to provide access to similar social and business groups according to interests and needs. Strong communities are planned and organic in growth and interactivity. That's at the heart of iNation communities. Each city-based community is comprised of numerous interest-based neighborhoods. It offers layers of interactive functions for personal and branded business participation. The environment is rich with opportunity for businesses and organizations that have a need to provide information to and interactively communicate with specific local population segments, organization members and customers.

Dot VC: Virtual Communities On The Move

iNation has developed a virtual community and branding concept build and support a unique network state and city specific communities. The .VC registry is branded to personify Virtual Community and to become a strong base and unifier for the iNation communities. The concept is designed to provide a turnkey platform and environment to draw mass local audiences and provide vertical social, civic and business space to provide purposeful interactivity benefits. The system provides built-in community building promotion mechanisms and a host of professional tools and services to benefit all types of users. The vertical spaces offer branding and sub-branding opportunities for profit and not-for-profit organizations in each local city area. The structure is comprehensive and self-supporting so that member organizations need no technical savvy to make full use of the system.

What Characterizes an Enterprise Vortal Community?

The Internet offers many gateways or portal entries to the World Wide Web environment. These gateways are best understood through a review of online community structures such as Yahoo, AOL, and Google. They are massive, successful gateways offering easy access to information and multi-channels for interactive participation. The successful portals provide personalized and user responsive environments. Most of all, they are information and link stations that quickly become comfortable gathering places for people and opportunities for business. A unique user of a gateway community environment is a person who usually begins each Internet session with a visit to that gateway community to see what's new and say hello to friends in that community. Yahoo has 115 million unique users. AOL has 75 million. Google is a search engine environment that has 55.6 million unique users.

These unique gateway communities are commonly referred to as portals because they are web entry points. Another type of more vertical community is springing up under the banner of vortals (vertical portals). The vortal communities are designed to serve more specific niche needs of organizations and Internet users. The vertical, "niche" nature of vortal communities is usually targeted for enterprise or organizational purposes. Online audiences are identified more narrowly and primarily in relationship to the organization hosting the vortal community. In this way, they fulfill a specific need for an Internet gathering place where organization or individuals sharing the same interests can congregate to interact, collaborate or transact in the digital marketplace. A rapidly growing number of market-based communities are being created to meet this need. These web communities are inviting to users because they are alive with good information, discussions, products, content, friends etc. The more people that visit a community site the more it adds to what people are looking for. Research indicates that once the visitor becomes loyal to a good vortal community site they usually keep coming back.

Beyond Gateways: The iNation Opportunity

Enterprise and organization vortal communities can be distinguished by the types of functions they provide. The enterprise information vortal is designed to present internal and external information via Web-based, central access. The enterprise collaboration vortal extends access to information to include all required tasks and services. The enterprise unification vortal allows the integration of heterogeneous (dissimilar user group) applications from various providers.

The information Vortal focuses on the management of information available, while collaboration and unification portals focus on transactions. Information vortals provide the technical means to make all the back-end systems available - including all their data, information, and functions - to personalize them, integrate them, and to ensure the user's ability to execute transactions. To optimize manual processes, a unification vortal offers a technical platform that enables users to exchange event-driven data between different functions and systems, which then triggers follow-up processing. Users can control event-dependent functions without having to deal with the interfaces between various applications and systems. They can access information, applications, and services provided by the vortal through traditional or mobile devices.

The pure information vortal was formerly reserved for business management, but today, customers demand access to information and much more. A successful community must also be transaction based with integrated business applications. From an IT perspective, vortals must function as an open, virtual integration platform for heterogeneous back-end systems and integrate those systems with comprehensive workflow scenarios. The openness of systems allows both the creation of cross-company processes and transparency of those processes. A dynamic and robust vortal structure supports business-to-business, business-to-consumer, business-to-employee and user-to-user communication.

Practically every business or organization of any kind can utilize the multi-function community concept to redefine the way they manage their information and target audience goals and objectives. The iNation vortal community model encompasses and provides synergism for all of these criteria and options. Core functions are integration, automation, flexibility and customization. The developers of iNation are a leader in providing automated online reseller systems that integrate all the necessary applications to work seamlessly as one system. In the process, new technologies have been developed to dramatically improve workplace integration, collaboration, e-commerce and marketplace integration.