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Need
examples? In the following you will find only the most
relevant ones, in chronological order. Going through
them, we hope, you will able to evaluate and appreciate
how our uncommon long-term vision of the evolution of
ICT could effectively be used to help you solve your
business application requirements.
1992 - ESSAI: first
Italian e-commerce trial
It is 1992:
- Internet is still in its infancy (mainly an academic
network), the Web has not yet seen the light ... ,
- in the telecom world there is great excitement and
enthusiasm about the perspectives of broadband ATM
networking,
- a basic question starts circulating: where are the
applications for the broadband networks?
ESSAI - "Experimental Service
Sale Automation over an Integrated Broadband Communication
Network" is a research and development project,
partly financed by the European Union, that COSI has
devised and coordinated in order to experiment with
multimedia tele-shopping applications (at that time
e-commerce was still an unknown word!) for the sales
of services and goods through public terminals over
broadband ATM networks.
In 1994 we had the first public trial in Milano over
an experimental ATM link made available by Telecom Italia
in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele; then, the following year,
we had the second public trial in Zurich (CH), over
the city ATM MAN.
Who else in Italy can challenge our primacy in the
development of e-commerce applications? 
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1994 - First Internet
base ticketing service for the Arena di Verona
The service has been active for over eight years now,
and has substantially changed since its first implementation.
But in 1994, when it was firstly launched, it was a
really pioneering development when compared to the current
use of the Internet as a show room (at the beginning
too!), and certainly not as a transactional environment.
Today the service is operated over a robust, high performance
ticketing platform, developed by us, that allows to
run all the front and back-office procedures of an on-line
ticketing service for entertainment events (theatre,
music, concerts, sport, shows, museum, etc.).
 would
you like to come with us to the Arena di Verona?
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1994 - EPHOS: Handbook
for the Procurement of EDI technology by the
European Public Administration
In order to reduce and harmonise the different policies
of the European Public Administrations with regard to
procurement of ICT technologies, the EU Commission undertook
an ambitious programme, EPHOS (European Procurement
Handbook for Open Systems), aimed at assisting the Administrations
in their procurement activities of information an communication
technology product and services.
In the time span of a few years, EPHOS published a
number of handbooks aimed at facilitating the understanding,
by public procurers, of the appropriate technical standards
to be requested to ICT technology providers.
In 1994, by recognising the authoritative standing
of COSI in the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) sector,
DG XII of the EU Commission commits to COSI the coordination
of Technical Drafting Team (TDT) in charge of providing
the content of the European Procurement Handbook for
Open Systems - EDI.
The work group, consisting of COSI and FINSIEL (I),
releases the publication of the EDI HandBook by the
end of 1994.
top
1995 - X.400 and SMTP
messaging systems
As a logical consequence of its long and vast experience
in OSI (Open System Interconnection) standards and the
related applications, COSI, during the first half of
the 90's, undertook a technological scouting activity
aimed at identifying the best solutions available on
the market for X.400 corporate messaging. Following
this investigation, COSI subscribed distribution agreements
for Italy with the companies maXware (NO) and Net-Tel
(UK).
The maXware and Net-Tel messaging systems, after localisation
and customisation, were provided by COSI to several
national operators offering commercial messaging services.
These systems, even though messaging services are today
mainly based on SMTP, are still operational and fully
interconnected with Internet-based messaging systems
thanks to a X.400-SMTP gateway solution that COSI has
designed, integrated and still maintains for some of
the major Italian telecom operators.
The co-operation with Net-Tel, that in the meantime
changed its name in ClearSwift, is still going on today
and is mainly focused on the provision of solutions
for policy-based e-mail content management systems (anti-virus,
anti-spam, etc.) for corporates, and Service Providers.
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1995 - WebPay: secure
payment system over the Internet
It is 1995 ..., Internet represents a great opportunity
for the development of e-commerce applications in the
business-to-computer domain but, unfortunately, the
current solutions to protect sensitive data involved
in on-line payment transactions are still inadequate.
SSL, in the version admitted for export by the USA Department
of Defense (DoD), offers inadequate protection as well.
We have an idea, here at COSI: we develop WebPay,
a plug-in for the main web browsers, which can encrypt
the sensitive payment data and authenticate the end-user
of an on-line transaction. The algorithm used is Pretty
Good Privacy (PGP), of which legal implementations exist
at the European level providing digital security key-lengths
of 1024 and 2048 bits, more than enough to adequately
protect any transactions.
It's a good idea, but COSI in 1995 is still a young
company and deals with it rather naively!
Another company, more "important" and, surely,
more cunning is very swift to subtract the idea in a
way which can be defined shameless, at the very minimum.
They are swift develop a product that, also in the name,
resembles very closely WebPay.
It is a pity, but the errors of youth have to be paid!
Anyhow WebPay represents
another example of our ability "to look forward"
in the world of the innovative applications of ICT technologies.
 download
the WebPay
brochure (.pdf ˜150 kb). It is an old story
now, but it is interesting anyway.
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1995 - Internet-in-a-box
Another record of COSI consists in the signature of
one of the first distribution agreements, at the Italian
level, for an Internet suite of products. Internet-in-a-box,
by Spry-CompuServe, is really one of the very first
commercial entrants in the Italian market of Internet-based
networking products (Web browser, mail client, news
client, FTP, etc.).
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1996 - SGML, HTML
and XML authoring environment
In 1996, in consideration of the growing importance
of descriptive markup languages in the development of
network-based applications, COSI undertakes a distribution
and technical cooperation agreement with SoftQuad
Inc., a Canadian company leader in the development of
products and authoring environments for SGML ("Standard
Generalised Markup Language", an ISO standard since
1986) and HTML (an SGML "dialect" that has
experienced a phenomenal growth and market penetration
thanks to the widespread acceptance of the World Wide
Web service).
After many years, and even after their incorporation
in Corel, the cooperation
with SoftQuad continues today and extends to their new
suite of XML products and authoring environments.
top
1998 - TRADE: e-commerce
applications for broadband Internet
TRADE, "Trials in the domain
of electronic commerce" was a research and development
project, partly funded by the EU in the framework of
the ACTS (Advanced Communication Technologies and Services),
aimed at experimenting, in public trials, the first
e-commerce applications over broadband extensions of
the Internet. COSI was the original proposer and, later
on, the coordinator and prime contractor of the research
consortium of European companies that successfully carried
out the project.
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