"The Internet is an explosion like nothing we've ever seen before," declared Bob Davis, CEO of Lycos, the Internet search engine company, to an overflow crowd at the fourth annual Harvard Business School Cyberposium held last February at HBS. "In terms of the rate of growth and the numbers of people who are gaining access everyday," Davis noted, "it's making the personal computer revolution in the early 1980s look tame."

Titled "The Digital Field of Dreams," Cyberposium '97 was cochaired by Mike Dodd and Thomas Hoegh (both Class of 1997). They provided leadership for the more than seventy student volunteers from the Communications, Media, and Computing Ventures Club who organized seven provocative panel discussions and a number of leading-edge product demonstrations and entrepreneurial workshops. The two-day event attracted more than nine hundred attendees, twice as many as last year. Said Dodd of the conference's goals: "We wanted to ignite aspirations and implant some ideas for people to think about pursuing in the future."

The Cyberposium (http://wasat.hbs.edu/cmc/cyberposium) offered a comprehensive look at an emerging industry that is fast becoming a dominant presence and an attractive career path for many HBS students. Students fall into two camps, Hoegh explained, with regard to the Internet. "The first group is interested out of fear," he said. "Employers expect them to be up-to-date on technology simply because they are young and attend a business school that touts its Internet compatibility." For a second group of more online-savvy students, the Internet is viewed as a tremendous opportunity. "We're entering a new age," Hoegh asserted, "where you can build something worthwhile and gain worldwide brand recognition in as little as eighteen months."

Keynote speaker John Sculley, a self-described "venture catalyst" and the CEO of Live Picture, Inc., gave a demonstration of new technologies created by his company that make possible services such as Internet-based cybertours of remote locations around the world. Sculley said that a virtual walk-through of real-estate properties for sale at distant locations can be developed and offered by an online service for as little as $20,000.

In another look at the Net's commercial capabilities, a group of online entrepreneurs were panelists for a discussion, moderated by HBS professor David Bell, titled "The Future of Retailing." Participants reported success in leveraging advanced technology to reach more customers and provide better service. Tuck Rickards (MBA '91), CEO of Virtual Emporium, an online shopping company, predicted that "in the next five years, we'll see a gradual transformation of the Web from an information resource to a transaction platform in most content areas."

The panelists agreed that while secure transactions can now be guaranteed, the Internet will need more compelling sites if it is to capture the imagination and spending habits of consumers. That goal, they noted, will depend to a large extent on the availability of increased bandwidth and compression technologies, which speed access to information and facilitate navigation within a site.

At a session titled "Far Future," panelist Bill Taylor, founder and editor of Fast Company magazine, asked, "Has all this new technology improved our lives or made us more productive?" Steve McGeady, an Intel group vice president and director, quickly responded, "Would you give it up?" McGeady also offered some amusing conjecture about an emerging class of "cybernomads" who will be judged by the number of battery-powered devices they routinely carry on their person.

With special events such as the Cyberposium complementing a curriculum whose content and presentation are increasingly online and interactive, HBS students seem well-positioned to help contribute to the development of cyberspace. As HBS associate professor John Deighton, who moderated a panel titled "Online Media," observed at the Cyberposium's conclusion: "HBS is dedicated to preparing students for the information economy. Technology is being presented, and truly understood, in terms of its integral relationship to business."

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