Once upon a time, the Internet was a scary thing for insuranceagents, especially those selling what might be considered commoditypoliciesterm life and personal auto. Consumers, said theprognosticators, were going to shun humans in favor of lesspersonal, more private Web sites. The Internet was going to changethe way carriers did business, with those Web sites becoming thefront end of the industry, and agents relegated to E&S andother complex policies.

But the Internet revolutionor, rather, the Web revolutionneverhappened. Consumers may have checked out sites like InsWeb, butthey still turned to agents and direct writers when it came time tobuy. Carriers who spent time and money creating and crafting theirWeb sites found better uses for their personnel. And the Internet,once the nemesis of the insurance agent, became just a bit of apaper tiger.

But the Internet didnt go away from the insurance business,obviouslyit went behind the scenes. Back-end processes that tookadvantage of this relatively free network became the importantthing. Connections between branches, offices, employees, andpartners took precedence over consumer-oriented, point-of-purchaseWeb sites.

So while agents fretted about the Internet, then realized itwasnt as bad as all that, the Net grew quietly in the background.Andwithout the fanfare and hand-wringing of the first go-roundtheNet has been changing the face of the insurance industry. Andagents are still around. Imagine that.

The revolution has come in the process of insurancethe supplychain, some call it. The Internet and the changes it has forced(new data standards, different workflow, and so on) havestreamlined the business process, giving savvy carriers theopportunity to save money with the right technologies. And many ofthem are doing just thatread on to see how.

Andrew Kantor
Editor-in-Chief

What Fools They Be

Its April, when, traditionally, an editors fancy turns tothoughts of Tom Foolery.

Running April Fools jokes has long been a tradition of manyotherwise stoic publications, from local newspapers to nationalmagazines.

Science magazine Discover is one of the most consistentpurveyors of fake news stories in April. (See www.discover.com/science_news/fool.html.)Its pieces have included stories on the discovery of a50,000-year-old Neanderthal tuba, the unearthing of the Holy Grail,and Arctic mole-rats with heat-organs on their heads that burrowthrough the ice and prey on penguins.

Cincinnati-based Artscapes April events calendar includeslistings like reviews of a movie by Robert Altman in which HollyHunter plays a movie studio executive in New Zealand: The PlayerPiano. And Connecticut magazines April jokes included one aboutflatworm beauty contests.

PC Computing got plenty of mail when columnist John Dvorak wroteabout a Senate bill that would outlaw drunken driving on theInformation Superhighway.

Even venerable Scientific American has gotten in on the act,running April stories that included one demonstrating thatEinsteins special theory of relativity contained a logical flaw;one about a chess program that had established, with a high degreeof probability, that pawn to kings rook 4 is a win for White; andone of a diagram of a flush toilet attributed to one of Leonardo deVincis lost notebooks.

My old haunt, Internet World, ran a news story about theScentMaster 2000, which allowed personal computers to generateodors from .OLF files. It was years later, in 2000 in fact, thatreal scent boards were announced.

The Orlando Sentinels Sunday magazine ran a feature story on atrainable, cockroach-eating rodent called the Tasmanian MockWalrus, that fooled thousands of readers who wanted to buythem.

So, too, with Gamess 1997 April Foolone I had the pleasure ofco-authoringthat told the story of Orions Crystal, an invisiblepuzzle taking the toy world by storm. Hundreds of readers bombardedlocal (and confused) toy stores with phone calls and visitsdemanding one.

Arguably the most famous magazine April Fools joke is TheCurious Case of Sidd Finch, written by George Plimpton for SportsIllustrated. It features the tale of one Hayden Siddhartha (Sidd)Finch, a Buddhist pitcher recruited by the New York Mets who couldthrow a baseball with deadly accuracy at 168 miles per hour.Complete with photos and quotes from players, the article was sucha success it spawned a novel.

So April has become a special month for we editor types. Why amI telling you this? No reason. AK

Want more? Eric Berlin, co-author of the Orions Crystalpiece, has a terrific article on the history of such jokes atwww.ericberlin.com/reader.html.