InfoMall is an innovative technology transfer program based upon the ACTION-NYS program and designed to help create an HPCC software industry and produce new software products and services for the information age. InfoMall uniquely combines economic development funding, high technology research centers, industry partners, small business entrepreneurs, and business support organizations to apply state of the art information technologies to industry, school districts, hospitals, small businesses, and government services.
We use the analogy of a retail shopping mall to communicate our approach to linking emerging technologies, "virtual corporations", business support, and new markets. As in a shopping mall, InfoMall will contain superstores of equipment vendors (Digital, IBM, MasPar, New York Telephone, Oracle), large company and small business product stores (Kodak, Martin-Marietta, MCC, NYNEX), software boutiques (Portland Group Inc., CRi, Isis, Sonnet Software), an education wing (NPAC, Booz-Allen Hamilton, Cornell, The Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), NYSERNet), a marketing wing (Booz-Allen Hamilton, IBM Federal Systems Company, Integrated Systems Solutions Corp., Sterling Software), off-the-shelf technologies, incubator space, and a jobs office. Unlike the shopping mall, InfoMall does not require a single physical location as commerce is conducted electronically using email, telephone and collaborative technologies.
Consumers of InfoMall products will have different needs and "shop" in different parts of the mall. Industry managers might enter the mall through training courses and workshops offered in the education wing. Software companies may seek out a combination of off-the-shelf technologies and emerging technologies that have not yet reached the marketplace. Large corporations can visit the marketing wing to develop new markets for products enhanced by InfoMall technologies. InfoMall funtions like a virtual corporation providing an intellectual hub for the emerging HPCC software marketplace. Technology developers, HPCC vendors and industrial and government consumers form teams to develop new high-tech solutions to difficult problems. The goal of InfoMall is to create new commercial products and opportunities for an emerging software industry located in the United States. Through InfoMall, the US will be well placed to host the HPCC commercial explosion that will inevitably take place in this decade.
For more details on the InfoMall program, visit the InfoMall.