The winner of the bid would be the only e-commerce button on the OSU web, an attractive option to the web portal vendor. OSU would get a percentage of every sale through the portal, with a minimum amount specified in the contract. This would not prevent OSU departments, faculty, staff, and students from purchasing from any web vendor of their choice. The discussion revolved around OSU's leasing the name of the stadium and its exclusive contract with Coke as precedents. There was support for concern about local businesses.
Questions remain about the use of the revenue generated.
OSU would have an equity interest in the lab, which would be looking at intelligent interfaces and improvement of teaching. Richard Warren, formerly of MIT, is a principal in the company. See the attachment in the next message for more details on this project. It helps to have someone thinking way out of the box, then find others who are willing to discuss it and take small steps to it. Deborah mentioned that she'd been working on having the people at the University of Washington's UWired project to come and talk to us and any other interested parties here about it.