To the long and growing list of business activities being transformed by the Net, add employee benefits presentations.

Traditionally, when companies have hired people, the human resources administrator hands them a stack of brochures and papers explaining the various benefit plans. In some organizations, HR might have to schedule a half day with new people just to slog through the medical, dental, vision and legal plans.

Changes in plans trigger meetings, seminars, brochures and memos.

All this paper usually ended up in the back of a bottom drawer to be pulled out and perused only when it was needed if the employee could even find the material at all.

Richard Kagan, owner of Kagan Life & Health Insurance Services in Century City, is among those who figured that system could certainly be improved.

“People may lose or never even read the benefits book or they may not understand it. So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you were at home and wanted to know your dental benefits and a human being comes on the screen at the click of a button and explains it clear, concise, effective,'” Kagan said.

A few months ago, Kagan approached Load Media, hoping to land the tech startup as a client. But once he saw Load Media’s technology, his wheels started turning. Load Media is an Internet infrastructure and services company that hosts, delivers, and reports the delivery of data between databases and end users. Its specialty is sending out video over computer networks. Users have software and a player installed on their computer, and the company can send them video clips right to their desktops.

Delivery of such content in the past has often been accomplished through the use of so-called “push” software. The programs “push” information text, graphics, video clips, etc. down a network to any number of end-users. On the whole, push technology didn’t live up to the potential of its initial hype. It wasn’t popular with end-users because it was way pushier than people wanted.

Some software actually took over the user’s desktop entirely, demanded big pieces of real estate on small-capacity hard drives, or grabbed the whole channel so users couldn’t access the network.

Of course, no one likes a pushy insurance salesman, which Kagan knows only too well. But Load Media has developed a technology called “polite push,” which Kagan figured would be perfect for delivering employee benefits information.

“Polite push” eliminates some of these irritating aspects of the first-generation technology, because it takes the needs and activities of the user into account. It sends material only when there is available bandwidth, politely stepping aside when the user enters commands to go on the network. The program remembers where the process was stopped and resumes pushing material when the channel is open again.

Sending video still requires a lot of disk storage but hard drives are so much bigger now, that aspect of “push” is not as irritating as it once was.

When Kagan saw Load Media’s technology, he immediately realized how his clients would benefit from putting their benefit program information in video form and sending to their employees. No more long, boring hours spent repeating the same information to new-hires or explaining new programs to small groups of staffers. His clients could put out complete, accurate information 24/7 that employees could access whenever they wanted it, at their own pace.

Now Kagan is in a strategic alliance with Load Media as a value-added reseller of LM’s “polite push” technology, offering the service to his corporate clients. His decision to go on the Net is a pragmatic one.

“I’m a typical baby boomer learning to deal with the computer world slowly. But over the last year or two, we’ve found that to compete effectively with other brokerage firms, especially the larger ones, we have to be a step ahead technologically. I have a savvy staff and they’ve been pushing me and the whole company,” he explains.

Easy Come…

Supply-chain management is one of the biggest B2B applications that has been moving online over the past two years. Locally based eConnections, which provides digital links to facilitate deal-making between electronics vendors and customers, will receive at least $93 million in a still-open funding round led by private equity investment partnership Silver Lake Partners.

SLP is putting up $60 million, with the rest of the funding committed so far coming from Avnet Inc., Arrow Electronics, Red Rock Ventures, Trident Capital, Flextronics and Agile Software.

Easy Go

Remember the Secure Digital Music Initiative, the outfit that came out with what was supposed to be the consummate encryption scheme to protect copyrighted material on the Web?

SDMI last month issued a public challenge to hackers, offering them $10,000 if they could break the code.

Hackers, of course, love a challenge. The organization has received more than 400 claims of success, and it’s evaluating the merit of each before paying off.

Among the more legitimate claimants is a team of researchers from Princeton University, Rice University and Xerox Corp.

The team is promising to post on their Web site (www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/) next month a technical report explaining how it achieved the feat.

Said SDMI Executive Director Leonardo Chiariglione about the challenge: “This test will provide us with important feedback on actual conditions, and will tap the expertise of people from around the globe.”

Contributing columnist Joan Van Tassel has covered technology since 1990. Her book, “Digital TV Over Broadband: Harvesting Bandwidth,” will be published in December by Focal Press. She can be reached at [email protected].