Seuss, who received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1978, founded the $65-million Spinnaker Software Corporation before he created Northern Light last fall. Spinnaker has since been sold to Softkey International, a Canadian software firm.

The inspiration for Northern Light was simple, Seuss says." We made the observation that when someone searched the [World Wide Web], they were drawing from a database of, on average, low-quality resources, compared to premium resources like Lexus-Nexus," he says.

Seuss says Northern Light hopes to fill this void by bringing "premium" information to the Web.

"We are not trying to invent media," he says. "Instead, we hope to help sectors where quality information is important, where time is money , like analysis for businesses."

Thus far, publications have been happy to be included in Northern Light's premium document database, Seuss says.

"We have an irresistible pitch," he says. "We can process content in any format. There is no additional cost for the publication. We handle the transaction and a percentage of sales goes back to the publication, so they're getting additional revenue at no additional cost."

Despite all of its promising features, however, Northern Light has yet to show its profitability.

Unlike Yahoo and AltaVista, Northern Light does not contain advertisements of any sort. Instead, the $1 to $4 fee users must pay to view "premium" articles are to be the main source of revenue, Seuss says.