March 30, 1999
Useit.Com: Spotlight of Jeff Bezos' remark that "the No. 1 thing is the customer experience.
...Amazon now forces users to scroll through more than an inch of irrelevant blurbs for their online auctions that have no relation to the book the user is looking for.
CIO Web Business: Mazed and Confused.
You don't know because at your company, as at most companies, no one has ever asked customers whether your Web site is easy to use. And what you don't know can cost you.
CIO Web Business: Self Serving Sites.
These sorts of customers don't want to conduct business relationships through the mail or over the phone anymore. They want to do it on the Net.
NY Times: Discussion Areas on News Sites Aren't Just for Rants.
Rather than simply "talking back" to editors, readers can talk among themselves.
CIO WebBusiness: Defend or Attack?
Q&A with John Hagel. But the moment you move into an attacker mind-set, it really forces you to ask the more fundamental questions about what business you're really in, who your customers are, is there a new kind of customer you could be serving through the Internet.
Information Week: Online Data's FineLine.
Still, companies embracing E-commerce realize that exploiting customer data is one of the advantages of that online, real-time medium.
ClickZ: The Network Vision.
...web marketing can learn a lot from the process on linking, interdependencies, and just downright realizing that it's not the network technology, it's the people.
InfoWorld: No single formula for Web projects.
"In the future, Internet service firms will have to combine business consulting, technical, and creative skills..."
ZDNN: Robin Abrams on the 'Zen of Palm'.
Q&A with Robin Abrams, President 3Com's Palm Computing. You will see dramatic variations in product designs coming from the licensees, but not us. Palm Computing-branded devices will remain constant.
TechWeb: Compaq Demands Sales Support From E-Stores.
Compaq Computer said it plans to begin reauthorizing Internet retailers by early May, imposing program requirements that limit Web stores' ability to undersell its products while demanding top-notch customer support...
Wired News: IBM: From Cobol to Cool.
Now IBM Interactive faces competition from thousands of little design shops around the country, not to mention emerging powers like USWeb/CKS and Razorfish.
News.Com: Onsale unveils bid-bearing banner ads.
Viewers are encouraged to click through as pricing information on a number of products from Onsale's auctions is displayed on the banner.
Business Week: The Crucial Mission: "Provide Customers with What They Want".
Q&A with Jeffrey Bezos. I can understand why they want to do E-mail, and I can understand why they want to do stock quotes. I think there are a lot of people competing in that space, and it's an important space, and that's a good business. It's just not our business.
Useit.Com: Spotlight of the traffic on McAfee's download site after Melissa.
The general lesson is that the Web is susceptible to flash crowds and to have contingency plans to handle huge bursts in volume.
Wired News: NetSol Spams Name Holders.
"It seems to me they are using the "whois" database for their own marketing purposes. It's not what this system was intended to be used for."
Wired News: AltaVista Crawls Deeper.
The AV Photo and Media Finder scans the Web for about a dozen different media formats -- WAV, RealAudio, RealVideo, QuickTime, ASF, MPEG, AVI among them...
fatbrain.com: We Changed Our Name!
Make it easier for you to find us, type our name and remember our URL. (Let’s face it, ComputerLiteracy.com is tough to type correctly!)
USA Today: Hypervisionary sees bandwidth bonanza.
Falling costs result in less-time-consuming delivery of information, far more diverse channels of information and much greater ability to intelligently choose what particular information best suits our needs or desires at any particular moment.
MSDN Online: Technology's Next Steps.
Robert Hess. ...I see a richer and more client-exploitive experience in which there isn't a browser acting as a portal to content living elsewhere;
Freedom Forum: No new ideas in Bill Gates latest book.
Jon Katz. Looking at these rows of $30, 470-page books, it's almost defies belief that there's nothing inside any of them.
Wired News: Getting to Know What People Know.
Its flagship product is a sophisticated project-management program that stores each employee's résumé, skills, work history, performance ratings, and availability.
SF Chronicle: A Flat-Out Simpler Approach to Wireless Phone Service.
Industry watchers say flat-rate pricing has evolved because wireless companies finally are responding to consumers...
MSDN Online: Redirecting Traffic: Custom 404 Messages for IIS 4.0.
With the merge of the Site Builder Network (SBN) and MSDN Online, some 7,000 files on the former SBN have moved from the main microsoft.com cluster to a cluster called msdn.microsoft.com.
MSDN Online: Behind the Design Scenes of the New MSDN Online Site.
...look at the design process, team dynamics, user interface, and graphical approach taken through out the design process of the phenomenal and massive information-rich MSDN Online site.
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