May 24, 1999
PC Magazine: The All-Things Approach.
John C. Dvorak. And then there is this confused portal business, with every growing Web site trying to copy AOL, too. The irony is that many of them should have been specializing in one thing or another but couldn't resist trying to be AOL.
News.Com: Consumer sites offer lessons for e-business.
eBay, he noted, has moved from flea market status into high-end auctions with its acquisition of Butterfield & Butterfield and into vertical segments with its purchase of classic-car auction house Kruse International.
Webmonkey: Why Ask Why?
Too many Internet product ideas still come from Field of Dreams: "If we build it, they will come." These are ideas that sound brilliant to investors and reporters but oftentimes flop miserably when presented to real customers.
SJ Mercury: `Pioneers' put a human face on capitalism.
Q&A with author and columnist Tom Petzinger Jr. These ``pioneering companies,'' as I like to call them, are actually figuring out ways to deal with their customers as individual, sovereign, autonomous human beings.
NY Times: A Behind-the-Screens Glimpse of an Internet Retailer.
Contrary to the myths, rei.com says: Running brick-and-mortar stores has turned out to be not a liability but a huge advantage. The operating costs of the Web site have consistently gone up -- not down.
Wired News: Palm VII Goes to the Mall.
While online comparison-shopping services generally compare prices only among Net-connected retailers, Rolfe said that the PocketShopper will allow wireless PDAs to compare prices at stores without e-commerce operations.
Interactive Week: Shelving The Future.
Despite all the publicity about Jeff Bezos and his ever-expanding ambitions to sell online just about anything that doesn't move and lots of things that do, the bricks-and-mortar guys still are staring at his back bumper as he speeds away.
Interactive Week: Cascading Portals Feed Supply.
"Manufacturers will enable their resellers and share resources so that a small retailer or reseller can have the appearance of a running a multimillion-dollar site."
Salon: What does it take to make a buck off of Usenet?
No longer satisfied to serve as a nifty Usenet interface, the new Deja.com is angling for a more commercial identity, combining discussion areas with a participatory product ratings service a la Consumer Reports.
Interactive Week: Big Blue Gets InTouch With Speech.
"You can dial into the system and check e-mail; get news, weather and sports; and listen to RealAudio from Web sites, using simple voice commands..."
SJ Mercury: Wireless companies pitching data services.
Rather than connecting users to the full-blown Internet, they pass on just those bits of information that the users have said they want to receive.
News.Com: Huge leaps predicted for handhelds.
This growth will largely result from increased application development, including wireless and wired Internet access, and lower prices for the devices themselves.
Internet Week: Usage-Based Bandwidth: Pay As You Go.
...analysts say a pay as you go model is inevitable and will play a critical role in the natural evolution of the Internet becoming more like a utility.
PC Week: InfoSpinner patent for generating dynamic Web pages may ruffle feathers.
Keith Lowery, InfoSpinner's CTO, said the patent covers the process used in generating dynamic Web pages rather than a specific technology.
InfoWorld: Macromedia spreads its authoring tool wings.
Macromedia is also releasing the source code for the Flash 4 player, enabling any platform or application developers to integrate Flash playback capabilities into their products.
Industry Standard: Poor Rich Media.
The vendors of rich-media tools would like us to believe that rich-media ads are the wave of the future. But, in the meantime, fortunes are being earned on simple text and graphics.
Industry Standard: Coding Privacy.
The solution is to enable choice without words – to rely not on computers talking to humans, but on machines talking to machines.
A List Apart: The Illusion of Speed.
Jeffrey Veen. the near future, we'll be optimizing pages, squeezing every last byte from our sites, and doing whatever we can to make our designs load as quickly as possible.
Information Week: E-Commerce: New Sense of Urgency Companies rush for online market share.
Pressured by Internet startups that are rapidly amassing market share and loyal customers, established companies are making bold moves to build a bigger presence on the Web-fast.
NY Times: CDNow Struggles to be Heard.
Martin and other analysts said that Internet retailers are being increasingly taken to task by investors for the exorbitant amounts they have spent to acquire customers...
Forbes ASAP: Startup aims to turn copyrights into cash.
After it's official launch this fall, it will enable publishers to generate revenue from online content or any other content through the web.
Interactive Week: DoubleClick Elbows Into E-Commerce.
Highlighting the new initiatives are the equivalent of "syndicated stores" in which DoubleClick generates and serves custom, cobranded storefronts that can be promoted on its clients' Web sites.
News.Com: Big Blue's problem solving gets deeper.
"Deep computing combines the best of business and scientific computing techniques to find the value buried in all this data and to apply that information to solve real-world problems..."
Interactive Week: AboveNet To Buy PAIX.
...many in the access industry were dismayed to hear the PAIX would be run by a competitor, rather than a long-haul telecommunications carrier.
Industry Standard: Beyond the One-Man Band.
The app server crunches away behind the scenes, volleying instructions between the Web server and the legacy mainframe, monitoring transactions, creating and managing content that gets published on the site, storing data and more.
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