June 3, 1999
RCFoC: Technological Whiplash!
One measure of when a technology "makes it" is when it has garnered 50 million users. When electricity was introduced it took 50 years to reach that point. Broadcast radio took 38 years. TV took just 13 years. And the Web? About 3.
Industry Standard: Softbank, 7-Eleven Japan to Open Net Book Biz.
Distribution is where the new Japanese service departs from the Amazon model. Customers who order books will be able to pick them up and pay for them at any one of 7-Eleven's nearly 8,000 convenience stores nationwide...
NY Times: For New Online Grocer, High-Tech Warehouse is Key.
...consumers have been wary of grocery services, partly because they do not want to set aside a two-hour window of time during which their groceries may be delivered.
Builder.Com: Critique of Catalog City.
Every click produced what I expected to find. And at every turn, my options were clear and limited, and the most important ones were the most prominent.
Red Herring: AOL approaches content crossroads.
The Spinner.com and Nullsoft acquisitions suprised some observers because they hark back to the days when AOL tried to buy and build its own content, an expensive strategy that the company has shunned in recent years.
PC World: RemarQable Discussion.
Rather than succumbing to the allure of the portal model, RemarQ continues to chant its newsgroups-only mantra.
Wired News: Show Me E-Money.
E-commerce companies have searched for a universal system for selling goods online that's easy to use and inexpensive to control. But "e-cash" has been an e-dud.
Washington Post: Information Highway Indeed.
Soon, look for minute-ly customer service, minute-ly inventory updating, even minute-ly restaurant reservations online. But for an early glimpse of the Internet-time work style, check out the Net newsies.
ZDNN: Wal-Mart set to boost online effort.
"It’ll be a new approach to the business. It’s a good opportunity for our customer service," Brown said, adding that Wal-Mart sees the Internet as "a significant opportunity" for its business.
TechWeb: E-Commerce Forecasts Seen As Too Conservative.
Information is moving in the direction of becoming a free commodity, which is bearish for many traditional providers of news, sports, and financial information...
News.Com: Bluetooth consortium preps first spec.
...after a year of development, the consortium is a few weeks away from publication of the first specification, and one of the first member companies asserts that Bluetooth will soon be a reality.
Red Herring: Venture-backed Internet companies take off in Europe.
Jupiter advises European Internet companies to adopt free access and unlimited-use policies to take full advantage of the momentum towards Internet usage and e-commerce.
Red Herring: ETranslate speaks the language of money.
Based in San Francisco, eTranslate offers translation services to e-commerce companies wanting to develop virtual stores for foreign markets and to other organizations needing to translate documents.
NY Times: Web Growth Spurt in Spanish and Portuguese.
Latin American governments, aware of the need to promote local Internet access and business so that more precious dollars do not flow overseas, are also beginning to look at ways to encourage more people to get on line.
News.Com: Search firm gets $25 million influx.
"Every portal over time should be a customer," Moritz said. "We should be a key supplier to any company on the Internet that wants a search function."
Salon: Be true to your portal.
Registered users spend around three times more time at their preferred portal than non-registered users, and visit three to six times as many pages.
Forbes: Survey: Personalization makes sites stickier.
Nielsen/NetRatings compared registered users at Yahoo! and Netscape's web sites with unregistered users
News.Com: WebTV to add more entertainment options.
In essence, WebTV plans to blanket the market with set-top boxes that will fit a variety of niches.
TechWeb: WebTV Drops Hard Disk For Flash Device.
Initially, subscribers were really excited about having a hard drive in there. But it wasn't really that great for a television environment. It was kind of loud."
Red Herring: Qwest and VCs buy into Advanced Radio Telecom.
This investment will finance the expansion and deployment of Advanced Radio's high-speed local wireless network, which addresses the critical "last mile" of Internet access.
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