June 15, 1999
ClickZ: At Your Service.
Not only are we missing the chance to build customer confidence in the web, we are also not realizing the cost advantage and customer loyalty benefits that result from great, personalized web-based customer service.
Industry Standard: Mass Appeal.
An estimated 22 million more people will go online in 1999. That's a lot of new users - attracting them requires making your site easy to use. But most Web sites aren't built with the masses in mind.
Time Digital: One Less Reason to Leave the House.
The real stroke of genius is the Streamline Box, a secure, keypad-locked container that incorporates shelving and a freezer, and which Streamline will install at no extra cost in your basement or your garage.
News.Com: Electronics dealers face tough market online.
Challenges in moving online include keeping their regional store managers happy, working out regional pricing differences and possible channel conflicts, and planning to compensate employees who refer customers to the Web site to buy...
FEED Magazine: The Irrelevance of Nationalism Online.
Clay Shirky. Once a country gets sufficiently wired, the economic force of the internet has little to do with ethnicity or national sentiment and much to do with the unsurprising fact that given two offers of equal value, people all over the world will take the cheaper one, no matter who is offering it to them.
Forbes: Ugly duckling or swan?
Amid all the talk these days about broadband, the two technologies most often mentioned are cable and DSL. Wireless is gaining ground slowly, but the technology that commands the least respect is satellite.
News.Com: FCC's Kennard slams open access ruling.
...William Kennard predicted chaos and stymied growth for the Internet if local authorities were allowed to regulate broadband services.
Wired News: Barlow: Music Wants to Be Free.
"This does not mean that I don't think that copyright has some value in cyberspace. But the revolution is about giving that control back to the people who create."
Industry Standard: Trouble for DoubleClick.
Faced with declining banner efficacy and the obvious handicaps of trying to target consumer messages broadly across the Internet, DoubleClick, like any banner-ad network, is trying to prepare for the next wave of Web marketing.
News.Com: NSI-ICANN fight threatens Net growth.
[Esther Dyson, ICANN interim chair] She went on to accuse NSI of stalling a test period for its a shared-registration system that would allow ICANN-accredited registrars to compete directly with NSI...
Interactive Week: Intomi Revs Up Search Engine.
The new Directory Engine is based on "intelligence" that automatically searches for, finds and organizes high-quality documents into a directory that allows users to search the Web by topic.
ClickZ: What's The Buzz?
Todd got dittoes from Boyce, who added that ad pros are abusing users' trust. When he clicked on a banner at a site he declined to name, he had to download Flash, and after he did so his back button was disabled.
USA Today: Site outages send customers scurrying.
[Daniel Todd of Keynote Systems] "Two years ago, if a site went down, you would wait for the site to get back up. Today, there are probably five different companies selling the same item..."
Red Herring: Diamond sales shine online.
Pricing is Internet Diamond's key differentiating factor at this point. According to Mr. Vadon, his company offers a 40 to 50 percent savings over retail diamond jewelry pricing. This includes the shipping fee.
Industry Standard: Soup-to-Nuts Electronic Trading.
The market for buying and selling food and beverage products is $11 trillion. The company estimates that if it covers 15 percent of the U.S. market, it can generate $3 billion a year.
News.Com: IBM pushes hard drive envelope.
The 37GB drive is one of the highest capacity drives to date, offering about twice the data storage found today on high-end consumer PCs.
Cal Law: Putting a Price on Our Internet Identities.
The San Francisco-based Internet think tank Electronic Frontier Foundation is embarking on an effort to put a price on the average person's identity so that people can sue for damages if their privacy is invaded...
Computerworld: IT Revamp boosts Delta service.
"Seventy-five percent of flights take off and arrive on time. So what you're looking at is an exception process, and it's not worth investing significant amounts of capital in exception processes..."
Interactive Week: Lucent Rides The Digital Airwave.
...has shown that it can deliver streams of data at rates nearly twice those of today's fastest dial-up modems without hurting the quality of existing analog radio signals carried via the same spectrum.
News.Com: Open Market scores new patent.
The key element in the patent appears to be the ability for a shopper who has registered at one Web storefront to use the same "one-click payment" capability on other sites.
InfoWorld: HP adds muscle to Web printing program.
Hewlett-Packard announced Monday a more powerful version of its Web PrintSmart software that allows users to consolidate and print information collected from multiple Web sites.
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