August 13, 1999
Internet Week: IT Haunted By Ghost Of Christmas Past.
E-retailers now are focused on beefing up their sites for the upcoming season, with particular emphasis on strong customer service. That necessarily ties in lots of background functions that ultimately impact the quality of service...
Industry Standard: Sega Plays Favorites With Dreamcast.
"We have a great desire to offer this product," says Dave Emanuel, a spokesman for AltaVista's Shopping.com. Emanuel says Shopping.com has been talking to Sega about getting Dreamcast in stock, so far to no avail. "I think they're limiting their distribution potential..."
ClickZ: Don't Automate This.
On a recent afternoon, in yet another grubby and windowless room, Garden.com's customer service group is meeting. It's a motley yet earnest crew of 30 people. In peak season they collectively receive as many as 1,500 email messages a day, and they respond to them all.
ZDNN: eBook standard on the way.
The specification's basic goal is to allow the diverse ranks of hardware developers, publishers, authors and readers to settle on one way of creating, formatting and annotating e-books.
Forbes: Pig in a poke.
One of the ways that sites like Living.com and GoodHome.com hope to compete with the likes of Ethan Allen is by offering imaging technology that will give consumers a chance to replicate the experience of shopping in a brick-and-mortar store in a virtual way.
Red Herring: When outages hit, should investors run?
Discernible value on the Web will therefore be measured not only by traffic, revenue, and foreseeable earnings, but also, according to Mr. Pinsley, by a company's ability to manage the applications and data that go into running its online business.
PC Week: Before disaster strikes.
As companies in every industry have embraced e-commerce and the Internet, and as they've automated more internal processes with everything from e-mail systems to point-of-sale inventory and stock ordering systems, they have become increasingly dependent on IT to stay in business.
News.Com: What AOL stands to lose in browser war.
[Ramanathan Guha, former principal engineer at Netscape] "The people who decide what icons are on the browser have a real power over what is consumed," Guha said. "In a world with one browser, there is a real danger of coming to a model where the way you get your stuff presented is by doing a deal with MSN."
ZDNN: The next wave in Net shopping.
Now, two companies, Frictionless Commerce and Active Research are looking to fill that gap with online decision guides they say will help users figure out exactly what they're looking for.
Upside: The New Web Order.
[Thornley, co-founder and CEO Looksmart] Users want data on a relatively static number of things," he says. "It's a large set of things, but it's knowable. Our job is to get the most useful stuff for as many of those needs as possible."
Web Review: PNG, SVG, and JPEG 2000—New Image Format Standards.
If you've ever been tantalized by the multi-resolution capability of FlashPix, or frustrated by GIF's "all or nothing" approach to background transparency, then we have some good news for you.
SF Chronicle: TV Firms Threaten to Sue TiVo, Replay.
A new consortium of companies -- CBS Corp., Discovery Communications Inc., the Walt Disney Co., News Corp. and Time Warner Inc. -- say they're prepared to sue companies that make the new recorders unless they license the broadcasters' copyrighted programming.
Industry Standard: Clashing Laws Complicate Global E-commerce.
Now Bertelsmann is taking the lead in getting multinational corporations to help unify national regulations relating to global electronic commerce.
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