December 21, 1999
NY Times: The virtual science of high-tech forecasting.
But the headlong rush of the Internet, and the fortunes to be made or lost because of it, has created a particularly sharp craving for a numerical accounting of what will happen next. So who can blame Forrester and Jupiter for recognizing that uncertainty is just another demand in search of a product?
Fortune: Keeping Yahoo Simple--and Fast.
This steady simplicity is due in large part to Yahoo's best-kept secret, chief technology officer Farzad "Zod" Nazem. As Websites get ultragraphic, with bouncing balls guiding users and sound files providing audio direction for navigating pages, Nazem works with Yahoo designers and engineers to keep his site visually pared down, even while constantly expanding the services and content available to users
Salon: Amazon to world: We control how many times you must click!
Scott Rosenberg. If you want to buy stuff anywhere on the Web besides Amazon, Jeff Bezos insists that you must click at least twice! And that insistence, as manifested in a patent-infringement lawsuit, is now sparking a grass-roots boycott of the company by free-software devotees.
Wired News: Major Toy Site, Um, Er, Sucks.
Most companies that buy up potential slam-site URLs take them out of commission. Call up schwabsucks.com, for instance, and you get an error message, not the latest stock quotes. EToyssucks.com, by contrast, drives a little extra pre-Xmas traffic to eToys.com...
Computerworld: WAP is the wave of the Web's future.
Don Tapscott. Some pundits argue that the recent Microsoft-Ericsson alliance is intended to create a proprietary standard that will undermine WAP. Hesitant companies may use this alleged uncertainty as a reason to delay generating WAP content. That's the wrong decision. WAP will prevail.
- InfoWorld: From December 13, 1999; Wireless standards support slipping.
However, companies supporting WAP are also supporting alternative technologies that are promising a single HTML development environment, rather than backing WML and HTML, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure, such as a WAP gateway...
personalization.com: Personalization and Privacy: The Race Is On.
As it clearly constitutes a better approach, why would companies not always chose the latter path? Why would they ever risk turning privacy into a problem capable of eroding sales and undermining customer confidence? The answers are rooted in the historical relationship of companies and markets - a relationship that is changing rapidly today.
News.Com: Palm devices with color screen coming soon.
But the release also presents a new set of thorny issues for the company, which has so far predicated its marketing and development strategy on a so-called Zen of Palm principle, which mandates keeping devices as simple as possible, even at the expense of cooler features.
Business Week: Webheads, Lend Me Your Ears.
And unlike audiotex, which required publishers to create custom content, Tellme allows them to use what they already have on the Web. What's more, computer speech technology is vastly improved, and Tellme plans to offer the capability to add speech recognition to existing Web sites.
TechWeb: Phone.com To Acquire AtMotion.
The goal of Phone.com (formerly known as Unwired Planet) is to create a unified phone/PDA platform capable of handling WAP, short message service, and enhanced circuit voice capabilities such as unified messaging and voice recognition.
Time Digital: Checking the Interweather.
Check the weather - the weather in cyberspace, that is. Like the earth's atmosphere, the Internet is a vast, complex system, one that has its own patterns and disturbances, and those disturbances can affect your own access to the Web.
Internet Week: At Some Sites, Seeing Is Believing.
[Walt Dunnigan, IT Director at Gallery Furniture Inc] "Our inventory churns 70 times a year vs. four or five times a year for most furniture stores," said Dunnigan. As a result, keeping a catalog system up-to-date is deemed more trouble than it is worth. With the camera approach, "If you can see it [on our showroom] you can buy it..."
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