January 24, 2000
Industry Standard: Patent Problems.
Lawrence Lessig. While the old problems with patents remain – for example, can the patent office keep up with the pace of change – there is a new kind of patent that is sweeping technologists in the Valley. Yet we know nothing about the effect this patent will have.
Interactive Week: Building A Stronger Economy.
The Orchard will make its money the traditional way, by separating tourists from their money. But the contractor building it will make money a new way: by using internetworking technologies to bring down the cost of construction and increase its bottom line.
Salon: Brand builder.
Q&A with Lycos CEO Bob Davis. All of the leading media companies operate a number of products. Why? Because [you] can take individual interest types, segment them -- either demographically or by interest -- and package that and sell it to an advertiser.
USA Today: Search sites brush up on people skills.
The computer-automated indexes that powered a majority of the Web's search engines gave ground to Web directories -- listings that depended instead on the power of thousands of human minds to harness the limitless information of the Net.
Wired News: Outpost Leaves Data Unguarded.
"You can see someone's email address, their billing address, their shipping address, type of credit card they used, their order history -- everything they bought, everything they received, everything they're currently waiting for," Wynne said.
Washington Post: Sorting Out Mail's Place in Internet Age.
...Postmaster General William J. Henderson juggles the present and the future. He estimates he will need to chop U.S. Postal Service costs by $1 billion this year to avoid red ink. But he also needs to find a strategy, at whatever cost, to expand the agency into the new world of e-mail and e-commerce.
SJ Mercury: E-mergers trigger privacy worries.
So what's left of the e-commerce company that had grand aspirations of becoming the Internet's superstore? For one thing, a huge database stuffed with intricate details about the items more than 600,000 members looked at on its site...
Industry Standard: A Word-for-Word Imitation.
It's a bland, bland, bland, bland Web world. That's the word from cutting-edge, New York-based online pub Word, which traded in its award-winning online aesthetics this week for the sanitized look-and-feel of Yahoo. In fact, it practically is Yahoo, right down to the jumpy red letters and the exclamation point.
Industry Standard: (Serious) Playtime.
Barksdale's witticism – or was it analysis? – proved far more clever than he knew. In fact, it's become the overriding innovation ethic of the Internet. Ambitious Web entrepreneurs and desperate Fortune 1000 firms promiscuously plaster their prototypes on the Net all the time, just to see what sticks.
NY Times: Creating Marketplaces for Business-to-Business Transactions.
The first site, for the food and packaged goods industry, will be a relatively modest version of an Internet marketplace, in that it will not support transactions. Rather, it will allow suppliers like Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo's Frito-Lay to automatically notify retailers like the Kroger Co. on changes made to the suppliers' product catalogs.
Infoworld: Consortium to power up broadband.
The race to deliver broadband services directly into businesses and homes will heat up this summer when a new nationwide network created in secret by an alliance of utility companies and computer industry giants will offer voice, data, and television services.
LA Times: More Firms Are Willing to Work for Stock Options.
Trading services for stock has been taking place on a small scale for decades, but now professional firms are increasingly employing the practice--especially since clients are vigorously competing for their services in this super-heated economy.
Wired News: Pollster Sheds Old Ways.
Harris is the first company to rely entirely on the Internet in the high-stakes game of predicting election outcomes. Polling online has been considered particularly risky because of the thorny issues involved in using Internet samples to extrapolate results for the general US population.
Industry Standard: When the News Is Us.
If you want clear-eyed coverage of this deal, CNN probably is not the place to look. By the same token, disclosing every conceivable conflict at all times can be a misleading distraction.
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