February 26, 2001
NY Times: Investors Finally Consider Internet Companies' Shaky Math.
Every day, it seems, another couple of Internet companies fail. So it is perhaps not surprising that corporate credit managers are scrutinizing the financial standing of Web companies much more closely and demanding more security from them before handing over merchandise on credit.
- Industry Standard: From February 28, 2000; Debt Wish
Interactive Week: Back To The Drawing Board.
Computing devices are getting more complicated, not less, as they become more powerful. The World Wide Web has unleashed millions of "interfaces" on unsuspecting users, most created by people with no knowledge of, or training in, usability.
Interactive Week: The Hidden Cost Of P2P.
But observers predicted the rise of P2P could also mean the rise of Internet service provider access fees. Why? Because P2P programs have the potential to radically change the amount of bandwidth the average Internet user consumes.
Internet Week: Web Customer Service Isn't A Cost-Cutting Proposition.
The Web has been muchmaligned for replacing attentive customer service with impersonal, sometimes tortuous "self-help." God may help those who help themselves, but God help the call center rep who must handle the frustrated customer who's been thwarted by a labyrinth of service links.
News.Com: An e-commerce lament: Service still stinks!
Poor service is clearly not unique to online companies, but there seems to be a preponderance of incompetence on the transaction side of e-tailing. In fact, things are so bad that an online purchase is often more notable when nothing goes wrong.
NY Times: New Alternatives to Banner Ads.
That is one reason Cnet's new ad format brought a spate of me-too responses from publishers like Snowball.com and The New York Times on the Web — as well as the first serious discussions within the Internet Advertising Bureau about new standards for ad sizes.
The Economist: Banner-ad blues.
Thousands of dotcoms saw it as a substitute for a business plan, a blithe answer to the question of how to make money from the traffic on free websites. It has polluted the top of millions of web viewers’ screens, making an inch of valuable property a no-go zone of garish clutter.
SJ Mercury: CueCat scanner is not catching on with consumers as quickly as predicted.
A little over four months later, that initial pace has slowed considerably. The service has more than twice as many registered users since October, 1.3 million, but those users scan less than a fifth the number of bar-codes each month as in the beginning -- just over 900,000.
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