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November 1, 2000
SJ Mercury: Online privacy checkmated by a check box.
Dan Gillmor. But I've encountered similar behavior on other e-commerce Web sites. And whether the practice is a bug or a deliberate trick to ensnare consumers who aren't eagle-eyed, it is -- as Wedel puts it so precisely -- obnoxious.
eCompany: Debunking the MP3 Phone.
Unfortunately, the product is hobbled right from the start because of Sprint’s obsession with controlling its customers, fear of running afoul of the recording industry, as well as the technological limitations of wireless networks in the United States today.
Village Voice: The Incredible Shrinking Internet.
The really scary scenario for advocates of open access to broadband is that cable companies have the power not just to slow info, but to block it completely. If Time Warner should hook up with a big search engine, posits Rosen, the company could close the gate to others.
Inside: In the Fight Against Time Warner, Internet Service Providers Battle Back.
Accusing Time Warner of duplicity when it comes to promising open access to its high-speed cable lines, Internet service providers have fired back. In a filing with the FCC, a group of independent ISPs has proposed a business plan for opening cable modem lines to all comers...
Adweek: Just the FAQs.
Of her most recent enterprise, Kirkbride notes, "Other technologies have made it easy to buy things. We make it easy to answer questions. It's an important service because the Web has made it easier to ask questions, but harder to get answers."
digitalMASS: In search of an unbiased appraisal.
Eleanor Loiacono, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic, has put together a system for testing the usability and overall effectiveness of corporate Web sites. Called WebQual, it purports to have isolated the main areas of Web site effectiveness and found a way to test how well a site measures up.
Fortune: Last Days of a Dot-Com.
Everybody here is just so friendly. Most of Theglobe.com's employees have already stopped by my cubicle, many bearing resumes printed on fine linen paper. It's flattering that they think I might have jobs to offer them. After all, this is their big office. I'm just renting space.
Computerworld: 'Safe harbor' deal takes effect, but adoption may be slow.
According to attendees interviewed yesterday at the Privacy2000 conference here, many U.S. companies may wait to see if European authorities are serious about enforcing the existing privacy laws in that region as well as the safe harbor provisions...
Wired News: Did Smut Spammers Scam Google?
But the results of the search did more than give Wales his jollies: they sparked an Internet discussion about the nature of searching, and whether Google was as impervious to spamming as most Google-lovers say it is.
November 2, 2000
Good evening. If you haven't looked at your calendar yet, it's the two-year anniversary for Tomalak's Realm. Thanks for reading and pointing your friends to the site! Lawrence (tomalak@tomalak.org).
FEED Magazine: The BMG/Napster deal.
Clay Shirky. Despite the rants of a few artists and techno-anarchists who believed that Napster users were willing to go to the ramparts for the cause, large scale civil disobedience against things like Prohibition or the 55 mph speed limit has usually been about relaxing restrictions, not repealing them.
Forbes: Patent Chutzpah.
Allan M. Konrad, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, claims to own the rights to the way many interactive Web sites or internal networks operate. And he's got three patents, from between 1996 and 1999, that say he does.
Industry Standard: How to Write for the Web.
Why does so much writing on the Web stink? More than half a decade after business writing first sneaked onto the Web, you still can't travel far without being confronted by the sort of hollow, buzzword-laden writing that all but begs visitors to go elsewhere.
Future of Software: Internet and the Wireless Web.
Bruce Tognazzini. Two major trends will soon alter today's focus on Web browsers—wireless Web access and true high-speed Internet access. Wireless devices, be they palmtops or cell phones, will significantly increase the number of people gaining access to the Internet.
Future of Software: It's All About Interfaces.
Alan Cooper. Programmers naturally understand that they must design user interfaces for the user, but few programmers realize how vital it is for them to create the APIs deep inside the software with the user's goals as the foremost consideration.
Internet Week: Eastman Finds The Right Web Formula.
Eastman sells hundreds of products, from acids to waterborne polymers. And many of its customers buy several types of chemicals at a time from the company. In the past, navigating the Eastman site to find information from different divisions was a pain.
Future of Software: Microsoft Research: Adaptive Systems & Interaction Group.
Eric Horvitz and David Hovel. The Notification Platform project is an example of research on a new type of service and user experience. With this effort, we've created an experimental general notification architecture that highlights the promise of a future, flexible communications platform.
Washington Post: Programs That Aren't on the Same Page.
It's still a pain getting most things done online, and that will only grow worse before most people feel comfortable in cyberspace. That's my conclusion after spending many hours exploring the latest Internet software programs.
News.Com: AT&T changes course as spam policy is revealed.
AT&T has yielded to an anti-spam group's request that it stop providing services to a purported sender of unsolicited commercial email. The move came after an English anti-spam organization publicly posted what it termed a "pink contract" between AT&T and the alleged spammer...
November 3, 2000
NT Times: Copyright Office Issues Unusual Rule.
In a nutshell, the Copyright Office said that the new law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, permits people in certain circumstances to break through the technological barriers that safeguard lists of blocked Web sites maintained by many types of filtering software.
Upside: Yahoo case raises issue of Internet borders.
The court will hear testimony Monday from three top Internet experts, including one of the founding fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf. Each expert launched independent investigations into potential technologies that could allow for Yahoo's U.S. content to be filtered before entering France's borders.
ZDNN: AOL interactive TV -- it's inspiring angst.
Imagine an omniscient guide to your television, a “welcome screen” that can greet you each time you tune in. Instead of surfing every channel to find something to watch, this guide provides the universe of listings. Another menu selection leads you to the world of Time Warner Inc.
Inside: Much-Derided CueCat Could Put Heat on Print Media by Tracking Whether Ads Really Work.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. The Internet and digital television are forcing media outlets to be held more accountable, and print faces the biggest challenge because its method of assuring advertisers that their messages are working is disputable at best.
NY Times: Bill Gates Turns Skeptical on Digital Solution's Scope.
For a man often thought of as the world's chief evangelist for technology, Mr. Gates is assuming a surprising role these days, in which he seems to be taking his own industry to task for having far too much faith in digital solutions to the planet's worst ills.
CIO: Good Stuff Cheap.
As the landscape becomes increasingly littered with the carcasses of e-tailers, more and more executives are likely to get a call like the one Bright Station received in May. In fact, it's already de rigueur for viable retailers to purchase technology from their dead and merely moribund peers.
Internet World: Deconstructing Outpost.com.
Jakob Nielsen and Joy Busse. Product descriptions are dominated by breathless and grating marketese. A description like “Whether it’s a must for business or just for fun, the Kodak PalmPix Camera adds visual capture capability to your Palm handheld” could be pared to half the word count.
November 4, 2000
InfoWorld: What's it worth to you to get off the 'legitimate' spammers' mailing lists?
One thing I'm seeing in the spam that readers forward me, however, is that Internet companies increasingly are taking the spammer's word over the word of those reporting the abuse. Even when presented with evidence to the contrary, the ISPs insist you must have opted in for the mail.
The Guardian: Second sight.
Douglas Rushkoff. It's not a matter of figuring out how to get people to conform to the technologies we've already developed. The people who succeed in the device-driven networking economy of the future will be those who create applications, interfaces, and designs that conform to human need and expectation.
InfoWorld: AT&T's open-cable access pilot begins.
Eight ISPs will gain access to AT&T Broadband's local loop in Boulder to provide the service, according to AT&T Broadband. Similarly, Time Warner's cable division began a trial to test hardware and software in September with ISPs using the company's network in Columbus, Ohio.
November 5, 2000
SJ Mercury:
American Journalism Review: Second-class Citizens.
The IOC doled out press credentials this year to over 20,000 reporters from newspapers, magazines, wire services and broadcast news operations. Scores and stories were published as soon as they could be phoned or e-mailed from the stands. Only Internet journalists were uniformly blacklisted.
Map of the Month: Indexing the Web with Geography.
Geography has also been used to index websites in form of so called sensitive maps. These maps are website directories, with individual sites indexed by their latitude and longitude (often just to the nearest city). Sites are shown on the maps as dots, which act as hotlinks to the homepage of the website.
Brill's Content: Blocking the Exits.
In the early afternoon -- when the first round of exit-poll results is released to 100-odd media organizations -- just about everyone in the national press corps will know whether Bush or Gore is leading, and nearly every Washington politician and staffer will know, too.
ZDNN: Incoming! Cheap flat-panel monitors.
Whereas entry-level retail prices for 17-inch CRT monitors have hovered between $200 and $250, average prices for the equivalent 15-inch flat-panel displays have fallen since the beginning of this year, when they were more than $1,000.
November 6, 2000
SF Examiner: Quantifying the Internet.
If you ask Hal Varian of UC-Berkeley, he'll tell you the Net consists of 2.5 billion documents, growing at a healthy clip of 7.3 million pages a day. Across the Bay, Net archivist Brewster Kahle simply points to the basement of his Presidio office space. The whole Internet fits in there.
USA Today: Panel: Yahoo! can block access to Nazi items.
Yahoo! has the technical means to prevent French Internet users from accessing its U.S. auction sites that trade Nazi-era items, a panel of experts including Vinton Cerf, the man widely regarded as the ''father'' of the Internet, told a Paris court.
NY Times: E-Tailers Fine-Tune Affiliate Sales.
Both sides swallowed those issues, mainly because alternatives were in short supply. But that is starting to change, as companies like Nexchange and ePod create what amounts to miniature, portable stores for e-tailers, who can then set them up within the content sites or various corners of the Internet.
Adweek: E-Tailers Transfer Shelf Space Into Cyberspace.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, these click-and-mortar entities are not ruled by the architectural constraints of the physical world. Still, the stores grapple with cyberstore layout, as witnessed by the recent redesigns of several mass marketing e-tailers.
NY Times: V.C. Forsaking the Internet.
Indeed, for hundreds, maybe thousands of Internet companies founded with big ambitions, it is becoming time to go home. The trickle of failures that has steadily accompanied the growth of the Internet is now turning into a flood.
Interactive Week: Trials and Tribulations In The W3C.
Yet, lacking enforcement powers, it must rely on international goodwill to persuade competing companies to comply with the standards it creates. And, like the U.N., politics, greed and rancorous debate are increasingly making its work painfully contentious and slow.
Interactive Week: In Search Of Intelligent Search.
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. except maybe the big outdoor store REI. A search for hiking boots on the retailer's Web site yielded 84 selections. Top on the list: Ruff Wear Bark 'N Boots, $34, booties for dogs.
MSNBC: U.S. nears deal with AOL, Time Warner.
Federal antitrust enforcers made progress toward an agreement with merger partners America Online Inc. and Time Warner Inc. that would force the companies to open high-speed cable lines to one or more Internet competitors in each city served by Time Warner...
Inside: Drudge Vows No Surrender on Posting Exit-Poll Results.
During primary season this past winter, three Web sites broke ranks with their media peers by revealing exit-poll winners before the voting booths had closed. But come next Tuesday, only Matt Drudge will risk the wrath of the journalistic establishment and possibly of the courts...
News.Com: Court lets company pursue download patent rights.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit threw out late Friday a lower court's decision that E-Data's patent did not entitle the company to charge fees to the thousands of sites that sell downloads of video games, music and other products online.
Industry Standard: Rupert Murdoch's Internet Retreat.
Fox says it's focusing its efforts on broadband and will soon begin charging for video on the Web. But Fox has already let competitors get ahead in the race to establish their brands online – and that may leave Fox too far behind to ever catch up.
November 7, 2000
Interactive Week: Microsoft Betting On The Tablet PC.
Tablet PC is the working title of a new concept from Microsoft -- and a pet project of chairman and chief technology officer Bill Gates -- that, according to sources, will be powered by processors from upstart chip maker Transmeta Corp.
Publish: Micromedia.
Christopher Locke. From an Internet perspective, Web micromarkets are not markets at all, but rather nascent communities of interest. They tend to gravitate around articulate, knowledgeable and entertaining voices-individuals or small groups driven by a passion to communicate their views.
law.com: Key Ruling on Patenting E-Commerce.
What is certain, though, is that the three-judge Federal Circuit panel unanimously reinstated a 1996 lawsuit by Interactive Gift Express, now known as the E-Data Corp. The case will now go back to U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York.
News.Com: Web sites run with early election results.
In a one-paragraph brief, Inside acknowledged that the latest presidential election results remain wildly sketchy, but the online magazine nonetheless posted the information based on reports given to it by several journalists who saw the coveted data, which is collected by Voter News Service.
Forbes: GuruNet--Not!
More than a year after releasing its free, downloadable software, privately held GuruNet is giving up trying to make a living off consumers. It's changing its name to Atomica and morphing into a business-to-business company intent on providing the same sort of fast information to corporate users.
Strange Connections: Information Architecture 2000.
Peter Morville. While there's no substitute for the physical, intellectual, and social immersion of a conference, I hope this article will serve as a map to some of the people and ideas that became part of our user experience.
Wired News: Little News From Big China.
The rules, published in the People's Daily, require websites to seek approval from a department under the State Council, or cabinet, before they can publish news. Websites are forbidden from reporting or writing news themselves and must rely on state media.
NY Times: Publisher Sets Policy on E-Books.
Although the demand for books to be read on a screen remains largely theoretical, agents for authors and publishers have already begun arguing over how much of the proceeds from electronic book sales to bookstores and middlemen should belong to writers.
News.Com: Old Economy executives look before leaping to Net.
Whether they wanted to help build the New Economy or were lured by potentially lucrative options, countless top executives like Miller left comfortable positions to join the dot-com revolution at a time when the stock market was bestowing unprecedented valuations on Internet companies.
Washington Post: Freelancers Get Day in Court.
The writers argued that newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Newsday and Sports Illustrated violated their copyrights by allowing their articles to be included, without specific permission, in databases operated by Lexis-Nexis and University Microfilms International.
November 8, 2000
Editor & Publisher: You're Probably Charging Too Much Online.
Steve Outing. Recently, I've been doing research on pricing of online content (for an upcoming workshop that I'm presenting and an industry white paper). And one issue has become painfully obvious to me: Online news publishers are charging too much when they have online content to sell.
InfoWorld: Multilingual domain names under fire.
Several of the world's largest domain name registrars will start selling multilingual domain names Thursday night, despite a recommendation from the Internet Society that this initiative be delayed because it will harm the stability of the Internet's Domain Name System.
Bob Frankston: DNS: A Safe Haven.
The real problem is that the domain (“dot-com”) names have no permanence and one must be vigilant in order to keep the names valid. If one takes no action the name lapses and is either reused or simply becomes invalid. This can have serious and even tragic consequences.
Fortune: Net Election? Not Yet!
Remember when the Net was supposed to change everything? Well, as this column is being written, it's early on Election Day, and as we wrap up campaign 2000, we can add politics to the long list of things that, as yet, the Net hasn't changed in any substantial way.
Industry Standard: SDMI Says It Beat Hackers.
Leonardo Chiariglione, the executive director of SDMI, said that of the five technologies that were made available in September's contest, only two were successfully attacked. And of those two successful attacks, only one could be reproduced.
MSNBC: AOL-Time Warner deal hits hurdle.
The five-member commission must approve any settlement, and some members are now insisting that the merger itself cannot be approved unless AOL and Time Warner have negotiated terms with at least one of its rivals to provide Internet access service in competition with AOL...
ZDNN: Filtering programs block candidate sites.
Congressional candidate Jeffery Pollock used to advocate Internet filters. Then he learned that popular blocking software Cyber Patrol has been banning some people from visiting his campaign site.
News.Com: Geographic tracking raises opportunities, fears.
Net users worried about online privacy may balk at technology that might one day reveal their street addresses to marketers. But for governments watching their sovereignty erode online, the chance to erect virtual walls may be too tempting to pass up.
Industry Standard: PSINet, AT&T Get Caught Serving Spam.
Anti-spam groups have long suspected the existence of these contracts, which they term "pink contracts." Broadly speaking, they include language that expressly permits a spammer to distribute unsolicited e-mail from an ISP's network.
Internet Week: BlueCross Marries Web, Phone Support.
Empire BlueCross BlueShield, New York State's largest health insurer, is in the process of such integration. It recently pulled the switch on a new portal for insurance brokers that includes text chat, online collaboration and callback request...
November 9, 2000
MSNBC: EverQuest, online-games makers lure public to pay for entertainment.
On the day EverQuest was released, more than 30,000 people rushed out to buy the $49.95 game software, which they install and then register on the Web to play. By late last month, Sony had 300,000 subscribers paying $9.89 a month to play the game online.
EE Times: SDMI maintains only two technologies were hacked in contest.
After SDMI's press release this week, the university group fired back, saying researchers "remain convinced" that they defeated four of the technologies in the contest and accused SDMI of focusing on eligibility for the prize, rather than whether the technology could be defeated.
Computerworld: Testing of multilingual domain names set to begin.
And the Internet Society, a nonprofit group in Reston, Va., that acts as the "organization home" for the IETF and the Internet Architecture Board, yesterday released a statement urging a more cautious approach regarding the use of non-English characters in domain name registrations.
NY Times: Microsoft Sees New Software Based on Pens.
And whatever the optimism of Mr. Gates and his team, many industry veterans remain skeptical that Microsoft will be able to fashion a pen-based version of the Windows operating system that will create a market as broad as today's PC industry.
Wired News: Yahoo's Scheme to Stream Music.
For now, Musicmatch appears safe from legal attacks from the RIAA since the rules of interactivity haven't been clearly defined. Currently, the Digital Media Association and the RIAA are engaged in arbitration in the U.S. Copyright Office to determine whether services such as Musicmatch are interactive.
SF Chronicle: Journalists Like Security of Old Media After Being Burned at Dot-Coms.
Instead, Levy and the others took quasi-journalistic jobs at companies that needed content to lure visitors, who would then buy things. For some folks, that means a blurring of lines between commerce and content, which can challenge any journalist's integrity.
NY Times: Computer Controls? Save Your Breath.
Instead of using artificial interfaces like keyboards, we would simply talk to our computers and they would talk back, vastly simplifying those interactions. But speech has not become the universal interface for desktop computers, and some experts say that it is unlikely to do so any time soon.
Business Week: Is It an Encyclopedia or a Web Site?
But while taking extra precautions to account for the Web is becoming standard, many observers believe the laws themselves won't change much to accommodate the new medium. "The [classic law] principles are sufficiently general," says Columbia's Ginsburg.
NY Times: Class in a 3-D Lecture Hall.
Unlike a typical online chat room, the 3-D classroom lets professors and students see one another. Though there's no way to tell if students are nodding off, participants can have their virtual bodies wave, smile, scowl, dance or make other programmed gestures.
digitalMASS: Opting out of the online-buying labyrinth.
When I log in to my Etrade account, all I want to see is the amount of money in each mutual fund I own and my money market. There is one screen that presents all this data. But I’ll be damned if I can remember which screen it is, and I’ve had the account for six months.
November 10, 2000
EE Times: Speech companies shift focus to network solutions.
Frustrated by a business that failed to take off as expected, the leading companies in the voice recognition market now are plowing more fertile ground, putting their resources into a new quest to give voice to Internet, telephony and embedded applications.
Metropolis Magazine: The Metropolis Conference.
[Edward Tufte] "Often, the best design you can do is not to screw up wonderful content. Maybe the grandest principle of all information design is, 'Do no harm.' All my work in books, in teaching, really has been an endless defense of content against those who would screw it over...
Photo District News PIX: Pulp Friction.
Jeffrey Zeldman. The Web is like every other medium to which you've applied your talents, and like no other medium you've ever grappled with. Everything you know as a designer will help you tremendously, yet nearly everything you know must be rethought.
Inside: Adobe Unveils Unified Tool to Publish Content in Print, Video and on the Web .
Presenting a ''create once, view anywhere'' vision of media, Adobe Systems announced this week that it would begin packaging together a set of tools that will help publishers avoid the hassle and expense of duplicating the same content for the Web, print, interactive TV or handheld devices.
Online Journalism Review: A Redesign With a View.
The new site retains elements of the last – yellow in the logo, though thankfully less fluorescent, an easily navigable organization, but adds some smooth interactive features and best of all – a clean, restful layout designed for easy reading online.
ZDNN: ICANN report: Reject separate domains.
In one of its toughest decisions to date, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number at its board meeting in Los Angeles next Thursday is expected to select the first round of commercial top-level domains to be added to the Internet.
Federal Computer Week: Is Internet too public for court records?
Such ubiquitous access is troubling enough that the Judicial Conference of the United States, a body that recommends operating policies for federal courts, is calling for an in-depth discussion of how much public access is too much.
The Economist: The hollow promise of Internet banking.
Why has the online “revolution” faded so fast? The biggest problem has been that, for all their talk of liberating customers from the yoke of traditional branches, Internet banks did not think clearly about what customers really wanted.
November 11, 2000
News.Com: Walmart.com CEO Jeanne Jackson does some remodeling.
Jackson asserts that although industry pundits may not find Walmart.com's site particularly fashionable, it is the product of some very conscious choices. "Go look at Target and BlueLight. They have decided to be sexy, we've decided to be fast and reliable.
Washington Post: Court Overturns AT&T Cable Decision.
In the ruling, the judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida determined that a Broward County ordinance requiring cable giant ATT to allow rival Internet access to their systems violated the First Amendment.
Publish: Mutants in cyberspace.
As brave new tacticians follow the principles and manipulate the components searching for their holy grail, one factor in the viral equation will stay the same: The customer is always right. In an age of rampant spamming, companies must work to earn back customer trust.
InfoWorld: Virtual teams going global.
Rodriguez is one of many IT workers and managers who are part of the new corporate reality -- a centralized company with a decentralized employee base. These virtual teams manage to function despite being separated by distance, multiple time zones, and sometimes differing national cultures.
November 12, 2000
Useit.Com: Drop-Down Menus: Use Sparingly.
Drop-down menus are often more trouble than they are worth and can be confusing because Web designers use them for several different purposes. Also, scrolling menus reduce usability when they prevent users from seeing all their options in a single glance.
Web Informant: Remind Me.
I think my issue is the quantity of reminders that I now get on a daily basis. It used to be intriguing, or at least fun to show family and friends, that my car or whatever was sending me email. But now I want to turn a few of these nags off, or at least fine tune them...
ZDNN: Hey, Sony: I want it my way.
It's these types of experiences that explain a lot of the apparently confused behavior on Sony's part. Sony is an electronics company, but it's a content company as well. Not only does the content side seems to have the upper hand in the organization, but it seems to be staffed by paranoiacs as well.
PC World: Virgin Withdraws Webplayer Internet Appliance.
Barely two months into a marketing experiment to lure shoppers to electronic versions of its many stores, British retail powerhouse Virgin is discontinuing its free Webplayer Internet appliance program.
November 13, 2000
Salon: The jukebox manifesto.
But if the record industry is wise, it will realize that security isn't necessary to make this work. If the celestial jukebox is easy to use and reasonably priced, it's likely that few music fans will feel the need to go to the effort of trying to pirate the celestial jukebox's music.
NY Times: Advertising Grows Easier on Portals.
Now, as the dot-com scrap heap grows, and portals scramble to fill holes created by each week's e-tailing failures, surviving merchants say the portals are ready to make advertising deals on much more attractive terms than in the past.
Business Week: 3M: Glued to the Web.
A free-wheeling product-development environment helped 3M grow from a modest seller of sandpaper to a huge, $15.7 billion company that sells more than 50,000 products in 200 countries. But, truth be told, the company was stuck like glue when it came to getting all its parts to work together.
Clay Shirky: What Is Peer-to-Peer?
Napster is p2p, because the addresses of Naspter nodes have nothing to do with the DNS system, and because once the Napster server resolves the IP addresses of the PCs hosting a particular song, it shifts control of the file transfers to the nodes.
Industry Standard: The Content Clash.
Long before the bloodletting, the Web had promised journalists, fiction writers and even poets the possibility of higher pay and a wider audience. But as Net companies struggled to make money from content, writers found themselves working closely with business staffers.
Wired News: End of the Line for iCast?
CMGI's decision to shut down or sell iCast wasn't unexpected. ICast has long been "the black sheep in CMGI's cozy incubator," said Robert Buckman, a digital music reporter. "ICast has never turned a profit and has recently experienced two major layoffs and the very raucous departure of several top executives."
MSDN Online: The Art of UI Prototyping.
The best reason to prototype is to save time and resources. The value of the prototype is that it is a façade—like a Hollywood set, where only the front of the building is constructed. Relative to the real product, prototypes are easy and inexpensive to create.
Forbes: Swiss 3G Auction Cancelled.
The Swiss government cancelled its third-generation wireless auction today after failing to round up enough willing participants to compete for four 3G licenses. Bidding was supposed to begin this morning and was expected to net between $4 billion and $5 billion...
November 14, 2000
Forbes: The Bite of the ASP.
John C. Dvorak. Despite the market downturn and the general pullback from crazy dot-com schemes, people have failed to notice the danger that lurks beneath the trendy concept of the ASP, or application service provider. By danger I mean loss of data due to bankruptcy or shutdown.
MSNBC: New Web sites seek to shape the public’s taste in music.
Savage Beast Technologies Inc., the company behind the project, is the latest in a growing group of start-ups that are using the Internet to try to shape the public’s musical taste. It’s an idealistic, uphill struggle, applying heavy-duty computer science and accumulated opinions of experts and consumers.
News.Com: XML co-creator maps the Web in 3D.
Rather than using conventional search engine technology to navigate the Web, Antarcti.ca creates a landscape that spatially represents relationships between data. The resulting map allows surfers to traverse the network visually from the point of view of a low-flying airplane...
Forbes: Control Geeks.
Last month Lim and wife, Amy, both 32, released Bannerama, free software that wipes out banner ads on Web sites and replaces them with content of the user's choosing - tidbits on foreign languages and trivia and, eventually, wine, cooking and golf.
Wired News: Many Battles Behind ICANN's Scene.
As the Internet's naming authority prepares to announce the domain name suffixes of the future, constituencies representing varied interests are scrambling to impose their respective visions for how intellectual property and free speech should be balanced in the process.
Red Herring: Nabisco's Internet snack attack.
Thus far, there hasn't been much in the way of turning those crowds into paying customers. Ms. Fordham thinks the new e-commerce Web site can become a profitable business with higher margins than the company's past catalog business.
Washington Post: Amazon.com Draws Fire on Secondhand Books.
Whether through auctions or its specialty division zShops, Amazon has been selling secondhand and rare material for years. But when the company launched its new Amazon Marketplace last week, old and new were intermingled as never before.
November 15, 2000
Editor & Publisher: Reprints Leap From Print To Web.
Steve Outing. The reprint business is just beginning to come out of the "old world" and into the new. Instead of consumers calling a newspaper to get reprints of an article, they will increasingly use or be referred to the Web — where the sales and delivery process can be handled by automated systems.
Inside: Web's Election Coverage Failed to Tap Into the Power of the Internet.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. In addition to proving the journalistic incompetence of the networks in an entertainment medium, the Election Night reporting debacle also showed just how ''new'' the Web is as a medium. In other words, not new at all...
Business 2.0: One-Stop Browsing Companies Change Course.
The Internet advertising slump has finally cast its shadow on the much-hyped metabrowsers sector. A number of the firms have now dumped their original business plans, and began moving away from consumer products and toward business-to-business products.
Industry Standard: Cool Media.
Hal R. Varian. In the near future, tools for creating, editing, manipulating and sharing video over the Internet will become a hot commodity. When the vid-kids become screen-agers, the market for these products will mature and personalized video will be integrated into our lives...
NY Times: Time Looks to Online Era.
Signaling Time Warner's effort to integrate its operations with those of America Online, the company's magazine division, Time Inc., named Walter Isaacson, the managing editor of Time magazine, to the position of Time Inc. editorial director yesterday.
Washington Post: AOL, Time Warner Plan ISP Deals.
...Time Warner and AOL, the world's dominant Internet service provider, have stepped up talks with one-time nemesis EarthLink Inc., the nation's second-largest ISP, sources said. AOL and Time Warner also are trying to put the finishing touches on a proposed contract with Juno Online Services...
Wired News: RealNames Tries an End-Around.
Privately held RealNames said on Wednesday it plans to open up its proprietary system for marketing common words as a replacement for complex Internet addresses, in a challenge to plans for an incremental expansion of the existing website naming system.
IBM Developer: Are developers people?
Jakob Nielsen. Luckily, methods exist that allow developers to bypass their own brilliance and experience their product the way normal people do. In a previous article I discussed the usability lifecycle, and the many different phases where it is recommended to take active steps to collect user data.
TechWeb: Microsoft SharePoint Likely To Make Waves.
SharePoint is due to ship in the first half of next year -- around the same time as Office 10 -- and promises to make collaboration easier for workgroups. The goal is to ease creation of such group-oriented functions as discussion and chat, and plain old file sharing.
November 16, 2000
Red Herring: Rights fielder.
Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. Peer-to-peer is an instantiation of an architecture that is not giving the network owner control over the network. To that extent, it is reflective of the move that enables this end-to-end creativity. To the extent that peer-to-peer is an expression of an end-to-end design...
ZDNN: Let's cough up the cash for Web content.
Roger Ebert. Meanwhile, revenue from banner ads drops because many of the banners are linked to...other dot-coms.These ominous signs do not foretell the death of the Web. But sooner or later the free lunch has to end. Information wants to be free, but information providers want to be paid.
USA Today: New domain name suffixes approved.
ICANN approved dot-info for general use, dot-biz for businesses, dot-name for individuals, dot-pro for professionals, dot-museum for museums, dot-coop for business cooperatives and dot-aero for the aviation industry.
Computerworld: ICANN hit by critics as top-level domain name vote nears.
At a four-day series of meetings ICANN is holding here, Cerf yesterday told his fellow board members that he has a "certain amount of discomfort" with ICANN's process for choosing new top-level domains because of its emphasis on evaluating the finances of the applicants that submitted proposals.
EE Times: Emerging technologies displayed at Comdex.
Comdex attendees were treated this week to a host of emerging flat-panel display technologies, some with the potential to seriously disrupt the status quo. The Las Vegas extravaganza included tiny liquid crystal on silicon microdisplays, organic light-emitting diode displays...
NY Times: Economic Scene: Online Users as Laboratory Rats.
Hal R. Varian. Analysis of online auction data has yielded a wealth of insights, and a few puzzles. A particularly intriguing puzzle has been the tendency for "late bids." In a representative sample of eBay auctions, researchers found that 37 percent of them exhibited bids in the last minute...
Computerworld: Antispam group blacklists marketing firm Exactis.com.
"The decision to list Exactis' mail servers occurred after Exactis repudiated a previously negotiated agreement to implement measures which would have prevented unsolicited bulk and commercial e-mail from being sent through Exactis' mail servers," wrote a MAPS spokeswoman in the statement.
USA Today: Net directory raises privacy concerns.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the master record keeper of Web addresses and the domain registration companies, currently requires disclosure of contact information for holders of .com, .net and .org names.
MSNBC: Conde Nast’s magazine titles to create individual Web sites.
By the end of 2001, all 16 Conde Nast magazines, including GQ, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, will have consumer Web sites, things for which publishers of those magazines have been clamoring. Only Lucky, a shopping title, has its own site at present.
November 17, 2000
News.Com: Yahoo mulls charging for services.
Is Yahoo taking a closer look at charging customers to access areas on its site? Five years into the Internet revolution, the time may be ripe for the torchbearer of the free, advertising-supported Web business to diversify its revenue streams.
Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Sites Ignore User Experiences.
"Subscriptions get a bad rap," said Brenda Laurel, a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group. Like others, she believes offering free content was the biggest mistake, creating among users an expectation of entitlement. "Content can't be separated from an economic frame," she said.
Upside: Yahoo eyes for-pay music, movie services.
Yahoo's VP of media and entertainment is salivating over the money he says the portal will begin earning directly from its massive user base. He's talking about music and movies over the Web. While Yahoo would be foolhardy to charge for, say, email service, it has a shot at monetizing rich-media fare...
USA Today: Net pioneer to head ICANN.
Cerf's chairmanship is for one year and is unpaid. Concerned about what he referred to as ICANN's ''mushrooming activity,'' Cerf said that ''the current ICANN is probably pushed further beyond the technical mission, more than I wish it were.''
MSNBC: Yahoo to require sites to pay.
For the first time in its history, Yahoo is charging a mandatory fee for commercial directory listings. The move is an expansion of Yahoo’s Business Express service launched last year — through which sites pay $199 to be reviewed for listing on Yahoo’s directory within a week...
MSNBC: By selling Barbie online, Mattel may upset retailers.
Mattel executives emphasize that online and catalogue sales will amount to less than 1% of each brand’s overall sales this year. Prices are deliberately set 15% higher than at stores and some hot items won’t be available at all online...
ZDNN: AltaVista revs its aggregation engine.
AltaVista selected the OnePage tool after a six-month evaluation and test period. William Diehl, senior business unit manager at AltaVista, said the company expects the OnePage tool to keep up with the growing flood of content it aggregates onto the portal from content provider partner sites.
Wired News: Cubism, Web-Browser Style.
In a hotel suite off the show floor, Rosen is demonstrating an early version of the 2Ce browser (pronounced "to see"), which displays six Web pages simultaneously as though they were the inside walls of a cube. "This will be the interface of choice for the information age," said Rosen.
Industry Standard: China Wants to Assign Its Own Addresses.
The ministry bestowed upon the China Internet Network Information Center, or CNNIC, the sole right to oversee registration of Chinese-character domain names, and said that nine domestic Chinese firms would be appointed to act as agents. No foreign companies were included.
November 18, 2000
Advertising Age: General Mills to customize cereal on Web.
General mills has become the latest package-goods marketer to try direct-to-consumer sales as it launches a test of a customized online breakfast cereal site-mycereal.com. For about $1 a serving, the site lets consumers custom-blend breakfast cereals from more than 1 million possible combinations ...
The Register: MSN blacklisted for harbouring spammers.
Microsoft's vastly interconnected ISP and portal, MSN, has become easy prey for spammers due to several poorly-protected mail servers to which outsiders can connect easily for a free, anonymous ride, according to a bulletin on the Mail Abuse Prevention System Web site.
Salt Lake Tribune: A New Viewpoint on Internet Imagery.
Nike's home page for golf shoes uses it. So do Hewlett Packard and the Sharper Image Web sites. Sony uses the technology to show how its new Aibo robotic dog looks and behaves. And Eddie Bauer's Web site uses Viewpoint's player to show full views of its backpacks.
News.Com: Pay-to-surf site cuts 35 percent of work force.
AllAdvantage, a dot-com company that offered cash to people who visited its Web site, laid off about 35 percent of its staff in an effort to cut costs and change strategies. AllAdvantage said Friday it laid off nearly 150 employees, effective immediately.
EE Times: U.S. says industry should prepare to share spectrum.
A government report on third-generation wireless deployment has tentatively concluded that federal agencies and industry should begin planning to share spectrum and to face the prospect that some spectrum will be reallocated to new mobile telecommunications services.
November 19, 2000
Dallas Morning News: That'll be $0.001.
Should Beenz be redeemable for Flooz? If so, how do such Beenz-Flooz units translate to Mojo bucks? While we're on the subject, will Compaq's MilliCents ever be convertible to IBM Micro Payments? These are the questions vexing big thinkers of the e-shopping world.
Washington Post: AOL Seeks Cable Pact With MSN; Microsoft Would Use Time Warner Lines.
America Online Inc. is negotiating a deal to give its long-standing nemesis Microsoft Corp. access to Time Warner Inc.'s cable-television lines in a push to meet government demands over AOL's pending takeover of the media company, according to sources familiar with the matter.
SJ Mercury: Newly unveiled AOLTV is seriously flawed.
The theory behind AOLTV makes perfect sense: Take the undeniably popular AOL experience and transfer it from personal computers to television screens, while enhancing TV viewing with a spiffy electronic program guide. But AOL has made just about every mistake in the book...
Web Informant: Thinking about grandma's computer.
All I can say after using both devices is that I still think getting a cheap PC or iMac for grandma is still your best bet. Especially if you are the defacto technical support person in your household, trying to debug these units remotely won't be easy...
November 20, 2000
Computerworld: The Web doesn't have to shut out the 'small stuff'.
Don Tapscott. The newspaper and music recording industries are squandering magnificent opportunities by not promoting cheap and effective micropayment systems for the Web. It's one of the Web's biggest shortcomings.
FEED Magazine: The Butterfly Effect.
Q&A with the principals of the Nielsen Norman Group. [Brenda Laurel] Since word of mouth is such a strong way to market content, the only piece that remains to be filled in the whole puzzle to ensure that we have a medium that provides a lot of diversity, is an economic model that lets content creators actually earn a living doing it.
Industry Standard: Yahoo Must Block Nazi Goods From French.
Gomez ruled that Yahoo must put a three-part system in place that includes filtering by IP address, the blocking of 10 keywords and self-identification of geographic location. The system follows the recommendations of an expert panel appointed by the court to investigate such technologies...
ZDNN: eBay, Amazon avoid French knot.
Yahoo! Inc.'s French adventure has gone so badly that most of its souvenirs are court documents. eBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have made the same trek but have somehow managed to escape the same mistakes.
News.Com: Time Warner teams with EarthLink, delays AOL merger review.
Time Warner on Monday signed an agreement with Internet service provider EarthLink to offer EarthLink's high-speed Internet services over Time Warner's cable systems. Time Warner recently formed a similar deal with free ISP Juno Online Services.
LA Times: Support for Software Law Eroding.
After more than a year of conflict, a campaign by America Online, Microsoft and other powerful software companies to pass legislation dramatically limiting the rights of software buyers appears to have stalled in the face of growing opposition.
ZDNN: eBay: OS for the highest bidder.
eBay's new technology -- with the decidedly uncatchy name of eBay API -- reflects the company's growing belief that it can get a piece of e-commerce beyond the confines of its popular online trading post at eBay.com.
NY Times: Retail Battle Returns to the Bricks.
And even though traditional retailers were first to try the twin "clicks-and-mortar" approach, analysts said it might be easier for Internet and catalog merchants to open stores than it is for bricks-and-mortar merchants to sell directly to consumers online.
Upside: Yahoo launches video shopping site.
Yahoo launched a video shopping site this morning called ShoppingVision, expanding its broadband offerings to further target home users. Yahoo's initial foray into broadband, FinanceVision, a continuous feed of financial video content, was targeted at professionals at work.
Inside: Pioneer Digital Drops Big Suit on Gemstar.
Pioneer Digital Technologies filed suit today in Los Angeles Superior Court against electronic programming guide developer Gemstar-TV Guide, alleging that Gemstar has created an environment of unfair competition and intentionally interfered with Pioneer's prospective economic advantage.
November 21, 2000
Upside: EMI issues first broad subscription license.
Tribble's Dallas-based Streamwaves just closed a first-of-its-kind deal with EMI, one of the five major record labels. In doing so, Tribble's company has become the first dotcom to license a major-label music catalog for sale, by subscription...
Industry Standard: The New Encyclopedia Salesmen.
Douglas Adams hopes to bring this fantasy to life with his company, H2g2, which is turning WAP phones into real-world "Hitchhiker's" guides. H2g2 is part of a new breed of Internet encyclopedias that are trying to amass a repository of all-encompassing knowledge by using volunteers.
Columbia Journalism Review: The AP Now.
But perhaps the biggest problem for the AP is that the Internet magnifies an inherent weakness in the wire service's cooperative structure. The AP must serve the needs of the more than 1,500 newspapers that own it, from The New York Times to the Daily Guide in Waynesville, Missouri.
Business 2.0: PCs are the Dark Matter of the Internet.
Clay Shirky. No matter how it ultimately gets labeled, the thing that software like the Gnutella file-sharing system and the Popular Power distributed computing network have in common is an ability to harness this dark matter, the otherwise underused hardware at the edges of the Net.
CIO: Going with the Flow: Bob Metcalfe.
He longs to delve into something he calls "anticiparallelism"—the ability of software to anticipate what the user will want to do next, and then to do it in the background, invisibly, concurrent with, or parallel to, whatever task is visible to the user.
Business 2.0: Procter & Gamble's Great Web Experiment.
It's how P&G and other consumer products companies operate–by trial and error. P&G itself isn't sure how its Net strategy will work out: it could lead to ecommerce, it could be branding, it could be a colossal waste of money. Right now, it's just trial and error.
Forbes: Disaster Of The Day: Cable Cut On The Net.
It all started Nov. 19 when a major Internet backbone cable, sitting in less than 100 feet of seawater about 40 miles off Singapore, was damaged by unknown causes. Telstra relies on the cable, known as SEA-ME-WE 3 for more than 60% of its Internet transmission capacity.
TechWeb: Britain's Broadband Auction Fizzles Out.
Britain's broadband wireless license auction went out with a whimper Tuesday, with the government admitting that many licenses remained unsold, some went for rock-bottom prices, and only $55 million was realized from the sale.
Internet Week: PC Makers Tap Net For Support.
And even in situations where e-support can't reduce the duration of a tech-support phone call, Internet-based problem solving at least gives customers better control of their time. By combining e-mail, online chat and telephony, customers can move through tech support at their own pace...
November 22, 2000
SJ Mercury: Internet will find way around China censorship.
Dan Gillmor. This is a brash city, full of energy and rampantly capitalistic but still a part of a nation that is not precisely sure what it wants to be. The Chinese government wants to maintain strict political control while moving into the entrepreneurial Information Age, and it probably can't have both.
Industry Standard: A Mini Yahoo.
There will be an unusual union in Paris this week. Yahoo, the quintessential Web company, will launch a service for customers of Minitel, a national computer system in France, which uses old-fashioned technology that was supposedly made obsolete by the Internet.
Strategy & Business: REI Climbs Online.
"When I took the leap of faith that we could launch this compelling value proposition, and that it could be big, I realized we needed to make this a core competency," Mr. Hyde said. "It couldn't be outsourced. At that moment I knew I had to give this to bright, motivated people inside the organization."
NY Times: Software to Track E-Mail Raises Privacy Concerns.
Anyone who has been left hanging knows it is the sort of nagging question that is rarely answered. But thanks to a furtive application of a feature common to the latest e-mail programs, Mr. Bell was able to learn, undetected, that the intended recipients were indeed opening his messages.
Wired News: Europe Nixes Software Patents.
All European countries, with the exception of Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, voted against extending the current European patent system to cover software at the Diplomatic Conference to Revise the European Patent Convention which opened Monday in Munich.
MSNBC: Internet pioneer urges overhaul.
...Dr. Robert Kahn — one of the inventors of the Internet — wants to revamp the way information is handled over the Net. And his new system, which is increasingly being adopted by publishers and computer giants, may provide as much of an information revolution as the Internet itself.
Inside: Yahoo's X-Vision: First There Was FinanceVision, Then ShoppingVision. Is MediaVision Next?
The company has hinted at plans to create such channels in the past (as well as a sports channel) and, according to industry insiders who have dealt with Yahoo, the media/news product is expected to be the next channel that is unveiled -- perhaps as soon as January.
November 23, 2000
Washington Post: AT&T Puts Open Access to a Test.
But as a demonstration of the software last week made clear, AT&T's logo will remain an immutable part of every screen, flanked by menus that beckon customers with links to Web sites for local news and shopping--AT&T's commercial partners, who will share revenue.
The Guardian: Searching questions.
Q&A with Sergey Brin, president and co-founder of Google. In five years I hope they will be able to return answers, not just documents. Some companies have tried to do that today but they do not work very well, which is why Google still returns documents. In the future, Google will be your interface to all the world's knowledge...
Business 2.0: Hold the Bells and Whistles.
There are plenty of good ways for Web designers to use broadband. But cramming flashy videos and whizzy animations down a user's DSL line isn't one of them. "One of the things we know about Web users from day one is they tend to be very goal focused," says Forrester Research analyst Randy Souza.
VisionQuest: Meet the Man Who Spun the Web.
Tim Berners-Lee. Imagine a Q&A session with one of the best minds in technology answering your questions. Hear the remarkable stories of how technologies came to be—straight from their inventors. Here's your chance to discover what drives great thinkers, how they succeed and why they sometimes fail.
Business 2.0: Redesign The Data Dump.
Richard Saul Wurman. Therefore, the great Information Age is really an explosion of non-information; it is an explosion of data. To deal with the increasing onslaught of data, it is imperative to distinguish between the two; information is that which leads to understanding.
November 24, 2000
The Economist: Vive la liberté!
If authentication and access-control technologies such as digital certificates became widespread, the virtual world would soon start to look much like the real one, stuffed as it is with borders and regulations. This is exactly what law-enforcement groups and the copyright industry want.
NY Times: E-Commerce Dream Proves the Undoing of a Solid Business.
Theirs was a union marked by the collision of two worlds. When Living.com acquired Shaw last year to gain a toehold in the furniture business, Internet entrepreneurship came face to face with the rigid, traditional world of home furnishings.
Internet Week: Two Faces Of J.C. Penney.
"The Web is such a small part of their business; there's no way it's going to turn around the company," said an analyst who asked not to be named. "The Web is icing on the cake, but the biggest part of the company, by far, is struggling."
Wired News: Ask a Librarian, Not Jeeves.
A new project is attempting to make the library an even more vital research source than ever before. The Library of Congress and its partner libraries are launching a pilot project to bring librarians' expertise to the Internet by forming a global reference desk that is available 24 hours, seven days a week.
USA Today: HP to pay antipiracy fee for CD burners.
The case sets the stage for other European countries to possibly adopt similar rules to stem an epidemic that cost the music industry an estimated $5 billion last year. But analysts blasted the agreement reached Thursday as another example of Germany's notorious thatch of regulations.
Fast Company: Weathering the Storm.
In a way, the Weather Channel was just waiting for an interactive medium like the Web to come along. Its customers were already dying to interact. They regularly called or wrote to ask questions about the weather; about the meteorologists delivering the weather...
November 25, 2000
The Register: Country code chiefs, registrars mull ICANN breakaway.
At last week's ICANN meetings in California, the country code chiefs formed a working group to explore the option of taking the name business beyond its control. The managers, who represent the .de, .uk etc domains, unanimously voted to look at three alternatives...
Nando Times: Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf pans French ruling against Yahoo!
Cerf, who was part of an international three-member panel that advised Gomez, shares those fears, adding that the court had brushed aside his concerns about the "limitations and risks" of trying to keep certain Internet content from French users.
ZDNN: IBM rolls out high-resolution screen.
IBM Corp. on Friday announced that it has begun shipping a high-definition flat-panel display offering paper-quality resolution -- a decade ahead of schedule. The new display offers an image quality that is twice as good as is currently available on LCDs, but it won't be available in retail stores for another five years...
NY Times: Impressive New Video Displays.
Recently the military turned to Sarnoff to be part of a project to develop electronic maps. Mr. Birch said that what was emerging from the research, however, was a technology that might find widespread use off the battlefield. should, according to Mr. Birch, create jumbo-size, high-resolution, flat-panel displays...
November 26, 2000
Useit.Com: Security & Human Factors.
The big lie of computer security is that security improves by imposing complex passwords on users. In real life, people write down anything they can't remember. Security is increased by designing for the way humans actually behave.
SJ Mercury: Visiting Hong Kong, a telecom paradise.
Dan Gillmor. By world standards, Hong Kong has been a particularly forward-looking place when it comes to telecom. It was early to digitize the local phone switching system, and today, fiber-optic lines run past about 95 percent of all homes and businesses.
SJ Mercury: Interactive television gets nudge with Wink.
But most of these proposals are techno-Hindenburgs, bags of hot air that burst into flames and crash because of complexity and cost. So I'm more than a little surprised to discover a simple and effective interactive TV system that, with little fanfare, has just become available nationwide.
- Salon: From November 22, 1999; Tuned in to TV.
Q&A with Maggie Wilderotter, CEO of Wink.
O'Reilly Network: What is P2P... And What Isn't.
Clay Shirky. What has changed is what the nodes of these P2P systems are -- Internet-connected PCs, which had been formerly relegated to being nothing but clients -- and where these nodes are -- at the edges of the Internet, cut off from the DNS system because they have no fixed IP address.
November 27, 2000
NY Times: Struggles Over E-Books Abound.
There is something not entirely rational about the book industry's current love affair with electronic books. Few people have ever read a whole book on a screen. No one knows how many people will ever want to. And book publishers have been burned before...
Internet Week: BlueLight Site Fix: Hosted DNS Service.
With UltraDNS's routing-like capability, when a query is sent to a server and there's a problem, such as a lost packet, UltraDNS quickly tries another server close to the user making the query. If a server is down, Ultra-DNS removes it from eligibility to process requests.
ZDNN: Forget passwords, what about pictures?
Two researchers in the U.S. are suggesting a third way: scrap the character-heavy password altogether. They're aiming to harness the acute visual memory all humans are born with, a memory far more powerful than our ability to recall precise sequences of symbols.
Inside: With BigBox, New Piece of Yahoo's Broadband Strategy Emerges.
Inside has obtained a slide show presentation, apparently created by the sales team from Yahoo subsidiary Broadcast.com, pitching the new product -- creatively rendered as .bIGbOX at the start of the show. The ''big'' apparently stands for Broadcast Interactive Group.
MacWeek: Exploring MPEG-4.
Not only will MPEG-4 videos and photos have smaller file sizes than comparably sized QuickTime videos and JPEG images, but this algorithm crunches still pictures and video so small that soon it's going to be possible to stream MPEG-4 video and still images onto small handheld wireless devices...
SF Chronicle: Web Pioneer Looks Ahead.
Q&A with Vinton Cerf. We should make sure the domain name system and the Internet address system work in a technically functional way. We should also protect the public interest by ensuring that registry databases can be recovered in the event of a business or technical failure.
USA Today: Many victims of hacks clam up.
According to the FBI and security consultants, only a few of the many companies that suffer Internet-related security breaches or whose databases are compromised by hackers ever approach law enforcement for help.
News.Com: Kyocera gets "smart" with cell phone-PDA combo.
At 7 ounces and nearly an inch thick, the Smartphone is bigger than most cell phones, although it is smaller and sleeker than its predecessor, the PDQ, which debuted in 1998. That unit was widely criticized for its heft, as well as its poor integration of a phone and handheld computer.
November 28, 2000
Business 2.0: Citigroup to Push Ecash into Primetime.
Citigroup and America Online certainly know about consumers. They are, after all, the world's leading financial institution and the top online service provider. Now the two bet that by joining forces, they can bring electronic-payment services into the mainstream.
SJ Mercury: Jumping on bandwagon of eBay criticism.
There's reason to believe -- maybe not now, but soon -- that eBay's $170 million acquisition of Billpoint, its online bill-payment service, may need to be re-examined. In the worst case, some people are predicting that eBay may even consider selling it.
The Register: Yahoo! Nazi tech expert backtracks.
One of the three Internet experts that decided it was technically possible to prevent French users from accessing parts of Yahoo! US' auction site has posted an apology on his own Web site, saying that the solution is "half-assed and trivially avoidable".
eCompany: Regulators in Broward County Get Overturned.
Fortunately for cable companies, the law is on their side in this case. As the federal judge made clear in striking down the Broward County statute, broadband content of cable operators is considered under the law to be a form of speech.
digitalMASS: Another technology solution in search of a problem.
I'm the perfect target market for the various e-book hardware and software systems currently making the rounds. I've tested many of them. But for now, I'm not ready to donate a U-Haul's worth of dead-tree volumes to the local library and live the electronic-reading life.
Inside: While E-Books Seem Far Off, AvantGo Establishes Itself as Virtual Library.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. And we've recommended AvantGo to every first-time palm buyer we know. Without being intrusive or ''stealing time'' from other media, AvantGo has remained a constant and growing part of our media picture.
The Register: BT still chasing cash for hyperlink patent.
In an announcement today Scipher confirms that it was still "actively carrying out this commission", scotching mischievous speculation that BT's claim was little more than a hoax. No one from Scipher was available by press time to explain exactly what progress had been made during the last six months.
Forbes: Kyocera Joins Phone, Palm.
The chip technology that will allow combo devices to get smaller is improving almost daily. But the display technology remains tricky. A PalmPilot, or comparable device, requires a display area of a certain size in order to be useful. This will keep the devices bigger than mobile phones.
November 29, 2000
USA Today: Time Warner resists FTC demands.
Time Warner is unwilling to accede to regulators' demands to make its news and entertainment content available to America Online's rivals as a condition for approving the companies' merger — an impasse that could derail the deal.
News.Com: Comcast opens high-speed network to Juno.
Under terms of the deal, Juno, the third-largest dial-up Internet service provider in the United States, will offer its high-speed Juno Express over Comcast's network in what will be the cable company's first trial of multiple ISPs on its network.
Business 2.0: Online Privacy's New Hot Button: Access.
Forget the opt-out, opt-in debate: The thorniest online privacy issue on Capitol Hill is whether Web retailers, network advertisers, and other companies should be required to provide consumers with the ability to access, correct, and delete their personal data from the firms' databases.
Wired News: Copyright Act Faces Big Test.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Copyright Office will hold its final mandatory hearings with representatives from the library associations and webcasting, content and digital music industries. At issue is whether the DMCA has properly balanced consumers' rights with copyright-holders' interests since its inception...
Forbes: Chasing the Chat Dollar.
Firms such as Cisco, Oracle and GE Medical Systems are creating communities for suppliers and salespeople. Emily Meehan of the Yankee Group estimates that businesses have spent $300 million in the past three years building online community.
EE Times: AT&T develops broadband phone with touch screen.
AT&T is developing a "broadband phone" that will be able to carry any type of packet traffic — from voice to data to streaming video — as specified by a touchscreen. Designed by AT&T's labs in Cambridge, U.K., the phone was described in a plenary session at IEEE Globecom...
ZDNN: SDMI: Two hackers awarded $5K each.
The two challengers emerged from a field of 447 submissions as the only ones able to remove the protection systems and successfully disable one of five technologies currently under consideration for SDMI screening technology, the group said.
November 30, 2000
Boston Globe: Monsieur, do you Yahoo?
But rather than rail against the injustice of the Gomez decision, let's focus on a more practical question: Can it be enforced? Can an Internet company block access to citizens of a particular country, while leaving the rest of us free to surf wherever we wish?
NY Times: A Thumbs Down for Web Phones.
It's probably not surprising to learn that people who use cell phones to gain access to the Web find the experience less than gratifying. That is the main finding of a report released today on how well mobile phones work as Web-access devices.
News.Com: AT&T, NTT deal could jump-start wireless Web.
Executives said they expected to create the new multimedia division, which will be an AT&T Wireless subsidiary, sometime within the next 90 to 100 days. That company will begin adding improvements to AT&T's existing mobile data service over time.
Internet Week: Media Looks To Broadband.
It's not easy to accurately assess the impact that broadband delivery will have on the types of content and services made available, according to a couple of early adopters who are integrating streaming media into their Web sites.
News.Com: Consumers may find e-books a tough read.
When you buy a paperback book, you can read it as many times as you like, lend it out to your friends, and even sell it later on if you like. Not so for the brave new world of e-books, where publishers place complex electronic padlocks on their wares through so-called digital rights management technology.
Industry Standard: IBM Cries Crypto Wolf, Experts Say.
IBM is announcing a new algorithm on Thursday that it says will double the speed at which online communications are encrypted. But several crypto experts say that IBM is fixing something that isn't broken and that Big Blue has a history of tooting its horn needlessly.
ZDNN: AOL strengthens its 'Anywhere' grip.
Reynolds said that, in time, he expects service fees to roll into one overall charge. But for now, AOL has a chance to see if users are willing to pay separate fees, and also how much they're willing to pay for services on different devices.
NY Times: Flexible Displays for Electronic Ink.
Scientists have demonstrated what they say is the world's first flexible display using electronic ink, bringing engineers one step closer to creating a changeable display screen that is nearly as portable, lightweight and easy to read as paper.
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