March 20 - 26, 2000
from the up-to-date dept
It's back again, after a brief hiatus. Click below to check out the latest Up-To-Date complete with the latest funky quotes from the high tech world, pointless lawsuits, amazing changes in corporation value, and plenty of other fun snippets of high tech news. As always subscribing to the email version is as easy as sticking your email address in the Up-To-Date box to the right...********************************************************************* UP-TO-DATE ********************************************************************* The not always serious, not always weekly update on the High-Tech Industry March 20 - March 26, 2000 ********************************************************************* Shorter than the Oscars -------------------------------- Random Notes -------------------------------- Okay, okay, so it's been a while since Up-To-Date has come out. I apologize. Other projects have taken over plenty of time. I am still interested in seeing if there are folks who might be able to help out with the newsletter. Send email to icanhelp@techdirt.com if you're interested. --------------------- Techdirt on the Web --------------------- Techdirt Poll: What's your opinion of Napster: https://www.techdirt.com/pollBooth.pl?qid=napster Plenty of articles recently about Napster, but here's one that I thought was particularly interesting. The writer first admits that he thinks Napster is a terrible idea, encouraging piracy and all that. Then, he complains that songs he likes aren't even available via Napster: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/000320/1133227_F.shtml Are technology business magazines getting too big? https://www.techdirt.com/articles/000321/1130259_F.shtml Are cell phone and palm devices converging? https://www.techdirt.com/articles/000322/167247_F.shtml And, as always, there's plenty more stuff at https://www.techdirt.com/ updated most every weekday. -------------------- Say that again... -------------------- "It feels like nothing, actually." - Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy CEO on what it feels like to lose over $6 billion in personal value in one day "I've never spent so much time on rules since I was on student council." - Michael Armstrong, AT&T CEO on the internet tax committee discussions. "Let the inmates run the asylum! Let the passengers steer the bus! Don't redesign your Web site. Redesign your company." - David Siegel, big name consultant spewing the type of sayings that get him the big bucks. ------------------------------------------ Earnings Reports, IPOs and the like ------------------------------------------ The big news of the week was MicroStrategy's little story where it lost a ridiculous amount of its value by restating earnings due to new, more reasonable, accounting methods. Michael Saylor received a ton of press for losing the second most money of any single person in any single day (he's still a multi-billionaire, so there's not much to feel sorry for there)... Kozmo.com files to raise a cool $150 million in an IPO (it certainly beats having a business model that includes profits)... Lycos Europe had their IPO to much hype... Cisco passed Microsoft on Friday to be the most valuable company in the world... Caldera had the happy Linux IPO of the week... ------------------------------------------------ Rumors, Conspiracies etc. of the week... ------------------------------------------------ Everyone wants to buy GM's DirecTV satellite business... Yahoo and eBay are talking merger again (isn't it amazing how quickly this info gets out?)... Via and AMD to merge at least partially (gets the big denial out of both parties, which doesn't mean a damn thing)... Microsoft and the Gov't getting closer to settlements (blah, blah, blah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no one really cares)... Bank One thinking about selling Wingspan... ---------------------------------------- News you should have read elsewhere ---------------------------------------- Microsoft lobbyists under investigation for a dinner held in NY (is it ever a surprise when a sentence begins with "Microsoft so-and-so's are under investigation"?)... 3Com is so happy with their Palm spinout that they decide to spin off the rest of their business. Whatever they're doing, it looks like it involves getting rid of a lot of jobs, and conceding that Cisco beat them up pretty badly (maybe it's time for Techdirt to spin off the "dirt" side of the business)... That damn internet tax panel and the fact that they decided absolutely nothing (something I'm good at, perhaps they should hire me)... -------------------------- News you could do without -------------------------- Amazon.com dumps a ton of money into Kozmo so that you can get your books delivered in an hour (for the absolutely, positively lazy people who can't bother to go to the bookstore if they need a book right away)... HP and Xerox decide to drop all the various patent lawsuits they have against each other as they realize that no one actually cares at all about either of them... Internet pharmacies based in Thailand getting in trouble for selling illegal prescription drugs... Yahoo! and Palm team up so that you can instant message from your palm device (for the 30 or so people who want to do this - and I realize that half of you are on this list and will email me to tell me)... Disney is not a big fan of the proposed AOL-Time Warner deal (well, duh)... MP3.com is facing plenty of lawsuits and now Paul McCartney is suing them also (what to do when you have nothing better to do: come up with lawsuits)... Yahoo buys Arthas.com to allow person to person transaction billing (because Yahoo doesn't have access to yet enough of our daily lives)... Washington State Superior Court rules that spam laws are too burdensome (too burdensome not to fake the return email address or leave a clear way to opt-out? What were they thinking?)... The FTC is going after 1,600 "get rich quick" sites (maybe I should start billing Techdirt as the "lose money quick" site)... WebTV hit with Melissa-like virus. Microsoft acts innocent, claiming that "virus" is too strong a word (just like "monopoly" is too strong a word, right?)... All the little nobodies trying to get some publicity by saving Iridium from a fiery death... CompUSA finally ditches cozone.com and decides its online presence should be under the CompUSA brand (brilliant folks, there)... ------------ Surprises: ------------ Microsoft's next operating system source code out in the open (how buggy must that be?)... The Industry Standard seems to have dropped their fact checkers: in talking about rival CNET's recent top management shift they discussed new CEO Shelby Bonnie's previous roles at the company including "vice chairwoman". Shelby, as far as I know, has always been male (not that I have any fact checkers here - but then again, I'm not a big famous company, either)... Peapod loses its CEO (to health reasons) and its latest investment (I'd have health problems too if my investors pulled out on the $120 million they'd promised) and everyone else decides to sue them... eToys decides that enough is enough and they restructure their affiliate program so that all the folks who gave them nice leads in the past no longer get paid (if toysrus.com had any brains they would be all over the eToys affiliates getting them to switch their allegiance)... ------------------------------- (Mis)Uses of Technology: ------------------------------- Yahoo and Pepsi in a co-marketing agreement (so long as I never have to drink Pepsi.com, I'm okay with it)... Netpliance has made changes to its i-opener box so that you can't turn into a functional computer any more (taking away the main reason most folks were picking them up)... Japan now claims they've built the world's smallest helicopter (basically a chair with propellers), which they'll be selling on the internet (of course)... NEC printers with their own IP address... Napster tries to change so that it's not so bandwidth intensive... At the same time hacks such as Wrapster are allowing folks to exchange (read: pirate) much more than just mp3s... Emailing subpoenas... It is now possible (though of questionable taste as a role model) to bet on your childrens' future via the internet... ---------- Studies: ---------- If you didn't see or hear about this study then you obviously live under some sort of rock far, far away from any sort of internet access: at least 51 dot com companies are predicted to run out of cash within the next year, according to Pegasus Research. The companies responded and said it wasn't true. For example, good old CDNow said that despite the study's claims they only had enough cash on hand for one month, they've got *at least* 6 months to go... Excite@Home had the biggest gain of any of the major online properties last month according to Media Metrix... Primix Solutions has done a study showing that 71% of online shoppers consider price to be the most important factor in deciding what to buy online (though it's less important for repeat business)... More than half of all U.S. adults are now online according to Strategis Group (of course, another study has shown that 40% of people worldwide know about the internet, but have no desire to actually use it)... Forrester has discovered that those young folks out there still prefer going to movies, listening to CDs and going to stadium events to online entertainment... The Computer Security Institute has estimated that computer crime has cost companies over $10 billion (but, then again, they would have incentive to show that number to be pretty damn high, wouldn't they?)... PricewaterhouseCoopers says that big companies still suck at e-commerce, finding that only 28% of them conduct transactions through their websites... ----------- Overhype ----------- How many industry groups "teamed" up this week to create an online B2B "powerhouse"? (read: the FTC will soon be looking into all of them for collusion)... Yahoo and AOL announcing B2B strategies (can anyone tell me what they are without looking them up? Anyone? Does anyone care?)... More and more big companies get into the dot com funding business. The latest entrants: Compaq, HP, and Macromedia... -------------- Predictions: -------------- You think NASA is having trouble hiring quality scientists? First they had problems deciding between feet and meters and now it appears they added a zero in determining how hard to shake a spacecraft they were testing. Perhaps it's time they started sending their scientists back to remedial math classes... Accompany gets a business model patent for their "volume-based pricing technology". How long until their lawyers are swarming all over Mercata?... ------------------------ Too much free time: ------------------------ Okay, okay, I try to avoid sites that I know may have already been seen by the majority of you, and this one may have been passed around quite a bit already, but it's too damn addictive not to pass on to those of you who might have missed it. Have fun: http://www.soda.co.uk/soda/constructor/index.htm ********************************************************************* Up To Date is written by Mike Masnick from whatever news he hears from whatever sources they happen to come from. It is not intended for any uses other than as one of many possible ways to follow what's going on in the hi-tech industry. I certainly wouldn't rely on it as your only source of info. And, of course, my comments may not accurately reflect reality. Finally, an explicit warning about investing: I do not, under any circumstance, consider any piece of information in this newsletter "investment advice" and neither should you. If you would like to subscribe to the email version please send an email to utd-sub@techdirt.com with "Subscribe Up-To-Date" in the subject heading. Up To Date is also available on the web at https://www.techdirt.com/uptodate/ Unsubscribing is just as easy: unsub@techdirt.com with "Unsubscribe Up-To-Date" in the subject. If you want more in depth, daily up dates, along with your own commentary head over to https://www.techdirt.com/ Comments are always welcome! Email: feedback@techdirt.com *********************************************************************
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