--------------------
Say that again...
--------------------
"My client has lost millions of dollars in potential ad revenues, not
to mention the permanent damage to his reputation as a filmmaker and an
actor."
- Stan Lieber, attorney for Ken Tipton, on the lawsuit Tipton has filed
against IEG for shutting down “ourfirsttime.com” because it was a fraud.
I’m sorry, but going through with the fraud would have uplifted Tipton’s
reputation as a filmmaker and an actor? Someone want to explain that
one?
"Some people feel banners are annoying. Some people feel TV commercials
are annoying. I feel the Internet is going to become commercialized and
there's nothing that can be done to stop it. What corporations can
do is minimize the annoyance.”
- Bernard Ferguson, CEO of MicroSmarts Innovative Business Solutions,
the company who created Link Exchange’s new Pop-Up Exchange ad network
of annoying pop-up advertisements. It strikes me that the best way
to minimize the annoyance is simply *not* to have these pop up ads.
It also strikes me that this idea is not smart (even “microsmart”), innovative,
or a solution, which makes me wonder about the company’s name.
"Our arrangement with InfoSpace is particularly exciting, as it is intended
to serve as the foundation for Skyline's immediate expansion into providing
a broad range of both Web-related and location-based tour and travel services
catering to individuals and groups that visit our attraction at The Empire
State Building.”
- Jay Berkman, co-CEO of Skyline Multimedia Entertainment. A
hearty congratulations in next week’s issue to anyone who can tell me what,
if anything, the above statement means.
-----------------
Startup City
-----------------
Who wants to work for big boring bureaucratic companies anyway?
Execs from SAP, Oracle, and HP all quit this week to run startups...
-------------------------------------------
More Reasons to be Disgusted by Microsoft
-------------------------------------------
I try. I really do try. Each week, though, Microsoft does
something to disgust me. Microsoft officials refuse to use the word
“browser” now in their court case. To them, they say, the “browser”
no longer exists. There are just “bits of browsing technologies”
built into the Operating System. It makes you sick, doesn’t it?
Why doesn’t someone just show them IE for MacOS?... In other news, an article
by Wendy Goldman Rohm, who has admitted to making up good sounding stories
about Microsoft, reported that a Microsoft employee has admitted to destroying
evidence in the Caldera case... Also, proving that deep down inside they
really are bastards, MS has subpoenaed Netscape’s “Really Bad Attitude”
newsgroup. RBA is an internal newsgroup at Netscape, mostly for developers
to vent...
------------------------------------------
Earnings Reports, IPOs and the like
------------------------------------------
Yahoo! to be added to the NASDAQ 100... Morgan Stanley raised their
estimates on Intel, and suddenly Intel didn’t care that the rest of the
market was tanking... CMP misses estimates by a wide margin... uBid, yet
another online auction house, had their IPO delayed due to “market conditions”
(not business model conditions?)... Cadence to buy Ambit...
------------------------------------------------
Rumors, Conspiracies etc. of the week...
------------------------------------------------
Apple to build “search” functionality into MacOS. The search
will happen both locally on the hard drive and on the Internet (not a bad
concept, actually)...
--------------------------
News you could do without
--------------------------
Earthlink is the “official” ISP of the NFL (how much money was thrown
away on that deal?)... Inktomi buys C2B, the comparison shopping agent
(or, as some called it: “Inktomi pulls an Amazon”)... Microsoft offers
new pricing plan to academic institutions (one academic official says “I’m
not excited by this”)... Yahoo! and Amazon expand their deal (is this a
big game of Risk? They work together until one feels powerful enough to
screw the other one over)... Network Solutions in a co-marketing deal with
Info USA (why?)... A user who figures out a way to break into voice mailboxes
is threatened with a lawsuit when he tries to report the bug to PacBell...
Intel blames bandwidth providers for holding up web publishing (is that
a tone of desperation? Intel badly needs fancier web page applications
to justify selling more powerful processors) ... More web based email bugs...
Gordon Moore not all that worried about Y2K... Lots of child pornographers
were arrested this week in a worldwide crackdown on Internet child porn...
IBM wins a $3 billion outsourcing agreement from Cable & Wireless...
The Department of Justice expands its case against Microsoft... It’s okay
for Network Solutions to collect extra money for domains (watch those prices
jump back up)... eBay shells out $12 million to be AOL’s exclusive auction
service (as some begin to question their IPO offering)... Sportsline expects
to renew its exclusive agreement with AOL (how much will they have to shell
out?)... AOL to use Inference call center technology to answer customer
questions “more quickly and accurately”... PGP 6.0 already on European
servers despite not being released in the US (is it illegal if it hasn’t
been released yet?)... CompUSA finishes sucking up Computer City... A spam
bill in California (a smart one – basically saying unsolicited email has
to be flagged with an [AD] tag) raising free speech issues... Oracle has
been making deals with lots of companies owned by (guess who?) Larry Ellison
(I’m sure the stock holders will love those deals)... Juno hires detectives
to track down a spammer who abused their service... Judge John Flaherty
excuses himself from the Sun-Microsoft case due to a conflict with his
pension fund. (Two thoughts: 1. He got out of this case realizing
it was going to be a real bitch to make a decision or 2. Microsoft “got”
to him)... Fujitsu shuts down semiconductor plant, kills 570 jobs... Hitachi
shuts down semiconductor plant, kills 650 jobs... Mitsubishi shuts down
semiconductor plant, kills 230 jobs... It must suck to be in semi’s right
now... The U.S. government predicts it will take nearly half a billion
more than expected to fix Y2K problems (someone want to explain to them
we don’t care how much it *costs*, just the amount of *time* it will take)...
Bill Gates not to testify in the DOJ case... New bug found and fixed in
IE... Bell South has decided to charge companies that offer long distance
calls over the net the same charges they apply to regular long distance
companies... According to an Intel executive, game consoles are history
(thanks to powerful new PCs, of course)...
------------
Surprises:
------------
Zapata has hired Salomon Smith Barney to prove they are a real Internet
company (well, golly, now I’m convinced)... PointCast founder, Chriss Hassett
working to launch a new Internet startup called PrizePoint (let’s see if
he can sell out at the high point of hype this time, rather than letting
the company collapse into nothingness in a few months)... Condominiums
(minimum bid $9!) for sale on OnSale (they also plan to auction plane tickets
– watch out Priceline: who needs a reverse auction when a forward one will
work just fine, thank you)... Web folks consolidate: USWeb and CKS make
the big merger news, while Proxicom and IBIS slip under most news radars...
HP, Compaq and IBM team up to challenge Intel on circuitry... Andersen
Consulting sued for an installation done in 1990 that isn’t Y2K compliant
(hope that suit gets done before 1/1/2000 or Andersen may not be able to
find the money it owes)... ESPN, who had a fairly successful site, redesigns
it to look like yet another portal... Symantec told to stop selling Uninstall
Deluxe due to copyright infringement on a CyberMedia product... John Romero,
one of the main developers of Quake, and the co-founder of id Games and
Ion Storm “fakes” his death on the Internet using a newspaper photo of
a different John Romero (well, at least this guy is making games involving
lots and lots of death)...
-------------------------------
(Mis)Uses of Technology:
-------------------------------
IP-enabled vending machines... Yahoo! Internet surfing stations in
Times Square... IRS to use VeriSign to test digital signatures on tax returns
filed electronically. They plan to deploy it on a wide-scale basis
in 2000 (wait a sec... I thought the IRS was going to drop off the planet
on January 1st 2000)... Microsoft has produced a pop song in Hong Kong
that urges listeners not to pirate software (I can *smell* the desperation)...
The web movie “Monster Home” where the end-users get to choose the order
in which they see the scenes... Text mode Quake (no, there is *no* good
reason for this)... President Clinton signs an e-commerce communique with
Ireland using a digital signature... David Bowie has decided to become
an ISP http://www.davidbowie.com/
... Yet another computerized essay grader: Thomas Landauer at the University
of Colorado at Boulder has created a program that, after reading a “gold
standard” can grade other essays based on content – but not creativity...
----------
Studies:
----------
According to eMarketer, CDNow is the top ranked music website, followed
closely by N2K, Amazon.com and CD Universe... Broadband Internet access
will be used by a quarter of all online homes by 2002 according to Forrester
– 80% of which will be fulfilled by cable companies... More than 10% of
Internet users have browsed for clothes online – a category most folks
swore could not be sold over the Internet, according to @Plan... Forrester
is predicting that lower income houses will start buying more computers
next year... Apparently, according to Student Monitor LLC, the Internet
is “cooler” on campus than “beer-drinking” (man, I left college too early)...
Saatchi & Saatchi has found that chatting makes up 26 percent of time
spent online...
-----------
Overhype
-----------
Mixing sex and stock quotes. IEG announces their little venture
into this arena and suddenly it’s news on every site. Do we care?...
That damn Microsoft-Disney spam. Is it that the net is getting *more*
gullible? Though, I love the new excuses I get from people who are
normally quite technically savvy: “well, it’s probably not true, but just
in case”...
--------------
Predictions:
--------------
Pop-up Exchange will fail. Don’t they understand? Pop-up
banners are (1) annoying as anything and (2) damn easy to program out *or*
to simply shut down before they even load...
------------------------
Too much free time:
------------------------
A fairly good analogy to software piracy: http://www.brunching.com/features/feature-copyfire.html
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