March 15 - 21, 1999

from the Up-To-Date dept

Thinking about starting a web-based, financial services, home-shopping, e-commerce, auction site.*********************************************************************
UP-TO-DATE
*********************************************************************
The not always serious,
not always weekly update
on the High-Tech Industry
March 15th - March 21t, 1999
*********************************************************************
Thinking about starting a web-based, financial
services, home-shopping, e-commerce, auction site.

----------------------
Here I Am... Briefly
----------------------
So, Techdirt's Up-To-Date has taken a bit of a breather for the past two weeks as I've been busy with some other things. It's back this week, but will be taking another few weeks off going forward. It will return sometime in April, with a few surprises in store.

--------------------
Say that again...
--------------------
"It's the Internet meets 'The Real World' - but without the mandatory gay character. People always bring up the concern of being watched 24-7. I've heard the term Big Brother being tossed around. But I think technology is something that shouldn't be feared. It's cool."
- Nicholas, one of the new "stars" of Webdorm.com.

"This is analysis? No, I think it is evidence of an investment firm looking to suck up to a company that is clearly going to need debt and equity underwriting support from Wall Street for as far into the future as the eye can see."
- Christopher Byron, of MSNBC in response to superstar analyst Henry Blodget's (now of Merrill Lynch - made famous at Oppenheimer for calling for Amazon $400) analysis that Amazon.com is worth somewhere between $1 and $200.

"When people are under a lot of pressure from supervisors and managers to meet tight deadlines, they can become frustrated and lose control of their temper. Instead of voicing their frustrations to their supervisors, some people choose to take out their aggression on inanimate objects -- in this case, their monitor, keyboard or mouse."
- Dr. Will Calmas, a psychologist who participated in a study by Concord Communications showing that users have a tendency to beat up on their computer equipment in frustration.

"The day I made that comment, I was tired from staying up all night inventing the camcorder."
- Allegedly said by Al Gore, when asked about his comment last week saying he invented the internet...

"A suitcase of microprocessors is worth more than an equivalent volume of cocaine, is more difficult to trace than cash, and is not a felony to have in one's possession."
- A study by RAND, explaining why drug dealers really ought to expand into new businesses, such as microprocessor hi-jackings.

------------------------------------------
Earnings Reports, IPOs and the like
------------------------------------------
eFax's stock jumps because of a deal with Xoom.com (you get the feeling people want to hear just any news these days to make a stock jump)... Xoom.com did well in its own right by deciding to offer 4 million more shares (not dilution, just more NASDAQ Gold)... iVillage first decides to double its offering price (as more negative allegations come out) and then find out that they certainly didn't raise the price high enough. The first trade was still nearly 4 times higher... There were other moonshot Internet IPOs as well, as FlashNET, Multex, and Cheap Tickets all have fairly impressive debuts (in regular terms, though not in internet terms)... Wit Capital to go public (though it will turn to a more established underwriter to be lead)... Paul Allen may have an IPO with his cable stock, Charter Communications... AT&T stock to split, as they are also preparing a bond issue for $6 billion (um, wow)... Barnesandnoble.com is really ready to go public now... DLJDirect is also ready to go public... CMGI to split right after they said they weren't ready for it... Priceline, a company losing even more money than iVillage, has set its IPO price range... Adobe has a great quarter, beating estimates, and last year's numbers (but is it only due to cost cutting?)... Scient files for an IPO... StarMedia files for an IPO...

------------------------------------------------
Rumors, Conspiracies etc. of the week...
------------------------------------------------
New Y2K worries (or is this just an attempt to keep those Y2K companies in business next year?) as many of the solutions are just temporary. Apparently they just add something that allows the computer to guess whether the date more properly belongs in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. This, of course, begins to break down as we move further into the twenty-first century... Sony and NBC working on some form of a content sharing deal... Christos Costsakos (CEO of E*Trade) is working on creating the Asterisk Channel, a "financial home shopping network"... Amazon.com may be switching ad agencies... Buy.com and Ford possibly working together on something (buy.com does own buycars.com)... Nathan Myhrvold is thinking of leaving Microsoft (he's their CTO, if you didn't know that). In a related note, Techdirt.com is looking for an experienced CTO... Everyone seems to be reporting that AOL is going to layoff 30% of Netscape's workforce (but not the engineers!). Seems like an interesting method of motivating the new workforce to stick around... Harry Motro being forced out at Infoseek... Doubleclick is still in merger talks with someone...

----------------------------------------
News you should have read elsewhere
----------------------------------------
Ciena bought Omnia and Lightera (on the same day)... Apple releases OS X server software with its own form of open source (no it's *not* open source, yes it *is*, no it's *not*) and gives the fun folks in the open source movement yet another thing to fight about (it amazes me that I can't picture Bruce Perens, Richard Stallman, or Eric Raymond without a scowl on their faces)... Motorola has filed a lawsuit against Intel for stealing "trade secrets" by hiring away a top exec... AOL and Netscape completed their merger, as did N2K and CDNow... The FTC now accepts that Intel is really really sorry for being a bad bad company, and will now play fair and not run home with the ball or any advanced information about computer chips... Antitrust lawsuit against Network Solutions is thrown out...

--------------------------
News you could do without
--------------------------
Privacy violations tied to Microsoft? Can you believe it?... Gateway to release new Amigas (kill it already)... PlayMedia is suing Nullsoft over MP3 copyright stuff (yes, that's right, work to kill each other in a new market, rather than working to grow the market)... Cyberian Outpost adds auctions and the market loves them for it... CMGI is telling everyone that there really (really!) are people interested in buying Lycos... Teenagers arrested for creating a website where they pretend to be a gang... CyberShop spending more money to be featured on Yahoo!... Warner Brothers "Online" President, Jim Moloshok is pissed off that people are using Warner Brothers character on their personal home pages, saying they are being "ripped off" to help others build their brand. I'm sorry, but some kid playing around with a web page is not "ripping off" Mr. Moloshok or Warner Brothers by including a picture of Tweety Bird on his Geocities page... This is why I like Yahoo!: they look at what is currently difficult for users to do and then they make it easier. Currently, it's a pain in the ass to set up your own merchant account to sell stuff and accept credit cards online. So, they go out and make a deal with Banc One Payment Services to make it easy and cheap for anyone to set up a merchant account, and with First Data to handle credit card processing... Lots of worries about FASB changing accounting rules and making it impossible (or so the companies claim) to buy companies. I'm unsure on this one. If a merger makes sense, it should make sense no matter how it's accounted for. But, then again, writing off billions over 40 years could make it difficult to show a profit for a very long time... Schwab, E*Trade and Ameritrade all had outages this week (sometimes at the same time!)... Australia is trying to ban all porn on Australian servers... PlanetRX launches and no one really cares, because Drugstore.com already beat 'em to it... IE 5.0 released (or is it just a patch for Windows 98?)... Pawn shops online... Network Solutions has a redesign so it looks prettier, has lots of options, but is more of a pain to use... Microsoft invests $30 million in Rhythms NetConnections, a DSL company... NetZero has 500,000 registered users (but how many regular users who can put up with the floating ads?)... CNBC to create a personal finance hub with an "e-commerce" component (very original, guys)... Inktomi launches their shopping engine (does this mean that it works now?)... VLSI turned down Phillips buyout offer...

------------
Surprises:
------------
$750 million (a good portion of it cash) pumped to Go2Net by Paul Allen. Say what? Maybe he should've looked into purchasing Lycos instead... Broadcast.com President, Mark Cuban, thinks that MP3 will die because it has no commercial support (which is exactly why the Internet died, right?)... Truste is apparently going after Microsoft to see if they really abide by the conditions they signed to be approved by Truste (I'm torn: is this a publicity stunt by Truste, in the wake of the BBB's movement into their space, or are they really concerned about MS?)... Global Crossing buys Frontier for $11 billion... NBC and 24/7 to work together... Purple Moon, who shut down last month, was scooped up by Mattel (for not much money, I would imagine)... Microsoft now claims that Larry Ellison owes them $1 million for beating the challenge he set for them a few months back. Oracle counters that they didn't beat the challenge on time or even correctly...

-------------------------------
(Mis)Uses of Technology:
-------------------------------
The new megacar (also called the Mercedes-Benz V-Class Multipurpose Vehicle) which has a backseat that turns into a complete office including a removable desk, IBM notebook computer (with cool pull down screens), a printer, phone, fax, and (of course) a high speed wireless network connection (I think it's time I got into the product testing business)... How'd you like to be one of the cosmo/astronauts on Mir when word comes through that the Russian Gov't is running out of money and therefore they need to cancel spacewalks. "I don't care about spacewalks, get me the fuck home," is what I'd be thinking... The new Beenz virtual currency that no one wants to adopt just yet... RealNetwork's G2 with AOL Instant Messenger built in... Web-enabled mobile phones from Motorola... MacWeek delivered in .pdf...

----------
Studies:
----------
Telecompetition has released research predicting 12.6 million U.S. users will spend more than $5 billion to connect with wireless networks... Semiconductor sales in January increased over 1% from January of last year, but decreased two percent from December, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association... The Jobs Rated Almanac says that website manager, computer systems analyst, and software engineer are among the best jobs in the country... Computer Economics predicts that cable modem use will grow to over 24 million units in five years (about 10 times the estimate for this year)...

-----------
Overhype
-----------
The $300 PC from Microworkz. News of which knocked out their site and flooded their phone lines. Kinda scary when you think that a new color screen PDA may cost 3 times as much as a PC... Plenty of different takes on the ICQ filtering story, ranging from outrage to the fact that they filter many sites that possibly should not be, to the realization that the list is stolen from another companies filtering list...

--------------
Predictions:
--------------
Despite the tremendous amount of effort I'm sure was put into the naming process, are folks really going to start calling kilobytes and megabytes, kibibytes and mebibytes? I doubt it...

------------------------
Too much free time:
------------------------
If you haven't seen http://www.heyidiot.com/ (and know that Larry Ellison, Mitchell Kertzman and David Roux actually have enough spare time to think of stuff like this) or http://www.etattler.com/. Then you also probably missed the rivalry between the two: http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor/docs/dg031999.htm. I'm just annoyed, because I came up with same idea a few months back, and planned to register http://www.mikesretirement.com and go public a few months later. Unfortunately, I, unlike the HeyIdiot crew, am not filthy stinkin' rich, and decided not to waste my hard earned $70 on crap like that.

*********************************************************************
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/

Comments are always welcome! Email: feedback@techdirt.com
*********************************************************************