CNET Drkoop latest dot-com to run low on cash
"In an annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission released yesterday, the company said it has "sustained losses and negative cash flows from operations since its inception," posing a threat to its future as a business. PricewaterhouseCoopers is the company's auditor.

Drkoop's shares dropped $2.56, or 41 percent, to $3.69 by the 1 p.m. PST close of regular trading.

PricewaterhouseCoopers said in the filing that the company's financial data has raised "substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.""

The New York Times Modigliani's Message: It's a Bubble, and Bubbles Will Burst
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"FRANCO MODIGLIANI says that the current mania for Internet and other technology stocks is not irrational. But it is a bubble, and it will burst.

"I can show, really precisely, that there are two warranted prices for a share," Dr. Modigliani said in a telephone interview. The one he prefers is based on such fundamentals as earnings and growth rates. But, he added, "The bubble is rational in a certain sense." The expectation of growth "produces the growth, which confirms the expectation; people will buy it because it went up."

The trouble, he said, is that the bubble price is naturally unstable. It can keep rising only so long as expectations keep growing. "But once you are convinced it is not growing anymore, nobody wants to hold a stock because it is overvalued. Everybody wants to get out and it collapses, beyond the fundamentals." "

The Motley Fool An Investing Tiger Calls It Quits
""[I]n an irrational market, where earnings and price considerations take a back seat to mouse clicks and momentum, [our] logic, as we have learned, does not count for much.... What I do know is that there is no point in subjecting our investors to risk in a market which I frankly do not understand.""

Arianna Onlilne Tarnish On A New Gilded Age
"At the same time that Fed chairman Alan Greenspan is doing his level best to keep the bullet-train economy on track, increasing numbers of major news stories are appearing on the plight of the poor...Could this sudden explosion of stories on the invisible poor be, as the first swallows are to spring, a harbinger of an economic downturn that we refuse to even contemplate? Are the mainstream media tapping into an inchoate fear among the multitude of debt-laden, savings-strapped, middle-class Americans that "there but for the grace of God and tech stocks go I"?"

BusinessWeek Weblining
"You may think that getting graded A, B, or C ended with graduate school. Try getting Sanwa Bank to waive its $20 fee on your bounced check. Customer reps are trained to treat everyone politely. But your luck will depend on a little letter that pops up on a screen as soon as your name is punched into a computer, or when your e-mail arrives at Sanwa's server. If that letter is a ''C,'' customer reps don't exactly hustle on your behalf. That's because machines whirring at Net-speed have lumped you--often in seconds flat--with other customers whose accounts don't make much money for the bank. But if you score an ''A,'' you're right up there with the cream: Customers who generate hefty profits get bounced-check waivers, no questions asked. And B's? They're harder calls. They actually get to negotiate with the rep before their case is decided."

"Scientific or not, high-powered computing increases the incentive for businesses to Webline customers by making human behavior appear predictable. Visa International, for example, is using neural networks to build up elaborate behavioral profiles. Over months, these systems--which emulate the learning power of the brain--track a person's behavior online and off, then match it against models of similar personality and behavior types to predict how people will act in the future. The initial incentive was to recognize and thwart fraud. Now Visa is testing the software with 12 member banks in an effort to anticipate loan defaults. ''This gives us smarter data, and with Web-based technology, we can get that to our member banks in real time,'' says Martin Izenson, a director in Visa's risk management and security group."

Law News Network Kellstrom Demands Yahoo! Name Anonymous Online Critics
"Anonymous postings critical of Kellstrom Industries Inc. on an online investor forum have earned the wrath of the Sunrise, Fla., company.

Kellstrom, in the aircraft and engine sales and leasing business, last week sued Yahoo! Inc. to have the Internet portal reveal the identities of two individuals who Kellstrom claims have left defamatory statements on a Yahoo message board."

BBC News Demon settles net libel case
"Laurence Godfrey will be paid £15,000 plus legal costs - which could top £200,000 - by Demon Internet after allegedly defamatory postings about him appeared in newsgroups.

Nick Arnold, an information technology litigator from Tarlow Lyons, told BBC Breakfast News: "This will be the benchmark for all future cases." He said it raised the issue of whether ISPs would be responsible for monitoring all the material trafficking through their system. He added: "For the larger ones it is going to be almost impossible for them to do so without putting enormous resources into their infrastructure."

Salon Cassandra complex
"Sven Birkerts says computers are destroying literature. He couldn't be more wrong.

...Birkerts thinks, this new technology, chatty and endlessly in the know, is changing not only our reading and thinking habits, but our very selves. Human beings are so adaptable, they're sure to get with the digital program: speedy information scanning, our brains mimicking computers, all data, no deep and complicated conversions to knowledge, and no housing anymore for a soul.

I think he's wrong, in large part because his idea of print culture is so shallow -- what I distill from it is a nostalgic image of a reader, arms full of fresh books from the library, ambling through the tree-lined streets of a small town to the comfy chair in a quiet room. This has never been reality, as Birkerts knows, but even as an ideal or a standard for a civilized life it's too narrow to be inspiring."

Wired Lehigh Looks to Go the Distance
"Next year, some students accepted to Lehigh University will meet their professor and fellow classmates in a chat room instead of a classroom.

Beginning in January 2001, high school students will have a chance to take free college courses from the Pennsylvania-based university over the Web. "

redux [03.16.00]
The New York Times Billionaire Plans Online University
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"A 35-year-old software billionaire said yesterday that he would spend $100 million to realize his vision of 21st century higher education: a giant free Web site that would provide access to what he calls the "10,000 greatest minds of our time," in lectures and interviews recorded especially for the venture."

"Mr. Saylor imagines that his company's future lies in a world where the Jetsons would feel at home: personally-tailored information -- like a disembodied voice reporting that a doctor's appointment or flight has been canceled -- that would be broadcast directly to people through their car radios and cellular phones, which would then offer them an instant opportunity to respond.

Wall Street, at least, thinks it is hardly science fiction: MicroStrategy's stock has rocketed in less than a year from $7 a share to nearly $268.625 at the market's close yesterday."

The Guardian Students on silicon campus
"Universities are dead. Campuses are defunct and everyone gets their degree online. Welcome to the future. Or is it? It's a spectre that haunts the education system, and it is already sending ripples of change through the world's learning communities."

Salon "It's not broken but we're fixing it"
"The Patent and Trademark Office announced on Wednesday that it will scrutinize "business method" patent applications, like the one Amazon.com filed for its one-click ordering system, more intensely than all other innovations seeking protection."

"Of course, [the] patent reforms will have to come about with no additional head count. Dickinson said he would like to add more examiners, but can't unless Congress sanctions a bigger budget. [Amazon's] Bezos, with whom Dickinson plans to meet next week, has also called for Congress to let the office keep more of its cash. Dickinson is not optimistic that it will happen this year.

"It's good to see an awareness of the problem, but there still isn't acknowledgement of the cause. It's like admitting there's a leak, and deciding to bail out the water instead of fixing the leak.""

The US Patent Office BUSINESS METHODS PATENT INITIATIVE: AN ACTION PLAN

redux [02.28.00]
The Industry Standard Amazon.com Patents Enemy-Making Process
""Question: When did the media stop seeing Amazon.com (AMZN) as an e-commerce hero and start seeing it as a corporate bully for which, in the words of San Jose Mercury columnist Dan Gillmor, "arrogance and greed seem limitless"?"" "

The New York Times DNA Tests Cast Doubt on Link Between Neanderthals and Modern Man
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"Did modern humans wipe out the Neanderthal people who inhabited Europe until 28,000 years ago, or did the two populations merge through interbreeding? New DNA evidence, extracted from the ribs of a Neanderthal infant, one of the last of its kind, supports the thesis that these hardy, beetle-browed people left little or no genetic legacy in today's populations.

Even though Neanderthals perished long ago, the surprising retrieval of intact DNA, the second such sample to be recovered, has set biologists speculating that with further finds the genetics of this extinct human species could become quite well understood."

BBC 'Single mutation led to language'
"A controversial new theory suggests that the power of speech and language resulted from a single mutation in the brain of one man who lived many tens of thousands of years ago.

The idea has been put forward by Professor Tim Crow, a respected psychiatrist from Oxford University, UK."

"These are important questions because they may help explain why H. sapiens flourished at the expense of all other human-like creatures such as the Neanderthals. A sophisticated form of have over his rivals."

Salon The revolution that wasn't
"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.

For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."

"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."

redux [03.09.00]
The Industry Standard Stephen King: Content Provider?
"In a move being billed as the biggest market test to date, Stephen King's latest horror tale is being sold exclusively in eBook format. "Riding the Bullet" will be released for download March 14 at $2.50 a pop, and many in the media suggested that its performance would have great implications for the nascent online publishing industry."

The New York Times Weavers Go Dot-Com, and Elders Move In
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"This village in the remote southern savannas, little more than an airstrip and scattered mud huts, could easily be taken for one of those far-flung places untouched by the digital revolution.

But it was in this community of 2,000 people that an organization formed by indigenous women of two tribes revived the ancient art of hand-weaving large hammocks from locally grown cotton -- and then took their exquisite wares online. They hired a young member to create a Web site. And last year, they sold 17 hammocks to people around the world for as much as $1,000 apiece, gigantic sums in these parts.

Perhaps too gigantic. The foray into electronic commerce created tension between the weavers and the traditional regional leadership in the same way, perhaps, that many a geeky start-up has sent shivers down the spines of corporate titans. Threatened by the women's success, regional leaders moved in and took control of the weavers' organization. The woman who created the Web site quit in a fury, and the group has been struggling since then to get by."

The New York Times Technology Has Made Some People Money, but Is That All There Is?
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"Try telling someone hit by the money truck (or waiting to be) that the making of millions overnight does not justify the present means -- like poor business practices, rejection of even sensible government oversight and early profit-taking -- that leaves the dregs of dot-com reality for the public to deal with. Say that out loud and you, too, can live the experience of clearing a room in 10 seconds flat."

Yahoo News ChiliSoft founder plans to give away most of windfall
"Charles Crystle, chairman and former chief executive of ChiliSoft, said today he plans to donate about $11 million of the $15 million he expects from the acquisition toward boosting high-tech education opportunities in Central America. Crystle stepped down as chief executive in November; he felt he was better suited to run start-ups and was just plain burnt out from trying to run an increasingly large company. "I was just dying," he said. "I weighed over 250 pounds and felt like hell. I was in a bad mood all the time. That was for a year and a half."

"My advice to people who are making a ton of money is to pass on the yacht, rent a boat and put money into social ventures," Crystle said."

SiliconValley.Com Heady dreams for diversity go unfulfilled on the Internet
"The Net has lived up to many of those early expectations. It's certainly changed my life -- and millions of others -- immeasurably for the better. But with that said, it's becoming increasingly clear that the Internet has not rewritten the rules of mass media. Not all of them. Not by a long shot.

Consider two rather arresting statistics from Alexa Internet, a San Francisco-based division of mighty Amazon.com. The company's primary product is a free service that furnishes supplementary hypertext links and other related information to Web surfers. To do the job, Alexa's robots attempt to ``crawl'' the entirety of the Web every two months. The most recent of these surveys counted 3.9 million Web host machines. (This is not, strictly speaking, to be equated with the total number of sites on the Web, since several host machines may constitute a single Web site.)

Alexa also looks at Web traffic. By examining usage patterns among its users -- 500,000 people in 109 countries -- the company can draw a pretty good bead on who's going where. What the company found recently may come as something of a shock: Eighty percent of all Web traffic is going to one half of one percent of all sites."

The New York Times On the Web, as Elsewhere, Popularity Is Self-Reinforcing
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"On the World Wide Web, the rich are getting richer.

Bringing new statistical support to an increasingly common Internet wisdom, two Xerox Corp. researchers have found that the most popular Web sites command by far the biggest share of Internet traffic -- a signature of what economists refer to as "winner take all" markets. "

Salon Artists to Napster: Drop dead!
" Ask singer-songwriter Aimee Mann what she thinks of Napster, the ingeniously simple and wildly popular tool for exchanging MP3 music files, and you get a very concise response: "Artists should get paid for their work." It's a time-honored notion, but one that seems to be getting lost amid the Napster buzz."

The Guardian Online Music industry is caught napping
" Shawn Fanning may look like a typical 19 year old American science student in a T-shirt and a university of Michigan baseball hat, and until last summer - when he unleashed his first ever attempt at writing computer code - he was. But in a few months, he has gone from being the kind of customer the music business cherishes to the creator of its latest headache.

The program Fanning wrote as a class software project, Napster, lets users turn their computers into servers for the purpose of swapping MP3 music files."

"Fanning, a musician himself, claims he envisioned the service would benefit indie bands making their MP3s available for download without going through intermediaries like MP3.com. Though Napster does not itself store or sell music, like MP3.com it is a means of distribution that isn't controlled by the record industry and gives control to consumers."

Salon The Napster Files
"The lesson of the Napster saga is that, once again, the powerful populist dynamics of the Internet's many-to-many architecture may surprise the moguls. Fast broadband connections mean that AOL Time Warner can pump its content at you and me; they also mean that you and I can share content with each other. Maybe doing so won't require an advanced engineering degree. Napster suggests it can be done pretty easily."

Civilization Supercivilization and its Discontents
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.

A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.

Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.

This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.

How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."

Salon Den of Thieves
"If size is your thing, just flip through the proxy statements of publicly traded companies that will be arriving in mailboxes over the next month or so. The releases provide shareholders with a fleeting glimpse into the surreal world of executive compensation -- where company boards never let tanking stock prices, paltry earnings or massive worker layoffs get in the way of hefty raises and bonuses. CEO paychecks are swelling like never before.

By 1998, according to Business Week, the average CEO compensation package, including bonuses and stock options, had multiplied to 419 times the average worker's paycheck. And if, when that information is disclosed this month, the 1999 increases are comparable to the 28.5 percent hike of 1998, that figure will reach 538 to 1 by the time this proxy season is over.

Where will it stop? Each year, shareholder activist groups like United for a Fair Economy file resolutions seeking to cap executive pay. And bills currently under review in Congress would limit corporate deductions for bonuses and stock options -- legislation that extends an existing law limiting salary deductions to $1 million. But let's get real. The bills and resolutions have no chance of passing -- at least not as long as the most popular show in television remains "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.""

Wired Geeks Get Inside the Beltway
"Washington's courtship of the computer industry is paying off. A recent report shows technology companies significantly increased their political contributions in 1999. The industry donated around $8 million in soft money to congressional and presidential campaigns last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks campaign finance.

"It's kind of ironic because a couple of years ago the computer industry used to look at Washington with contempt," Bailey said. "But now they're every politician's favorite girlfriend."

Silicon Valley also is recognizing the value of political access. From Internet taxes to work visas, Congress makes decisions on a variety of issues that deeply impact the industry, she said."

Business Week More Visas for High-Tech Workers May Be Inevitable
“High-tech managers desperate to fill vacancies with skilled labor from overseas may soon get relief -- and none too soon, claim most business groups. Prospects are improving for congressional passage this year of a bill that would allow more foreign high-tech workers to take jobs in the U.S. Supporters of the increase in so-called H-1B visas cite declining numbers of engineers and computer programmers graduating from U.S. colleges.

In a step toward relieving the problem, on Mar. 9 a bill sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Senate Immigration subcommittee Chairman Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) cleared the Judiciary panel by a 16-2 vote. The legislation would nearly double the number of foreign technically skilled immigrant workers allowed to enter the U.S. each year under a special visa. Final Senate action on the measure is expected this year, and the House is working on its own version of the legislation.

Labor unions and America-Firsters adamantly oppose any increase in H-1B visas. They contend that the solution to a high-tech labor shortage in the U.S. isn't to let in skilled immigrants but to improve the U.S. educational system so that Americans are better trained in math, science, and engineering skills."

CNN Kashmir conflict continues to escalate -- online
"A group of Pakistani hackers has used the conflict in Kashmir as a reason to deface almost 600 Web sites in India and take control of several Indian government and private computer systems, according to the group."

"Unlike the majority of Web vandals, the MOS members say they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they "have no more use" for the data or the server itself.

"The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to 'heavy duty' government servers," says the MOS representative. "The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary."

Federal Computer Week Hacker-controlled tanks, planes and warships?
“Army officials are worried that sophisticated hackers and other cybercriminals, including military adversaries, may soon have the ability to hack their way into and take control of major military weapon systems such as tanks and ships."

"In fact, the Defense Department has already tested and proven that hackers have the ability to infiltrate the command and control systems of major weapons, including Navy warships. According to a training CD-ROM on information assurance, published by the Defense Information Systems Agency, an Air Force officer sitting in a hotel room in Boston used a laptop computer to hack into a Navy ship at sea and implant false navigation data into the ship’s steering system."

The Christian Science Monitor Wars of the future... today
“Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.

What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."

"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."

Online Journalism Review A Post-Mortem, With Great Prejudice, of the Online Journalism Conference
"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."

""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."

Freedom Forum AOL-Time Warner merger raises questions about journalism, concentrated ownership
“AOL has been ethically challenged throughout its existence,” wrote Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor... “I hate to see Time Warner, which has had its own ethical troubles but generally shows high journalistic standards, fall into such hands."

"“[W]hen the biggest online company controls the biggest traditional media company, you'd be wise to turn to other sources for reliable information on, for example, e-commerce and its biggest players,” wrote Gillmor."

LA Times Errors Found in Patent for AIDS Gene, Scientists Say
"Scientists have uncovered what they believe are glaring errors in a patent issued last month to Human Genome Sciences Inc. for a human gene that plays a crucial role in AIDS.

The company's description of the chemical makeup of the gene contains at least four significant mistakes, according to research scientists, an allegation that legal experts say could allow the company's competitors to attack the patent's validity.

But Human Genome Sciences officials say that because the company isolated the gene first, any errors in describing it won't matter--it is still entitled to royalties from anyone using the gene to discover new treatments.

"When we file a patent, we don't claim the sequence as the invention," said William A. Haseltine, chairman and chief executive of the Rockville, Md., company, which has filed about 7,500 gene patents. "The invention we claim is the gene we deposit with the ATCC. We know that our sequence and most sequences are not perfect. "Anyone who wishes can go to the ATCC," he said. "It's the same as the olden days, when inventors used to deposit a little model of their inventions.""

HMS Beagle Patenting Genes Is It Necessary and Is It Evil?
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"Last October, biologists' neck hair rose when J. Craig Venter announced his company, Celera, had filed 6,500 provisional patent applications for human genes. Henry Ford mass-produced automobiles - it seems evident we are now entering an era in which intellectual property is rolling off the assembly lines. Is this really the ultimate legacy of Watson and Crick's elegant double helix? And what does it portend for the future of biology?"

Salon My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can't get up!
"It's no great mystery what's fueling the ungainly growth in these magazines. "There's a huge information overload going on right now," says venture capitalist Andrew Anker, a partner at August Capital. "It's being driven by marketers trying to spend dollars, not by users saying 'I need this content.'"

Web companies spent more than $700 million on magazine advertising alone last year. That's 348 percent more than they did in 1998, according to Competitive Media Reporting. Plus, with almost $25 billion flowing from venture capitalists into Net companies in 1999, 66 percent more than the previous year, there's a lot of business-to-business advertisers itching to reach the newly cash-rich dot-commies who need to quickly find somewhere to put all that capital to work."

""Are we too big? Of course, we're too big," says Jason Pontin, editor of the Red Herring, which is putting out a whopping 488 pages in April. "I recognize that we're getting uncomfortably large.""

ZDNet Cash drought ahead for Net firms?
"At least 51 Internet firms will run out of cash within the next year, according to a Pegasus Research International study commissioned by Barron's and reported in its March 20 edition.

The report listed online music store CDNow Inc., network security company Secure Computing Corp., online health Web sites Drkoop.com Inc. and Medscape Inc., and online grocer Peapod Inc. as among companies likely to run out of funds soon."

redux [02.01.00]
News.com Stellar IPO prices fall despite e-commerce boom
"James Schrager, a professor at the University of Chicago's business school, is among the most blunt at summarizing the e-tailers' outlook. "Amazon's model doesn't work, the same with most e-commerce companies," Schrager said. "Amazon has discovered that the more they sell, the more they lose. All the numbers are going backwards."”

Forbes I got it @ 7-eleven
"A new channel for e-commmerce is headed for the U.S. One of North America's most pervasive retailers, 7-Eleven Inc. (6,200 units), will be installing ATM-like machines in its stores that will be Web-linked. These personal transaction terminals will be tied into a delivery and payment system that promises to make 7-Elevens a depot for e-commerce."

"A flaky idea? Well, it's working in Japan. Ito-Yokado Corp., a retail giant that owns the 7-Eleven chain in Japan plus 72% of the U.S. chain, now feels ready to export Web-updated aspects of the home operation. In Japan, where convenience stores are in nearly every urban neighborhood, they are used to pay routine bills such as those for utilities and to pick up and pay for sundry deliveries.

"How can Amazon.com be selling so much and still losing money? "They have a giant warehouse so they have to pay rent, pay wages for warehouse employees and carry a huge amount of inventory at their own risk, because not every book is going to get sold," says 7-Eleven Japan Vice Chairman Masaaki Kamata. "The Internet is not a manufacturing and warehousing business but an intermediary commission business.""

The New York Times E-Commerce the Japanese Way
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"Tucked amid the instant noodles, pantyhose and canned drinks at the local Lawson, Japan's second-largest convenience store chain, customers now find a computer terminal that gives them access to a system called Loppi. With a few stabs at the keyboard, they can order concert tickets, make train and plane reservations and pay at the cash register on the way out.

Need a book? Seven-Eleven Japan, the country's largest operator of convenience stores, lets a customer hop online to eShopping Books, a site owned by Softbank, Seven-Eleven, Yahoo! Japan and Tohan, Japan's leading book distributor. A day or so later, on the way home from work perhaps, the customer picks up the selection and pays for it at the local Seven-Eleven."

News.com Netscape readies new browser, wins development support
"All but trounced by Microsoft in the browser wars, Netscape Communications has long harbored a plan to regain dominance through its Mozilla open-source development project, promising revolutionary new technology to tap into the Web.

Such pronouncements have been long on hype and short on delivery, but now the company's efforts appear to be gaining respect.

Netscape today announced that it will deliver a test version of its long-delayed Web browser within the next 25 days. Perhaps more significantly, the company said that numerous partners have agreed to develop hardware and software products to support its Gecko technology for displaying text and graphics on the Net."

The New York Times Netscape Browser Faces a Changed World
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"...even as Netscape touts a series of features and technological improvements in the new browser, just as it has in years past, the entire field of the battle has changed under America Online."

As an independent company, Netscape's strategy was to use the browser to build a base of users that would help sell the server software that corporations use to create Web sites. In contrast, America Online, which has farmed out Netscape's server business to a joint venture run by Sun Microsystems called iPlanet, sees the browser as the key to a series of interactive consumer services.

So it is no surprise that many of the new features of the browser tie to America Online's strengths."

ZDNet The Rise and Fall of Netscape
"When Netscape employees first heard their company was going to be bought by America Online in November 1998, they worried whether their dogs would still be allowed in the office. A year and a half later, the dogs are still allowed, but little else is the same. Key executives and engineers cashed in their options and left, and the company that once was synonymous with the Web itself -- the pioneer of the Net as we know it -- is now merely the "at-work" arm of AOL's multi-brand media strategy.

"The merger has been a disaster," said Michael Cusumano, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and co-author of "Competing on Internet Time," which details Netscape's struggles in its now legendary browser war against Microsoft. "All the best engineers and managers have left. Sun has taken over the client software. ... They're no longer a player." "

Project Cool Trib Gets It ... And Does It
"Another mega-deal. More mega-media. But it is a creative, new media move? Yes, it is.

In the digital world, the significance of this deal is that it will push the envelope of change on how to cover, produce and present news in a multimedia world of print, television, online, and other formats.

"Despite having a past history (something that seems to make a company suspect in the realm of new media), The Tribune has been a model for the future, starting a few years ago when the name of the company was changed from the "Chicago Tribune Newspaper Company" to "The Tribune Company." The signal was loud and clear, internally and externally, that this would be a media company -- not merely a company that controlled printed products. "

Salon The return of the dead-tree media
"Analysts are comparing the merger of Times Mirror and the Tribune Company to AOL-Time Warner, but the combined company looks more like an industrial age holdout than a 21st century media giant."

Online Journalism Review ChicagoTribune.com: the Windy City as it happens
"At a time when most newspaper's online offices have all the energy of a morgue as a skeleton crew of editors funnel print and wire stories onto the Web, chicagotribune.com's newsroom pulses with adrenaline. Five days a week, six news reporters and six editors race to get original reporting onto the site as fast as local news breaks."

""It harkens back to that old tradition of great newspapering," says Interactive News Editor Thomas Cekay, a newspaper veteran seated at his desk near the middle of the action. "Have your coat nearby, because when news breaks, you're out the door.""

""...We see our function as being like an all-news radio station."'

redux [02.02.00]
First Monday Interactive Features of Online Papers
"According to McAdams, who helped create the Washington Post's online service, "A journalist with little online experience tends to think in terms of stories, news value, public service and things that are good to read, but a person with a lot of online experience thinks more about connection, organization, movement within and among sets of information and communication among different people". Journalists today must choose. As gatekeepers they can transfer lots of information, or they can make users a smarter, more active and questioning audience for news events and issues. Making users smarter means involving them in a collaborative experience; i.e. interaction ”

[03.19.00 - unfortunately, it appears that the NYT has quickly shifted the following article to 'pay-per-view']
The New York Times Even Techies Are Getting Nervous About Technology
[requires 'free' registration]
"One of the problems, in fact, might not be in technology itself but in the ways in which technological culture has already undercut the special status of the human. In studying computer simulations of life, some theorists have argued that sophisticated simulations are themselves primitive life forms. Among other thinkers it is also becoming more common to think of humans as "hosts" for "memes": memes are ideas -- "justice," "evil," the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the taste for tatoos -- that replicate and spread from body to body like genes; their particular meanings are unimportant. These sorts of speculations treat human nature as a sophisticated form of information processing. Why should tampering with such codes matter? Genetic engineering is just another form of reprogramming.

This view of human life grows directly out of the culture Wired celebrates. It does not encourage experimental restraint. Instead, it encourages speculation about how we can control our memes and genes, and encourages optimism that the possibilities are unlimited. So Mr. Joy's argument needs amplification: there are not only risks latent in technology, there are risks latent in certain celebrations of technology. The dangers lie not in our technology but in ourselves."

redux [03.12.00]
The Washinton Post From Internet Scientist, a Preview of Extinction
"A respected creator of the Information Age has written an extraordinary critique of accelerating technological change in which he suggests that new technologies could cause "something like extinction" of humankind within the next two generations.

The alarming prediction, intended to be provocative, is striking because it comes not from a critic of technology but rather from a man who invented much of it: Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., the leading Web technology manufacturer."

Wired Magazine Why the future doesn't need us.
"Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. "

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

Salon Give my regards to broadband
" If you're looking for the most misunderstood, misrepresented, overused and abused buzzword right now, look no further than "broadband."

MSNBC Heavy traffic is overloading cable companies’ Net lines
"The cable industry’s rush to wire up America with high-speed Internet access is running into a serious problem: Too many heavy Internet users are crowding online at once, in some cases creating major bottlenecks and slowdowns."

The New York Times Billionaire Plans Online University
[requires 'free' registration]
"A 35-year-old software billionaire said yesterday that he would spend $100 million to realize his vision of 21st century higher education: a giant free Web site that would provide access to what he calls the "10,000 greatest minds of our time," in lectures and interviews recorded especially for the venture."

"Mr. Saylor imagines that his company's future lies in a world where the Jetsons would feel at home: personally-tailored information -- like a disembodied voice reporting that a doctor's appointment or flight has been canceled -- that would be broadcast directly to people through their car radios and cellular phones, which would then offer them an instant opportunity to respond.

Wall Street, at least, thinks it is hardly science fiction: MicroStrategy's stock has rocketed in less than a year from $7 a share to nearly $268.625 at the market's close yesterday."

The Guardian Students on silicon campus
"Universities are dead. Campuses are defunct and everyone gets their degree online. Welcome to the future. Or is it? It's a spectre that haunts the education system, and it is already sending ripples of change through the world's learning communities."

Slashdot A Free, High Quality On-Line University?

Wide Open News Law Prof Lessig: Software Patent Situation Is 'Terrifying'
""Linux got going not because someone successfully patented the idea, but because they shared the idea," Lawrence Lessig told technology leaders at Esther Dyson's annual PC Forum conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. "Five years ago if you had a great idea, you coded. Today, if you have a great idea, you call a lawyer."

Intellectual property grabs such as Priceline's patent on the reverse-auction process and Amazon.com's patents on one-click ordering and associate marketing indicate that "we are retreating from a commitment that created [the Internet], possibly the most dramatic growth in innovation we have ever seen," said Lessig..."

redux [03.11.00]
The New York Times Magazine Patently Absurd
[requires 'free' n.y.t. registration]
"When 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: "The patented One Click® feature," Bezos calls it."

"In ways that could not have been predicted even a few years ago, the patent system is in crisis. A series of unplanned mutations have transformed patents into a positive threat to the digital economy. The patent office has grown entangled in philosophical confusion of its own making; it has become a ferocious generator of litigation; and many technologists believe that it has begun to choke the very innovation it nourish."

redux [07.09.99]
Seattle Times Would-be Web giants go a little patent-happy
""It is a mad rush to get as many dumb patents as possible," said Gregg Aharonian, publisher of Internet Patent Service, a Web site that conducts patent searches."

The New York Times A Call for Sharing of Research Causes Gene Stocks to Plunge
[requires 'free' registration]
"President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said yesterday that the sequence of the human genome should be made freely available to all researchers. The statement led to a sharp sell-off in the stocks of biotechnology companies, which hope to profit by creating drugs based on genetic data.

The White House quickly said it did not intend to hurt the fledgling biotechnology industry, but investors who have made biotechnology stocks the darlings of the market were unconvinced. In frantic selling, they wiped away tens of billions of dollars in market value from the industry. Genomics companies, which are racing to produce a database of human DNA, were hit hardest, with some off more than 20 percent."

"The statement was intended to codify the government position in the rivalry, that the human genome sequence should be made publicly available to all researchers, but it appears to have been interpreted as a challenge both to Celera's intellectual property rights and to those of other genome and biotech companies. A White House official said neither challenge was intended, noting the statement explicitly endorsed intellectual property protection for patents based on genes."

Wired News Biotech Downturn Baffles Experts
"Tuesday's sell-off of shares in biotech companies demonstrated that the same buzzwords that draw investors can also turn them away."

BBC News Scientists produce five pig clones
"The company that created Dolly the sheep has announced the birth of five cloned piglets, the first in the world. "

"The company said that five healthy piglets - Millie, Christa, Alexis, Carrel and Dotcom - were born on 5 March."

"A spokesman said: "This opens the door to making modified pigs whose organs and cells can be successfully transplanted into humans - the only near-term solution to solving the worldwide organ shortage crisis."

redux [02.04.00]
The New York Times Magazine The Recycled Generation
[requires 'free' registration]
"After stuffing every cow egg with its little spud of human DNA, Sawyer prepares the next step. She gives the cells a zap of 120 volts. The jolt of electricity effectively fuses man and beast into a single biological fate. After one final step, this . . . this thing will believe it has been fertilized and, if all goes well, begin cleaving, or dividing, in the bubbling, momentous arithmetic of life lifting off the pad: 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells, 16 cells, 32 cells --"

MSNBC Could America Online become the Ma Bell of new millennium?
"While no one was watching, America Online Inc. has quietly become a force in the telephone business, piecing together a formidable collection of technologies and products that could one day make it the Ma Bell of the new millennium."

A company spokeswoman says AOL isn’t ready to talk about its Internet telephony strategy. But in a recent speech, Steve Case, AOL’s chief executive, said, “People will have the equivalent of AOL phones.”

The Washinton Post From Internet Scientist, a Preview of Extinction
"A respected creator of the Information Age has written an extraordinary critique of accelerating technological change in which he suggests that new technologies could cause "something like extinction" of humankind within the next two generations.

The alarming prediction, intended to be provocative, is striking because it comes not from a critic of technology but rather from a man who invented much of it: Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., the leading Web technology manufacturer."

"In a 24-page article in the Wired magazine that will appear on the Web Tuesday, Joy says he finds himself essentially agreeing, to his horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski--that advanced technology poses a threat to the human species. "I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place," Joy wrote in the article, which he worked on for six months. "If I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine that such a day may come.""

The New York Times Magazine Patently Absurd
[requires 'free' n.y.t. registration]
"When 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: "The patented One Click® feature," Bezos calls it."

"In ways that could not have been predicted even a few years ago, the patent system is in crisis. A series of unplanned mutations have transformed patents into a positive threat to the digital economy. The patent office has grown entangled in philosophical confusion of its own making; it has become a ferocious generator of litigation; and many technologists believe that it has begun to choke the very innovation it nourish."

Newsweek The Great Amazon Patent Debate
"You might think that Jeff Bezos would be on top of the world. The company he founded, Amazon.com, is sitting pretty on top of the e-commerce food chain. In an age consumed with millionaires, his stash can be measured in billions. His braying laugh has rung out on the Leno show; his beaming visage was on a certain newsweekly cover as 1999's alpha human. And he and his wife are momentarily expecting the arrival of a brand-new baby Bezos. But last week he sounded hurt at finding himself in an unfamiliar role: Internet villain. "

Wired No More Pencils, No More Books?
"Most of today's tech-savvy college students are using cell phones, laptops, and pagers but continue the decidely low-tech practice of lugging around backpacks filled with 40 pounds of textbooks.

A natural solution is electronic reading devices that allow students to instantly store over 100,000 pages in a single paperback-sized package.

"E-books as devices will become ubiquitous," Sachs said. "They will be available in every size, shape, and color imaginable."

The Industry Standard Stephen King: Content Provider?
"In a move being billed as the biggest market test to date, Stephen King's latest horror tale is being sold exclusively in eBook format. "Riding the Bullet" will be released for download March 14 at $2.50 a pop, and many in the media suggested that its performance would have great implications for the nascent online publishing industry."

Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea
"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Research and Technology A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents
"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."

Feed The Money Flowed
"The sixteen-headed beast oxymoronically dubbed our "national primary" has been watered, fed, and put to sleep. So swatting away their desultory feints to each party's ideological core, our presumptive nominees can turn to the critical business at hand: romancing the affluent center -- the suburban swing constituencies who harken to melodious demographic lullabies about how kids at risk will be redeemed by miniature culture crusades and Internet-wired schoolrooms." "

The Atlantic Monthly The Kept University
"In the fall of 1964 a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley undergraduate named Mario Savio climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and denounced his university for bending over backwards to "serve the need of American industry."

To the modern ear this sixties rhetoric may sound outdated. To many people in the academic world, however, Savio's words ring truer today than ever.

In an age when ideas are central to the economy, universities will inevitably play a role in fostering growth. But should we allow commercial forces to determine the university's educational mission and academic ideals?"

The Industry Standard Intel to Give Workers PCs, Net Access
"Not to be outdone by older, less tech-smart industries, Intel (INS) will ride a trend started by Ford Motor (F) and issue a free Pentium III PC to each of its 70,000 workers worldwide, the company announced Tuesday.

"We think this is something a lot of other companies are going to start doing.""

redux [02.23.00]
Feed Magazine Blurring The Work/Home Boundaries
"As the internet continues to blur the distinction between being at work and away from work, with personal email accessible at your desk and work email accessible from everywhere else, the workers of the world may find themselves in a Faustian bargain. Their subsidized home computer use may keep the economy growing, but they cannot protest against the demands an "always on" economy places on an "always connected" workforce."

Wired News AOL Ups German Access Ante
"AOL Europe announced Tuesday that it plans to give all German primary and secondary schools and 900,000 German schoolteachers free access to the Internet."

"It can never be too early to start communicating the necessary skills," [Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder said."