{"conf": "techbusiness", "generated_at": "2026-04-26T08:00:02.954878Z", "threads": [{"num": 0, "subject": "", "response_count": 0, "posts": []}, {"num": 1, "subject": "introductions for techbusiness conference folks", "response_count": 2, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "acroberts", "date": "Tue, Jan 14, 1997 (07:26)", "body": "Hi, I'm Antony Roberts, I work as a Systems Engineer in Denmark, for a computer called Pine Tree Systems."}, {"response": 2, "author": "terry", "date": "Sat, Jan 18, 1997 (18:01)", "body": "What does Pine Tree Systems produce? techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}, {"num": 2, "subject": "In the news", "response_count": 11, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Dec 17, 1996 (21:46)", "body": "biztech.57.635: Busy Techie (ronks) Wed 6 Nov 96 10:43 Penril Sells Modem Business To Bay Networks Penril Datacomm Networks of Maryland is trying to narrow its corporate focus and concentrate on remote access by corporate users into their companies' nets, by spinning off a company called Access Beyond Inc., and selling their modem division to Bay for $120 million. Network Company Execs Dump Own Stock SEC filings show that high-ranking insiders at four network firms are selling larger than usual blocks of shares lately. The companies have done very well, so they could just be taking profits; or they could all be buying new houses; or they could know something about the fourth quarter they are not sharing with us. Five insiders at Ascend are selling about $19 million of their stock, ADC Telecomm execs are selling $8 M, nine insiders at 3Com sold $29 M in just two days, and the CEO of Cascade Communications sold 100,000 shares, keeping only 8,000. biztech.57.637: Busy Techie (ronks) Thu 7 Nov 96 08:56 Iomega To Sell Zipettes For PDA's The name is my invention; what they say they will do is offer a smaller version of their popular Zip removable-disk drive, holding 20 megabytes, that will fit in PDA's, cell phones(!), and digital cameras. They will call it the \"n-hand\" for no apparent reason, and price it to OEMs for about $100; disks should run about $10 each. 3Com Publishes Big Attack Ad Just when the election is finally over and civility restored to public discourse outside of the Well's News conference (some places are just hopeless), 3Com takes out a full-page ad in the business section of the NY Times titled \"Is your future HELD AT BAY?\" (a little pun there you see, who says CEOs don't have a sense of humor). Anyway, a serious- looking Bob Finocchio goes on and on about how untrustworthy places like Bay Networks, Cabletron, and Cisco are, and how compared to these lowlifes \"There is an alternative: 3Com.\" I'm sure those rumors about how Cisco would gut Medicare and Cabletron would flood the streets with Willie Hortons are...oh sorry, wrong campaign. biztech.57.642: Busy Techie (ronks) Fri 8 Nov 96 09:28 Banyan Prunes Staff The network company will lop off a hundred people, or about 15% of its workforce. Its chairman and CEO David Mohoney has been demoted to vice- chairman; his place at the top will be held for now by the company's CFO while it searches for new blood. TV Set-Top Web Browser Banned From Export As Weapon Not on account of its sharp corners but because it uses a 128-bit encryption key, an appliance available from Sony and Philips at munitions dealers like Circuit City and Sears has been classified as a weapon requiring an export license for overseas sales. To date, 40 bits are the maximum that can be sent abroad as it were, though the Web TV Networks company who designed these instruments of destruction says it has an OK for up to 56-bit keys. The government has not granted any export licenses for 128-bit key devices, according to \"a Government official who spoke on condition of anonymity\". Jeez. SEC To Revamp Edgar The system for the electronic retrieval of corporations' financial filings was designed in 1984 when the technology was somewhat more primitive, so the SEC is putting a redesign up for bids. They may also outsource some of the remaining public-sector functions like database maintenance to private firms. Another Internet Stock Scam Alleged The SEC has obtained an order freezing the assets of the head of a company called Systems of Excellence (stock symbol SEXI), as well as those of an electronic financial newsletter called SGA Goldstar. Trading in the stock of SEXI, \"which says it makes equipment for video teleconferencing\", was suspended in October. Basically the allegations are that the chairman of the company issued millions of unregistered share in the company to himself, his wife, mother, and niece (presumably three different women), and to the publishers of a newsletter called SGA Goldstar published on the Internet; then both he and the publishers made false or inflated claims about the company's prospects. One sounds straight out of the South Sea Bubble: an unnamed source \"informed us of a rumored Federal order so large which [sic] we do not even want to rumor the size of the order\". While the news report goes on about the Internet, its role here seems merely a faster and better way of spreading the same old lies. biztech.57.643: Busy Techie (ronks) Sat 9 Nov 96 12:52 AT&T Worldnet E-Mail Service Down For Over A Day Over 200,000 customers of the big hobby board were unable to send or receive e-mail from mid-afternoon Thursday till some time Friday when a mail server failed. Mail was not lost in either direction, the company says, just queued and queued and... biztech.57.645: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon 11 Nov 96 10:44 Web Designers Trying To Spoof Search Engines Like a constant battle between burglars and lock makers, some Web site builders are trying to tilt the results of searc"}, {"response": 2, "author": "terry", "date": "Sun, Dec 29, 1996 (14:40)", "body": "Topic 57 [biztech]: In the news for 1996 #748 of 749: Busy Techie (ronks) Sun Dec 29 '96 (09:56) 21 lines Scientific American has an interesting article in its January 1997 issue about developments in fiber-optic bandwidth and their implications for the telephone industry. Companies including AT&T, Fujitsu, and Nippon T&T have already used a single optical fiber to transmit data over \"many kilometers\" in excess of a trillion bits per second. NEC has gone them one better by using wave division multiplexing to create multiple channels transmitting at different wavelengths; with WDM they sent 132 channels, each carrying 20 billion bits per second, over a single optical fiber. While these \"hero experiments\" are not yet ready for commercial deployment, they seem to demonstrate big changes in store: glass cable is much cheaper than copper, and WDM is said to eliminate both the need for expensive boosters along the path to clean up the signals periodically and for a separate laser on each channel. As the cost of providing humungous bandwidth plummets, the phone companies' revenue and even their monopoly status could be in jeopardy. A rogue spokesman at British Telecom says technology will make \"bandwidth free and distance irrelevant.\" The director of H-P's labs says phone companies will become digital utilities something like the water or the power company, and an independent analyst estimates \"telephone service should cost about three cents a month.\" (This and forthcoming comments by ronks are reprinted with author's permission)."}, {"response": 3, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Dec 31, 1996 (08:45)", "body": "Topic 57 [biztech]: In the news for 1996 #748 of 753: Busy Techie (ronks) Sun Dec 29 '96 (09:56) 21 lines Scientific American has an interesting article in its January 1997 issue about developments in fiber-optic bandwidth and their implications for the telephone industry. Companies including AT&T, Fujitsu, and Nippon T&T have already used a single optical fiber to transmit data over \"many kilometers\" in excess of a trillion bits per second. NEC has gone them one better by using wave division multiplexing to create multiple channels transmitting at different wavelengths; with WDM they sent 132 channels, each carrying 20 billion bits per second, over a single optical fiber. While these \"hero experiments\" are not yet ready for commercial deployment, they seem to demonstrate big changes in store: glass cable is much cheaper than copper, and WDM is said to eliminate both the need for expensive boosters along the path to clean up the signals periodically and for a separate laser on each channel. As the cost of providing humungous bandwidth plummets, the phone companies' revenue and even their monopoly status could be in jeopardy. A rogue spokesman at British Telecom says technology will make \"bandwidth free and distance irrelevant.\" The director of H-P's labs says phone companies will become digital utilities something like the water or the power company, and an independent analyst estimates \"telephone service should cost about three cents a month.\" Topic 57 [biztech]: In the news for 1996 #751 of 753: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Dec 30 '96 (11:38) 47 lines Emergency Services Seek More Bandwidth The last allocation of frequencies for police, fire, and rescue services was about 23 megahertz in 1987. The amount of traffic over those frequencies has risen dramatically in the last ten years, and the public-safety agencies are asking for 97 MHz by the year 2010 from the FCC, who was all set to auction them off to private carriers. There are various issues like the different characteristics of the 800 MHz and the 30 MHz frequencies, and the fact that 10 channels are available around 220 MHz with no equipment capable of using them. The one I find most striking (and dangerous) is that equipment from each of the two primary manufacturers is incompatible with gear from the other: Motorola says their units meet standards, but Ericsson says Motorola won't license the technology they need to be compatible. Makes you wonder about standards. Bigfeet Moving Into Cell Phones The two biggest manufacturers of wireless phones are Motorola and Ericsson (now where did I just hear those names?), followed by Asian makers like Matsushita/Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, and Toshiba. Conspicuous by their absence are the two infrastructure heavyweights Lucent and Northern Telecom; until now. Both companies are building facilities to make handsets for a couple of reasons. One is the fact that globally it's a $26 billion a year business (58 million units, 17M of them in the US; expected next year, 71M and 20M); the other is the upcoming obsolescence of most existing cell phones. New personal communications services (PCS) technology is incompatible with the old units, and the efforts of cellular networks in retooling to compete with PCS will require new phones. Chances are that Lucent and NT will try to stake out the high end of the market via service provider alliances. Apple Clones: Good News and Bad for Apple Around 300,000 licensed Mac clone machines are expected to sell in 1996, according to an article that suggests they will cost Apple about $100 million in profits from lost sales. No one who purchased a Mac clone seems to have picked it over a PC, but instead bought it over an Apple. In terms of long term effect, though, clones may help Apple by slowing the Mac's erosion of market share to PCs and keeping developers writing for the platform. Apple is hoping cloners will focus on developing markets like Asia and leave the US for it. A boost in clone volume is expected to come next spring when CHRP machines arrive, made from standard components."}, {"response": 4, "author": "terry", "date": "Wed, Jan  1, 1997 (13:52)", "body": "Topic 57 [biztech]: In the news for 1996 #751 of 754: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Dec 30 '96 (11:38) 47 lines Emergency Services Seek More Bandwidth The last allocation of frequencies for police, fire, and rescue services was about 23 megahertz in 1987. The amount of traffic over those frequencies has risen dramatically in the last ten years, and the public-safety agencies are asking for 97 MHz by the year 2010 from the FCC, who was all set to auction them off to private carriers. There are various issues like the different characteristics of the 800 MHz and the 30 MHz frequencies, and the fact that 10 channels are available around 220 MHz with no equipment capable of using them. The one I find most striking (and dangerous) is that equipment from each of the two primary manufacturers is incompatible with gear from the other: Motorola says their units meet standards, but Ericsson says Motorola won't license the technology they need to be compatible. Makes you wonder about standards. Bigfeet Moving Into Cell Phones The two biggest manufacturers of wireless phones are Motorola and Ericsson (now where did I just hear those names?), followed by Asian makers like Matsushita/Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, and Toshiba. Conspicuous by their absence are the two infrastructure heavyweights Lucent and Northern Telecom; until now. Both companies are building facilities to make handsets for a couple of reasons. One is the fact that globally it's a $26 billion a year business (58 million units, 17M of them in the US; expected next year, 71M and 20M); the other is the upcoming obsolescence of most existing cell phones. New personal communications services (PCS) technology is incompatible with the old units, and the efforts of cellular networks in retooling to compete with PCS will require new phones. Chances are that Lucent and NT will try to stake out the high end of the market via service provider alliances. Apple Clones: Good News and Bad for Apple Around 300,000 licensed Mac clone machines are expected to sell in 1996, according to an article that suggests they will cost Apple about $100 million in profits from lost sales. No one who purchased a Mac clone seems to have picked it over a PC, but instead bought it over an Apple. In terms of long term effect, though, clones may help Apple by slowing the Mac's erosion of market share to PCs and keeping developers writing for the platform. Apple is hoping cloners will focus on developing markets like Asia and leave the US for it. A boost in clone volume is expected to come next spring when CHRP machines arrive, made from standard components. Topic 57 [biztech]: In the news for 1996 #752 of 754: Sofia's Choice & biztech hostly type (amicus) Mon Dec 30 '96 (11:46) 1 line What's your source(s) re emergency spectrum? Topic 57 [biztech]: In the news for 1996 #753 of 754: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Dec 30 '96 (15:53) 6 lines > source(s) re emergency spectrum Today's NY Times business section includes a spectrum with the emergency bands marked on it. Topic 57 [biztech]: In the news for 1996 #754 of 754: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Dec 31 '96 (09:08) 25 lines Spindler Outdraws Amelio for Apple Money As of the end of September accounting, Apple CEO since February Gilbert Amelio received $3 million ($655K in salary plus a bonus in excess of $2.3M) while his predecessor Michael Spindler took away $4.7M ($557K salary, $382K bonus, and severance of over $3.7 million). There is no need to take up a collection for Poor Gil, however: his stock options could be worth another $42M if Apple shares rise 10%. Iomega To Lay Off 700 The company will move manufacturing from its Utah plant (site of the layoffs) to one in Malaysia, which they said is now capable of producing all its data storage products such as the popular Zip drive. IBM Triples Disk Density Their current PC hard drive stores around 1.5 gigabits per square inch; the new ones can hold 5 gigabits in that space, or \"625 full-length novels\" according to a spokesman. Commercial availability is expected to be a few years off."}, {"response": 5, "author": "terry", "date": "Sat, Jan  4, 1997 (08:49)", "body": "Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #1 of 6: Busy Techie (ronks) Thu Jan 2 '97 (10:53) 58 lines Bankers Move To ToonTown Barnett Banks has launched a cable-TV home banking service as a joint venture with Time Warner in Florida. Barnett customers can check their balances, review statements, transfer funds, and pay bills through their television. Viewers switch to a designated channel (97) on their cable service, and are ushered into an imaginary community known as \"Barnett Town,\" where computer-generated cartoon characters (such as Bugs Barnett?) lead viewers through the various banking functions. Son Of DES Conceived, NIST To Aid Pregnancy From the January 2, 1997 issue of the Federal Register: A process to develop a Federal Information Processing Standard for an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) incorporating an Advanced Encryption Algorithm (AEA) is being initiated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). As the first step in this process, draft minimum acceptability requirements and draft criteria to evaluate candidate algorithms are being published for comment... It is intended that the AES will specify an unclassified, publicly disclosed encryption algorithm capable of protecting sensitive government information well into the next century. The purpose of this notice is to solicit views from the public... so that their needs can be considered in the process of developing the AES. DATES: Comments must be received on or before April 2, 1997. ... Electronic comments may be sent to AES@nist.gov. ... It is NIST's view that a multi-year transition period will be necessary to move toward any new encryption standard and that DES will continue to be of sufficient strength for many applications. NIST will consult with all interested parties so that a smooth transition can be accomplished. ... PROPOSED MINIMUM ACCEPTABILITY REQUIREMENTS AND EVALUATION CRITERIA Draft minimum acceptability requirements and evaluation criteria are: A.1 AES shall be publicly defined. A.2 AES shall be a symmetric block cipher. A.3 AES shall be designed so that the key length may be increased. A.4 AES shall be implementable in both hardware and software. A.5 AES shall either be a) freely available or b) available under terms consistent with ANSI patent policy. A.6 Algorithms which meet the above requirements will be judged based on the following factors: a) security (i.e., the effort required to cryptanalyze), b) computational efficiency, c) memory requirements, d) hardware and software suitability, e) simplicity, f) flexibility, and g) licensing requirements. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #5 of 6: Busy Techie (ronks) Thu Jan 2 '97 (21:30) 12 lines > Does this dictate that the *AEA* will be publicly defined? \"It is intended that the AES will specify an unclassified, publicly disclosed encryption algorithm...\"; from the FedReg entry, that's how I read it. > There's already a lot of good symmetric encryption algorithms I didn't quote the whole article, but the impression I got was that an existing algorithm might be anointed as a FIPS if it met the criteria, which include availability terms. NIST seems to be looking for a long-term replacement for DES so as not to be caught short when its usefulness fades. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #6 of 6: Busy Techie (ronks) Fri Jan 3 '97 (16:18) 10 lines Spyglass Reports Loss The company announced quarterly losses would be about 10 times what analysts expected, on revenue of $4 million; this includes $400,000 (instead of an anticipated $1.5 million) from Microsoft for Internet filter software used in MSIE. Seems like only a short while ago Spyglass was thought to have sewn up the Web browser market when they bought the rights to Mosaic. Sic transit..."}, {"response": 6, "author": "terry", "date": "Mon, Jan  6, 1997 (23:08)", "body": "#8 of 9: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Jan 6 '97 (14:40) 45 lines Apple Reports Greater Than Expected Loss Analysts were looking for a quarterly loss of about 4 cents a share; instead, the company says it will be about 20 to 30 times that, or $100 to 150 million. They blame slow Performa sales, and a shortage of laptops based on the PowerPC chip. In the quarter ended September 30, compared to a year ago Apple's market share worldwide fell from 9 to 5 percent; domestically from 13 to 7%. An expected upcoming problem is competition from Intel's MMX-enabled Pentium chips; the PowerPC is said to lack parallel processing capability the MMX chips have along with DEC's Alpha, H-P's PA-RISC, SGI's MIPS, and Sun's Sparc. The shortfall in revenue and the other bad news may make it harder for Apple to persuade both developers and customers it has a bright future. SGI Stock On Roller Coaster After reaching $46 a share in July 1995, Silicon Graphics dropped to $18 as growth slowed from 40% a year to around 25%. Part of the problem seems to be analysts' expectations of continued fast growth the company didn't dampen in time; but there are other concerns. The company's engineers admit the Pentium Pro matches the performance of their MIPS chip, though they claim faster memory access; and Intel is moving in on the workstation market once owned by SGI and Sun. Digesting the $745 M purchase of Cray Research is another. The company's big hope seems to be expanding their market to business intranets and movie makers, and getting beyond their earlier base of engineer types. Pentiums With MMX Due This Week Intel announcement of the multimedia enhancements for its Pentium chips last March was considered a major factor in slow holiday PC sales, though the company says they only targeted developers to prepare them for the added features. MMX is said to improve Pentium graphics performance by a factor of about 1.6, less than some graphics accelerator cards, and not to be slated for the Pentium Pro. The paradox is that it will most benefit low-end CPUs but make them cost a great deal more, so the rollout Wednesday may be a bust. The PPro chip will be enhanced in the second half of 1997 with something called the Accelerated Graphics Port; the AGP should raise CPU-memory bandwidth from 100 to 500 megabytes a second, slower than SGI's new O2 system at 2 gigabytes/second, but still respectable."}, {"response": 7, "author": "terry", "date": "Sat, Jan 11, 1997 (23:27)", "body": "Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #10 of 22: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Jan 7 '97 (08:58) 22 lines Cray Dumping Suit May Backfire Last May, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado announced plans to purchase a $35 million supercomputer for weather modeling from Japanese maker NEC. Cray responded in July by accusing NEC before the US International Trade Commission of \"dumping\", or selling below cost by the staggering amount of $65 million. NCAR has more or less been held up from moving while the dispute unfolds with a counterclaim by NEC to the Court of International Trade accusing the Commerce Department (evidently including the Trade Commission) of bias and favoritism toward US companies. So to get some work done while the attorneys duke it out, they are purchasing an H-P supercomputer, a domestic product immune from dumping charges. While they would prefer a vector machine like the Cray or the NEC to a massively parallel system like H-P's, a new generation with pooled memory makes the H-P easier to program, and it can be beefed up to equal the power of a Cray. If NCAR buys the H-P and NEC wins its bias suit, the whole Cray initiative may go down in the roster of Really Bad Business Decisions, since they have pretty much poisoned their relationship with NCAR, till now a major customer. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #12 of 22: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Jan 7 '97 (14:35) 3 lines The voice of cynicism suggests that Apple could hardly dare to announce anything other than aiming for compatibility with existing apps. To do otherwise is like saying \"Please take your business elsewhere\". Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #17 of 22: Busy Techie (ronks) Wed Jan 8 '97 (09:00) 34 lines Experienced Computer Buyers Avoid Stores In 1992, 65 percent of consumers who purchased computers were doing so for the first time and 35% were repeat buyers; in 1996 those figures are reversed, and the differences in the two groups' buying patterns are significant. Two-thirds of the newbies' buys are made at big stores, while more experienced consumers go there only two times out of five. Or in other terms, companies like Dell, Gateway, and Micron show sales up 20 to 30 percent over last year, but Circuit City, CompUSA, and the like are down 15 - 25%. Overall, home computer sales were up 15% in the fourth quarter compared with 4Q95. Videoconference Companies Consolidate Austin maker of desktop and group VC units Vtel Corporation will purchase Compression Labs Inc. for $80 million in Vtel stock. Neither is a giant in the field today, but combined they may be in a better position to compete with Intel and PictureTel. Vtel is promising to come out this year with a board that will run over either a LAN or dialup ISDN at speeds up to 384 KB; that will enable them to integrate into nets that include their 384 KB group VC units - at last. Batteries To Go This probably belongs in the \"press releases\" topic, but I found it in the news and I'm lazy. A San Jose company is developing the niche business of 7x24 available replacement batteries for PCs, cell phones, etc. to business travelers and others. The company's name and phone number is (are?) 1-800-Batteries or www.powerexpress.com. They claim to stock over 6,000 types fresh monthly and ship overnight. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #18 of 22: Sofia's Choice & biztech hostly type (amicus) Thu Jan 9 '97 (06:52) 8 lines FCC Expected to Approve Wireless Plan The FCC is apparently expected to approve setting aside 300 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed use... was this the SuperNII proposal Apple had originally made? Presumably we'll see everyone rushing to put cheap local networking infrastructure on the shelves. Only downside seems to be the fairly short (1-2 mile) range, which makes this good for wiring up a school to a fixed link to the Net, but bad for carrying a connection cross town. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #19 of 22: Busy Techie (ronks) Thu Jan 9 '97 (08:56) 39 lines I wonder how many transmitters they can sell before the interference becomes unbearable. IBM To Put Its Patents On the Internet The company plans to make all its patents dating back to 1971, over two million of them comprising about 400 million pages or 3000 CD-ROMS, available without cost on the Web. The facility at www.ibm.com/patents will permit searching by subject, inventor, and other keywords. Presently the US PTO permits free searching of patent abstracts, but charges for orders of the full text; commercial companies like Questel charge $2000 a year for access to their US patent database, which does not include downloadable drawings and images like the IBM service. The search may be slow, though; the patents are stored on CD-ROMS (about 3000, I bet) mounted in jukeboxes and probably not instantaneously online. The effort is not entirely altruistic, since IBM plans to use it to show off its Internet technology like DEC does with Altavista. Rumor has it that IBM m"}, {"response": 8, "author": "terry", "date": "Mon, Feb 10, 1997 (00:26)", "body": "Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #23 of 94: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Jan 13 '97 (11:07) 28 lines MS Slate Decides Not To Charge For Self Originally the online magazine planned to charge $20/year to subscribe, effective last November; then they postponed it to February; now in an article titled \"Slate Chickens Out\" they abandon the whole idea. Their reasoning is that with 30 million free Web pages competing for viewers' attention, even asking visitors to provide information about themselves drastically reduces their numbers, and asking them for money as well would leave the place a deserted and unattractive venue for advertisers. Caruso Pans Macworld Denise Caruso had very little good to say about the company's performance at last week's gathering of the faithful. She did like the demo of an e-mail reader that converts text to speech, and a document summarizer that selects relevant sentences out of long passages. But given that this is a kind of pivotal time for CEO Gilbert Amelio to keep software developers still writing for Apple, she felt he showed no strategy and wasted time on photo ops with himself and Wozniak, Jobs, Muhammad Ali, and an actor. She says Ellen Hancock admitted that Apple spent $400 million to buy Next but hadn't even decided if Rhapsody (their joint OS) would be based on the Next software or on the MacOS. And she observes that the delay of Intels' MMX chips till after Christmas gave Apple a fat opportunity to push their own multimedia Macs to consumers; an opportunity they simply ignored. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #24 of 94: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Jan 14 '97 (15:32) 40 lines IBM Wins 1996 Patent Derby For the fourth year, the most US patents were awarded to IBM: 1,876 of them. Runners-up were: Canon 1538 Motorola 1064 NEC 1042 Hitachi 961 Mitsubishi 932 Toshiba 912 Fujitsu 868 Sony 854 Matsushita 837 GE 819 Musical Desks At Intel Everybody in the executive suite seemed to go up a notch. Craig Barrett moves from COO to president; Andy Grove moves from president to chairman; Gordon Moore moves from chairman to chairman emeritus. NCR Strikes Deal With CA Similar to a deal that Computer Associates did with DEC last April, CA will develop a version of Unicenter for NCR machines, and NCR will drop support for its own systems management software and sell Unicenter instead. Though most of CA's $4 billion in annual revenue is said to come from mainframe software, Unicenter is their fastest growing product. Gee, is NCR still around? More Mergers Veritas Software is buying Openvision Technologies for about $400 million in stock, and Teleport Communications is acquiring Cerfnet from owner General Atomics for ~$70 M in stock. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #26 of 94: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Jan 14 '97 (18:09) 5 lines No doubt the condom patents emerged from IBM's Special R&D division; the first person to make a joke about \"firmware\" will be, well I don't know what but I'll think of something. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #32 of 94: Busy Techie (ronks) Wed Jan 15 '97 (10:43) 29 lines \"Conductive\"? To avoid a buildup of static electricity? Intel Profit Doubles+ Supported by high volumes and fat margins, the company's quarterly earnings rose to $1.9 billion from $867 M last year. Since they practically own the microprocessor market with a 90% share, they can price as they please, which they did by skipping planned cuts in November to maintain their 60% gross margin. No one seems to know if the 40% growth rate of the last two quarters can be sustained or if it's cyclical; but for know, the company is rewarding its 48,500 employees around the globe with a $1000 cash bonus. That's on top of the two semi-annual profit-sharing cash bonuses and the special group awards for meeting targets. Hilton Hotels To Offer High-Tech Services To Frequent Sleepers The international division of Hilton will provide a group of regular customers with their own individual \"follow me\" phone numbers; to reach such a VIP you just dial a toll-free number that routes you to whatever hotel they're at now, and you can leave a voice message, fax, or e-mail; or even talk to them if they should deign to appear in person. The company is also planning to offer encrypted e-mail, videoconferencing, and Internet access to guests, and make the services available to the US division of Hilton. (But I remember they announced VC services last year; when I called to ask about it, nobody knew a thing.) Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #33 of 94: Busy Techie (ronks) Fri Jan 17 '97 (07:05) 11 lines AOL Asks Users To Log Off Faced with at least four class-action lawsuits from angry customers unable to log on to their hobby board since the introduction of flat-rate pricing, America Online is taking the unusual step (for them) of throttling business. In addition to suspending TV ads, Steve Case has posted a letter to users asking them to hang up rather than stay online out of fear they will be unable"}, {"response": 9, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Feb 11, 1997 (22:10)", "body": "Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #95 of 100: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Feb 10 '97 (11:54) 30 lines Flat Screens Advance Typical technology for laptop displays (up to 12 inches diagonal) is called Thin Film Transistor / Liquid Crystal Display or TFT LCD. New flat TVs (up to 42 inches) use color plasma displays. A hybrid system called Plasma-Addressed Liquid Crystal or PALC replaces the TFT part of TFT LCD and shows promise of enabling larger displays (up to 25 inches) without the high cost, high voltage requirements, and misty image of pure plasma technology. Jury Still Out On Fee-Based Web Street Journal Of 700 newspapers with Web presences, only the Wall Street Journal requires paid subscriptions ($50 a year) to access content, though some charge for premium services or morgue searches and the NY Times bills overseas readers. Microsoft Slate recently decided not to charge, for fear of starting a mass exodus of readers. The WSJ fee regime became final Jan. 1, so it's too soon to say if it's a success yet, but there are concerns. For one thing, 90% of people who tried the free trial did not stay on after it ended. For another, an unscientific survey of eight who did turned up only one who was not planning to drop their existing subscription to the printed version. Last but far from least, its value as an advertising medium is in question: vendors pay each time an ad of theirs appears on a user's screen, but one stopped advertising after they determined that almost no one who viewed the ad actually clicked on it to visit their site, much less actually place an order. They suggest number of click-throughs is a better measure than views. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #98 of 100: Busy Techie (ronks) Mon Feb 10 '97 (15:04) 2 lines I think existing WSJ subscribers get a break on the $50 fee for the Web version to like $30, but still... Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #99 of 100: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Feb 11 '97 (11:39) 29 lines Cyberscouts (Hosts?) Reappear As Guides An Internet search site that uses human searchers to scout for interesting places and material was featured in a recent news article. The aim of The Mining Company (www.miningco.com) is to combine the aspects of an online service like AOL with those of a search service like Altavista. They are specifically trying to distinguish themselves from the television or broadcast-channel model of say MSN. But the more I read the article, the more it sounded like this new idea wasn't. Their plan is to employ part-time \"guides\", who get $250 a month plus 40% of the ad revenue, to sniff out interesting stuff in their area of interest and expertise and to publish it to users of the service. They apparently also moderate online forums on the subject. I don't see much difference between this business plan and EMinds'; take away the money, and I don't see much difference with the Well (except we probably have more intense thrashes). $250+ a month for hosting; hmm... Chip Fabricator Improves Compaction With Insulation By improving the quality and the application of insulation between a chip's transistors, the Plasma and Materials Technologies company claims a four-fold improvement in the density of components it can fit on a single processor. To me it's reminder that creating the tiniest imaginable circuit or switch, like that single-electron gizmo of a few days ago, is only part of the job; packing them together has room for optimizing as well. Topic 79 [biztech]: In the news for 1997 #100 of 100: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Feb 11 '97 (13:55) 9 lines Quote of the Day Alan Braverman, a Credit Suisse analyst on Web search tools like Lycos: \"Without search engines, there's no way the Internet growth...could have happened. But do search engines really work? The answer is No. In my mind, we are at the point of the $300 calculator that subtracts and multiplies.\""}, {"response": 10, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Feb  5, 1998 (23:23)", "body": "Around the World by Private Concorde, with 22 sold-out departures over the past decade attesting to this programs popularity. Offered in September and October 1998, this best-of- the-best adventure takes guests to some of the worlds most fascinating destinations Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Peoples Republic of China (Beijing and Hong Kong), India, Kenya and France to sample the finest cuisine and relax in the luxurious atmosphere of internationally renowned hotels. This is the ultimate trip, the pinnacle of world-class travel, ... from my cousin's website"}, {"response": 11, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Mon, Mar  6, 2000 (13:49)", "body": "techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}, {"num": 3, "subject": "providing content - CSP not ISP", "response_count": 5, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Mar 20, 1998 (08:47)", "body": "Markets are changing and they do this fast if you are in the Internet business. We see Internet service providers grow in the number of subscribers and in the way they do their business. They start to grow to a service center. More and more hosting services, Content creation, financial services for payment over the Internet become part of their core strategy. On the other side large publishers become aware of the same market, the Internet for content providing and a service center facilitating this. They start to think of solutions that help them providing their content and they want to learn what their business will be in the future. Content Providers are companies that have information available for a (large) group of consumers and want an interactive relation. Content Service Providers are the facilitators of the solutions that content providers need to do their job properly. The larger content providers have their own service center and that makes them a combination of both. For Content Providers Traffic is the key to success. Traffic is generated by: Brand Products Community Service A company has a complete value chain with as goal to generate this traffic. Content Creation Content Packaging Market Making Transportation Delivery Support Content Distribution With these steps it is possible to define service areas, that enable content providers to meet their goals. It translates the value chain to a more practical view of the world. I defined the following service areas, and I'll name the companies that are in these areas: Editorial Systems - StoryServer - Netscape publishing system - Twinspark Internet Publishing System Generated Content - Tailored work done by web building companies Hosting - Apache - Netscape - Microsoft - name all those webservers Restricted Content - MCIS (Microsoft Commercial Internet System) - Netscape - the new planet Closed User Groups Personalization - Firefly - BroadVision - Microsoft (of course) Communities - WELL engaged - Motet Advertising - Netgravity - DoubleClick E-Commerce - Open Market - Intershop It is possible to enter the selected market with parts of the services mentioned. This is the concept till now, a techie perspective. I'm working on procedures etc.... I'd like some comments on the concept and the blind spots."}, {"response": 3, "author": "aschuth", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (13:28)", "body": "It doesn't matter what you do, there are three things to think of (it's me stating the obvious again: \"eternal truths of business\" - sorry if I bore you, fellas): (1) Marketing - lure potential customers to your offer. It doesn' matter how good the product is if nobody buys, because nobody knows. (2) Be different - it's no good to be as good as the competitor, if they are on the market longer or also offer other things (\"one stop shopping\"). A fresh idea and distinct character might enlarge the total market, or at least allow to carve a niche. (3) Stay attractive - if you can't grow from (2) on and hold any consumers lured in step (1) -, a niche is all you'll ever achieve; this might not be sufficient to support even a small team. Hmh, my personal project is well defined concerning (2). Sales aren't too hot, so we give more attention to (1), in the hope that growth kicks in (meanwhile using up time, effort and capital that would otherwise be put to use in production, but without sales, we can stop the whole thing). While the basic profile is agreed upon, we can't neglect (3), though in our case, we need to get some more issues out and see how the market responds, to see what defines \"attractive\": Is that new stories and scenes, or are we more attractive if sticking to certain subjects?"}, {"response": 4, "author": "aschuth", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (13:29)", "body": "Are you working on anything specific, Terry? And Wer, how about you? Somehow seems to me both of you have some ideas... Out with it! Spill 'em!"}, {"response": 5, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (14:39)", "body": "me? ideas?"}, {"response": 6, "author": "aschuth", "date": "Sun, Jun 13, 1999 (04:26)", "body": "Well, like an adult website... Been on your mind lately... Admit it! techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}, {"num": 4, "subject": "incubators", "response_count": 0, "posts": []}, {"num": 5, "subject": "New Technology & Small Business - opportunity/risks", "response_count": 4, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Nov 10, 1998 (10:19)", "body": "I don't have a thesis yet. And am very much interested in what others may be thinking on this subject. A couple of things.... there is lots of talk about the Net changing everything, including how we do business. But from what I can see a lot of small businesses are not there yet - on the net or even adopting some of the existing new technologies. If that is true, why? Is it because the technology really is not there yet for small businesses/organizations? The learning curve or even financial investment still too high? In the 3-5 year period, unless something amazing happens, like the Web/Mosaic, won't most of the changes be drive by either the refinement of existing tech - making it ready for 'prime-time' - or the combining of existing tech in new ways? Last but not least, regarding the impact of tech upon small businesses, small companies that do not have in-house tech support/MIS people, are there other important issues in addition to \"The Net\"? I hear that Accounting packages for smaller businesses do not really get it. Thoughts? Reactions? Comments?"}, {"response": 2, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Nov 10, 1998 (10:20)", "body": "From Brian Zisk, one of the most successful netpreneurs around: Thought I'd add a few comments, though if you'd like to follow up, drop me an email or give me a call, as I don't really participate in the Entrepreneurs conference on the well as I (and others) have been treated rudely by the host too many times (who has stated that the reason this conference is dead is because there are hardly any entrepreneurs on the well, hahaha). Too bad for the conference (and the people of the well), as it could've/should've been an awesome resource for all of us... It's hard to predict what new technologies will be most influential. However it's easy to predict that there will be companies in various industries whose rise will be based on the added power and efficiency brought to them by advances in software. In essence, the leaders in many industries, (such as trucking, manufacturing, distribution, and on and on) will be \"software companies\" (that is where their competitive advantages will lie), and they will beat out the other companies based on how they use computers to better manage their information (and thus money and product) flow. While the better access to information provided by the web will allow more and better transactions to take place (the essence of our http://www.transaction.net site, and the force which drives such net superstars as http://www.ebay.com ) the lack of critical mass and difficulty for companies to have the knowledge base which will currently allow them to implement profitable systems is what keeps most companies (especially non-computer related ones) from implementing successful web commerce systems. As time moves on, places such as Ebay and ViaWeb (now Yahoo Store) will show companies hat it may not be as difficult as they'd been lead to believe. Hopefully decisionmaking aids (as technology, such as reputation based filtering) will allow companies to make better/more profitable decisions/business practices in the future. On a small scale this is working now (ie. San FranZiskGo! http://www.transaction.net/sanfran/events/ helps people determine (using a reputation based filtering model)) which events to frequent on a nightly basis. In the future (it's already started), more complex models will be put into place, showing people choices based on algorithyms determined by your and other people's choices. These (however) will most probably not be widely implemented (nearly to the extent possible) over the next 3-5 years. As software companies saturate the expensive, high end, corporate market, in order to grab more custumers they will indeed migrate down to the smaller customers. Companies like Microsoft will indeed dictate a lot of solutions for larger clients, but it will continue to be the small companies which come out with the major innovations. My guess is that most innovations will need to run on the most popular hardware configurations, and thus imho most innovations we see coming along in the next bunch of years will be designed to run on the Intel platform. So they're a major force, and will not go away, evenif the whole computing world happened to turn open source, hurting Microsoft immensely. I do believe that if the whole world decided to go open source that Bill Gates would be smart enough to release all Microsoft soure code and turn into a customer support organization, but that's at least a few years down the road. ;-) I believe that new technologies will infiltrate all industries, and the most successful (in pretty much all industries) will be the ones which most resemble software companies. Microsoft does indeed pose a threat to small companies as they move into smaller niches. It's hard to compete with them, so what you have to do is maintain a niche which they can't touch you in, such as street credibility and soul. How companies learn to work with the new technologies will be just as important to a companies success as what those new technologies happen to be, and thus some companies will successfully addapt, and others will be left behind in the dust. And yes, the learning (and cost) curve behind new technologies are definitely what is keeping most businesses from addapting them. Most accounting packages for small businesses do not really get it. For instance, using Quickbooks (or Quicken), it's so difficult to make projections based on actual data (passed through various scenarios) that the best way seems to be to pull data out and manipulate it using Excel. So they may be adequate if you define a small business as one which is too small to need financial projections, but even a lemonade stand should be projecting what they need. Hope this rapidly written rant is helpful. Anyone with anymore questions, please don't hesitate to ask."}, {"response": 3, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Thu, Feb 25, 1999 (16:18)", "body": "there are currently 2434 jobs listed at http://www.dice.com/ with the keyword \"e-commerce\"..."}, {"response": 4, "author": "sprin5", "date": "Tue, May 30, 2000 (19:36)", "body": "B2B Moves In On Office Realty Market One of the last un-Webbed fields is commercial realty; in large part, it has depended on a kind of inside knowledge that brokers acquire from their daily participation in the business. Who's moving out, how much a parcel just went for on that block, and so forth. But even this Luddite bastion is falling as companies like CoStar, RealtyIQ, and TenantWise.com collect data on transactions and make it available, either to fee-paying subscribers or on a commission basis. techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}, {"num": 6, "subject": "tech news 98", "response_count": 55, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Dec 15, 1998 (09:24)", "body": "IBM To Publish Source For Sendmail Alternative The article isn't clear on whether they will treat their new Secure Mailer program as freeware, but they will apparently make the source available. It goes on to say they published source for a compiler last week, that they are making software work with Apache, and they plan to sell DB2 for Linux. Anybody know wonder what compiler they mean? IBM hopes Secure Mailer with its modular architecture will displace sendmail, which was \"written as a large, monolithic piece of software\", a Bad Thing. Sun, Oracle Mount Another Challenge To Windows Having not gotten very far with the thin-client NC, their current plan to slay the giant of Redmond rests on a combined Solaris-Oracle server that is meant to reduce \"the need for a full-blown desktop operating system\" for Internet and database functions. Sun is also reported working on an \"ultra- thin client\" called Newt; no really, that's what it says. Denise Caruso On The Internet Stock Bubble Her article is mostly about the effects of instant share-price updates and the legion of day traders it has spawned, but she also notes a side effect of the meteoric rise of stock prices on high-tech companies. At some point the prices may be seen as so inflated that the incentive power of stock options, now used to lure employees, will diminish if people figure a return to sanity is imminent. But repricing the options at a lower level might spook the investors who presently hold the stock, creating a kind of self- fulfilling prophecy of decline. As they say, letting go of the tiger's tail is the hard part... Microsoft Monopoly - A Wrong Without A Remedy? With the possibility that Microsoft will be held to have violated antitrust laws, the question naturally arises of what to do about it. (A motion of censure? Oops, wrong Bill.) The article for some reason fails to discuss breakup a la AT&T except to call it a \"major economic policy decision\" as though that eliminated it from consideration, and concentrates on API access. This poses real problems of how to ensure access, which is something the government definitely does not want to police in detail. One possibility suggested is the Java model, where Sun announced it hired Price Waterhouse to \"guarantee the fair, impartial distribution of Java APIs\"."}, {"response": 2, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Dec 15, 1998 (21:09)", "body": "Credit Card Companies Wake To Internet Potential In advertising news, companies like Visa and Mastercard are said to be just noticing that the Internet is the best thing that happened to them since the invention of plastic. Up to 2.5% of an e-commerce site's gross revenue goes to the card firms, and this year's sales are expected to reach $40 billion. Visa says it expects to handle $13 billion worth of Internet transactions this year, one percent of its total business; in five years they project they will do $100 billion worth, or 11% of their total. They are contributing heavily to ad campaigns for e-commerce firms. But for some reason American Express is not jumping on the bandwagon; they did a one-day radio media tour and a few spots and they promote some businesses on their own site, but they have fallen behind Visa and MCard. Accountants Demand To See Quarterly Reports In accounting news, the Big Five (formerly the Big Eight, then the Big Six) say they have agreed not to audit and approve their clients' financial reports where the client publishes unreviewed quarterly reports. Up till now, the auditors just saw the annual figures, and several companies would pile all their special charges on the fourth quarter to manipulate the public's view of their performance."}, {"response": 3, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Tue, Dec 15, 1998 (22:23)", "body": "I hate it when that happens."}, {"response": 4, "author": "terry", "date": "Wed, Dec 16, 1998 (14:06)", "body": "Supremes Rule On Antitrust Not part of the Microsoft brouhaha, but likely to be cited in cases involving the complex and ever-changing relationships of high-tech companies is a decision this week by the US Supreme Court. Nynex was taking bids for the removal of old switching gear; they agreed with one of the bidders, AT&T, not to consider bids from a third company called Discon. Discon sued, calling the agreement a boycott. The court agreed that boycotts are \"per se\" unlawful restraints of trade, meaning that lack of harm to competitors, benefit to the public, etc. are irrelevant to the violation. But they also held that a contract between a purchaser and a supplier is not a boycott; that requires an agreement between competitors. The judgement was unanimous. Canadian Merger Bid Dropped Open Text has abandoned its hostile takeover plans to acquire PC Docs, a major document-management software company. OT is still buying up other, more willing companies as it expands from Internet search tools to intranet management software. Microsoft Buys Into Qwest They acquired 1.4% of Qwest for $200 million. Their goal is apparently to use Qwest's IP-based wide area fiber optic network and marketing staff to offer Internet applications based on Windows NT. Qwest will create a department to sell NT Web-hosting facilities. Their CEO assures everyone there is no conflict with their September deal to offer \"Netscape Contact\", a consumer service based on you-know-what for management of e-mail, faxes, and voice mail over a Web site, since the MS deal is focused on large corporate customers."}, {"response": 5, "author": "terry", "date": "Mon, Dec 21, 1998 (12:46)", "body": "Merchants' Servers Seize Up With Holiday Traffic Replicating the mall experience down to the long lines of people waiting to buy things, but presumably without meaning to, several Internet shopping sites have broken down under the volume of browsers (in both senses) and customers. Barnes & Noble and Macy's suffered slowdowns, and IBM and EBay just flat out collapsed for days at a time according to the report. New Radio Technology Could Revolutionize Wireless Systems At least for short ranges. Described as \"ultrawide band radio\" and \"digital pulse wireless\", it seems to be a kind of Morse Code for the millennium. The current technology, from a company called Time Domain, just emits on-off pulses (1's and 0's, basically) 40 million times a second at very low power across the entire radio spectrum (the article doesn't cite actual wavelength boundaries). While it doesn't go very far before attenuating, it can go through solid objects without multipath interference , making it useful for (say) a wireless LAN inside a building. By comparison, an existing protocol called \"Bluetooth\" transmitting at 2.4 gigahertz can send a megabit per second to a receiver 30 feet away from a 100 milliwatt transmitter. Ultrawide can send 1.25 megabits to a receiver 230 feet away from a 0.5 milliwatt transmitter. Time Domain predicts it can raise the rate into the billions of bits per second. Because it broadcasts in frequencies reserved for other uses, the FCC has to decide if the technology fits into an exception for \"incidental emitters\" like arc welders, hair dryers, and PCs. Patent Granted For Trees In Graveyards Mac Truong received patent 5799488 for trees \"grown from seed or seedling in a nutrient composition featuring...ashes derived from the remains of a deceased human\". His concept seems to be for using the tree as a kind of gravestone (gravewood?) in a \"memorial forest\"."}, {"response": 6, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Dec 31, 1998 (05:23)", "body": "Computer Vs. Network Debate Revived The old argument of whether the \"system\" is a group of computers connected to each other, or a network with computers as mere nodes on it, is coming back again with a few differences. Instead of mainframes and minis, the Goliaths are PCs, and the proposed paradigm of the \"post-PC era\" is a network of information appliances that includes cell phones, pagers, handhelds, and chips embedded in cars, coffeepots, etc. IBM calls it \"pervasive computing\" and they just created a group to track it and make sure they aren't left behind (again); their strategy is to supply the components like chips and mini-disks to OEMs. IBM is convinced that bandwidth is not a bottleneck, since their view is not of downloaded movies but of messages transmitted between the ubiquitous gizmos. Donna Dubinsky, a co-founder of Palm Computing and now of Handspring, says sub-$100 handheld devices will necessarily disconnect from the PC and become \"an extension of the network, not the desktop\". Post-PC evangelists point to the example of mainframes, which are actually handling larger volumes than ever, but are no longer the object of attention, investment, software development, and more importantly are no longer high-profit items. Microsoft and Intel not surprisingly dissent from predictions of PC doom: they acknowledge that the PC needs to get cheaper and easier to use, but Microsoft SVP Craig Mundie says we are really entering the \"PC-plus era\" with the new devices \"complementary to the evolving personal computer\". Place your bets... New Products and Services Annette Pappas received patent 5,713,081 for three-legged pantyhose with pockets. The purported advantage of this garment is that the occupant can tuck the third (and for earthlings, unused) fabric leg into its associated pocket, retaining it for instant - well, rapid - deployment in the event one of the other two legs develops an unsightly run. Russel D. Harmon has cornered the market on Internet sales of cremation urns; his company DiscountUrns.com has just bought out rival Urnsdirect.com. His latest product is $29.95 faux urns made of particle-board and painted to look like expensive hardwood, which he observes are completely biodegradable (just like their inhabitant). He also plans a crematory in Washington where customers can set their loved ones on fire, perhaps before stuffing them in a cheap faux urn. Talk about lack of respect for one's elders... Topic 99 [biztech]: In the news for 1998 #909 of 909: Busy Techie (ronks) Tue Dec 29 '98 (09:09) 32 lines Internet Upstarts Pass Elders Not only is AOL bigger than Disney in market capitalization now, but the runup in any stock with \"net\" or \".com\" has put Ebay five times ahead of Sotheby's, Amazon ahead of Borders and Barnes & Noble combined, and Charles Schwab ahead of venerable Merrill Lynch. Two weeks ago Merrill was reported considering the purchase of Schwab to bootstrap itself onto the Internet, but Schwab's price seems to prohibit such a move for now. Besides that, Merrill's 14,000 brokers might object to being displaced by a server in a closet. Schwab's success is all the more remarkable since it is not really a startup like some of the other net firms with astronomic P/E ratios, but a 25-year old company in an mature industry. And yet, by moving from a plain discount broker to an online house, it managed to maintain its 30% market share and counter its per-trade profit drop (from $63 last year to $53 now) with a corresponding increase in the number of trades. The result is that Schwab now trades at 65 times its expected 1999 profit to Merrill's 16, and is worth more on the market despite having one-seventh of Merrill's revenue. Stocks In The News It may be the serious money is vacationing this week with many institutional investors out of town. As one analyst put it, individual day traders who are \"sitting at home after having their turkey dinner are going to move the stocks\". Anyway, a company called Active Apparel rose 820% yesterday (229% for the year) after announcing they would sell \"women's activewear\" over the Internet; presumably with pictures which would at least boost their traffic. And Skymail, a company that publishes those crumpled catalogs you always find in your airline seat pocket, took off upwards by 183% (611% in 1998) when they said their internet sales were up sevenfold this year."}, {"response": 7, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Jan  8, 1999 (04:55)", "body": "Acer Delays Stock Offering After its share price fell 13% last month, the Taiwan PC maker said it might hold off on a $200 million issuance of stock it had planned since July. Taiwanese stocks have not done well in general, reaching a 30-month low last Tuesday. Cisco To Announce New Network They may use the current Consumer Electronics Show to describe their plans for a high-speed multimedia network to offer data, phone, and video services on a single line. Initially it will be available to TCI cable subscribers, though Cisco claims an alliance of 32 telephone, cable, and ISP firms. Bell Atlantic Smooths Path For Competition They say. The FCC requires local phone companies to demonstrate their market is competitive before it will let them offer long distance services. So far nobody has passed the test, though not for lack of trying. Now Bell Atlantic has trotted out a competitor to offer a testimonial: Royce Holland, former head of MFS, now CEO of Allegiance Telecom, says a new system lets a Bell Atlantic customer switch carriers in one week instead of six. It remains to be seen if this will impress the FCC."}, {"response": 8, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Jan  8, 1999 (04:55)", "body": "Economists Discount Bubble Theory In Current Stock Bonanza On the excuse that economics is a technology and the stock market is certainly a business, I wanted to recap an interesting article from this week's meeting of the American Economics Association. Members' concerns that the extraordinary rise of the market since the end of 1994 would turn into a bust grew through the first part of 1998, and increased when share princes plunged in August and September. But its recovery since the Fed's rate cuts has led to a restored confidence among economists that the market is fairly valued for the current unique environment and that prices are robust, with the Fed both ready and able to sustain confidence if a panic should develop. They point to a combination of job creation, rising output, and falling unemployment, which in other times has resulted in inflation, but not now. Some of this price stability is due to coincidence (falling oil and computer prices), but others are likely to endure. These include lack of wage pressure (outside of the basketball industry) possibly related to the growing use of contract workers, increased job mobility, and the preference of aging baby boomers for security over an increased salary. AT&T - AtHome Deal Reported Close They are expected to announce today that AT&T will provide the long-distance portion of AtHome's cable modem service with around 15,000 miles of fiber optic lines. AT&T should benefit from a credible move out of its voice services into Internet data communication, an area where it's seen to lag. The initial deal is for $100 million, but AtHome has other options that could bring AT&T more revenue if exercised. AtHome gets not only to connect its cable modem subscribers to fiber optics, but has opted for flat rate pricing to replace the per-unit cost of its existing Sprint contract, a change seen as worth 5% in its operating margin. AT&T's win at the expense of six other bidders came for an odd reason: AtHome required the ability to use Wave Division Multiplexing, and most of the other bidders tie WDM to Sonet which is suitable for voice transmission (which AtHome didn't need) and adds to the cost. Old voice carrier AT&T was able to avoid this somehow. Hayes Closes The former king of modems is shutting its doors. They declared bankruptcy twice, most recently last October, and have been trying to find a buyer and reorganize. But its lenders (to whom it owes $42 million) declined to keep it alive any longer in the absence of likely purchasers. So the company is now one with Nineveh and Syquest. H-P Moves Into Low End Printers Like Intel and Compaq before it, they have discovered that the low-price market is growing too large to ignore. So they created a subsidiary called Apollo Consumer Products (named after a former acquisition, I think) to sell sub-$100 color printers and eventually other stuff like scanners, cameras, and even PCs. The company estimates that sub-$100 printers will grow in the years 1998 to 2000 from 1.5 million sold to 5 M (5% to 11% of the market), and sub-$150 printers from 8 M to 17 M (22% to 38%)."}, {"response": 9, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Jan  8, 1999 (04:56)", "body": "Intel Debuts More Cheap Chips With the market for sub-$1000 PCs grown too big to ignore, Intel is gearing up to compete more effectively with AMD and Cyrix/National Semi at the low end. They just introduced 336 MHz and 400 MHz Celeron CPUs at $123 and $158 per, for orders of a thousand or more. And they reduced the prices of existing Celerons (Celera?): the 300 MHz is now $71 and the 333 MHz $90. Network Solutions Seeks Cash The company, now owned 72% by SAIC, will lose its monopoly on registering Internet names this year and probably wants to diversify. Their 2-for-1 split and a secondary offering of 5 million shares should reduce SAIC's stake to 45%, and an analyst says it should qualify the stock for pooling type mergers, which may be advantageous in accounting terms. Except they better hurry, because the FASB is thinking of disallowing the pooling form of merger. Intuit CEO Urges AT&T-Style Breakup Of Microsoft William Harris surprised Microsoft's attorneys yesterday by testifying in the resumed antitrust trial that the Windows operating system gave MS \"market power [which] should not be used to leverage into other markets\". Why this surprised them is beyond me, but they criticized him on the stand for not telling them in advance he was going to say it, and asked him if the government had put him up to it. He said no. He also suggested that the court \"make a distinction between operating systems and other applications\", which probably also astounded Microsoft's attorneys with its novelty. Spyglass Misses Revenue Goals, Expects Quarterly Loss The company that once seemed to have a lock on the web-browser market is now reduced to selling \"programs that link television sets and copiers(!) to the Internet\". And they didn't sell as many of those as they hoped, because they blame slow sales for an expected 15-cent-per-share loss. Their stock declined 31% on the news. Surfing the Net with your copier is just not an idea whose time has come yet; interesting notion though."}, {"response": 10, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Jan  8, 1999 (04:58)", "body": "Wireless Computing Success Still In The Future Xerox's 1972 concept of the Dynabook, a portable computer connected to a network by radio, was never executed by them; and its more corporeal successors have yet to achieve critical mass in the marketplace. Wireless e-mail is useful to some people, but apparently not to a wide enough base of consumers necessary to support a business. While there is some hope that if they build it, users will come and a suitable killer app materialize, the evidence to date offers little support. As Geoff Goodfellow, the founder of Radiomail, puts it \"this is a zero billion dollar industry\"; the article says he sold the company to Motorola after failing to secure a profitable market. Motorola is now trying to position it for corporate niches. Another example: Paul Allen's Metricom offers unlimited Internet access at 20 KB/sec for $30 a month in Seattle, San Francisco, and DC; after three years it has only 20,000 customers. Next into the arena: 3Com's Palm VII (for people with two extra fingers?), which should cost around $800 and offer Internet access at 30 cents per kilobyte. Apple is rumored ready to move also, with an AT&T alliance to connect both laptops and even desktop systems to the Internet without wires."}, {"response": 11, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Jan 12, 1999 (08:38)", "body": "Wireless Computing Success Still In The Future Xerox's 1972 concept of the Dynabook, a portable computer connected to a network by radio, was never executed by them; and its more corporeal successors have yet to achieve critical mass in the marketplace. Wireless e-mail is useful to some people, but apparently not to a wide enough base of consumers necessary to support a business. While there is some hope that if they build it, users will come and a suitable killer app materialize, the evidence to date offers little support. As Geoff Goodfellow, the founder of Radiomail, puts it \"this is a zero billion dollar industry\"; the article says he sold the company to Motorola after failing to secure a profitable market. Motorola is now trying to position it for corporate niches. Another example: Paul Allen's Metricom offers unlimited Internet access at 20 KB/sec for $30 a month in Seattle, San Francisco, and DC; after three years it has only 20,000 customers. Next into the arena: 3Com's Palm VII (for people with two extra fingers?), which should cost around $800 and offer Internet access at 30 cents per kilobyte. Apple is rumored ready to move also, with an AT&T alliance to connect both laptops and even desktop systems to the Internet without wires. katie sez: the theory is small pipe wireless spread spectrum radio modems to isps who connect to big pipe backbone via fiber or satellite. avoid local telco copper entirely. The washdc metricom users i have talked to are wildly happy with their wireless connections. LA also has a start up wireless but their monthly rates are little improvement over isdn/dsl, which is really a rip off. http://www.interwireless.com/ http://www.metricom.com/ if metricom actually delivers at 28.8kbs, it will be a huge improvement over 9kbs which is the best speed ever i have gotten from USWest pots, usual speed is 1 to 3kbs as measured. Intel Debuts More Cheap Chips With the market for sub-$1000 PCs grown too big to ignore, Intel is gearing up to compete more effectively with AMD and Cyrix/National Semi at the low end. They just introduced 336 MHz and 400 MHz Celeron CPUs at $123 and $158 per, for orders of a thousand or more. And they reduced the prices of existing Celerons (Celera?): the 300 MHz is now $71 and the 333 MHz $90. Network Solutions Seeks Cash The company, now owned 72% by SAIC, will lose its monopoly on registering Internet names this year and probably wants to diversify. Their 2-for-1 split and a secondary offering of 5 million shares should reduce SAIC's stake to 45%, and an analyst says it should qualify the stock for pooling type mergers, which may be advantageous in accounting terms. Except they better hurry, because the FASB is thinking of disallowing the pooling form of merger. Intuit CEO Urges AT&T-Style Breakup Of Microsoft William Harris surprised Microsoft's attorneys yesterday by testifying in the resumed antitrust trial that the Windows operating system gave MS \"market power [which] should not be used to leverage into other markets\". Why this surprised them is beyond me, but they criticized him on the stand for not telling them in advance he was going to say it, and asked him if the government had put him up to it. He said no. He also suggested that the court \"make a distinction between operating systems and other applications\", which probably also astounded Microsoft's attorneys with its novelty. Spyglass Misses Revenue Goals, Expects Quarterly Loss The company that once seemed to have a lock on the web-browser market is now reduced to selling \"programs that link television sets and copiers(!) to the Internet\". And they didn't sell as many of those as they hoped, because they blame slow sales for an expected 15-cent-per-share loss. Their stock declined 31% on the news. Surfing the Net with your copier is just not an idea whose time has come yet; interesting notion though. Economists Discount Bubble Theory In Current Stock Bonanza On the excuse that economics is a technology and the stock market is certainly a business, I wanted to recap an interesting article from this week's meeting of the American Economics Association. Members' concerns that the extraordinary rise of the market since the end of 1994 would turn into a bust grew through the first part of 1998, and increased when share princes plunged in August and September. But its recovery since the Fed's rate cuts has led to a restored confidence among economists that the market is fairly valued for the current unique environment and that prices are robust, with the Fed both ready and able to sustain confidence if a panic should develop. They point to a combination of job creation, rising output, and falling unemployment, which in other times has resulted in inflation, but not now. Some of this price stability is due to coincidence (falling oil and computer prices), but others are likely to endure. These include lack of wage pressure (outside of the basketball industry) possibly related to the growing use of "}, {"response": 12, "author": "terry", "date": "Wed, Jan 13, 1999 (10:59)", "body": "Math Algorithms Patentable: Supreme Court Declines Appeal The high court decided without comment not to hear an appeal in the case of State Street Bank vs. Signature Financial. Signature developed financial software that included a mathematical formula for calculating mutual funds investments. State Street claimed the formula was not eligible for a patent, and the trial court agreed, but the federal appeals court for the Federal Circuit reversed and said math formulas used in business could be patented if the produced \"a useful, concrete and tangible result\". Since the Fed Circuit handles all patent appeals, the decision applies across the country. Samsung Sells AST They bought AST Research in 1995 for $377 million and sold it this week for $12.5 million to Beny Alagem, a former head of Packard Bell. Samsung will keep a 35% interest, perhaps until it finds a bigger fool. AST's debts exceed its assets by $400 million; Mr. Alagem has wisely contracted not to assume those debts. $399 PC Announced A Fremont company called Emachines with Korean financial backing plans to offer sub-$400 systems through Circuit City and mail-order retailers. They claim to have already shipped 180,000 of their sub-$500 Etower PCs in the last month and a half of 1998. Microsoft Buys Into Banyan MS will spend $10 million over three years for a 7.5% stake in Banyan. It is surmised they want Banyan's directory management technology; if they have trouble creating the Active Directory feature of the upcoming Windows NT, a Forrester Research analyst says they \"will switch from build to buy\"."}, {"response": 13, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Jan 14, 1999 (06:23)", "body": "Eternal Airplane Under Construction A lightweight plane that runs entirely on solar power is still a ways away, but NASA's \"Centurion\" approaches it. A 206-foot wide flying wing that weighs 1175 pounds empty, its solar cells will generate 31 kilowatts and its intended altitude is 100,000 feet; so far it has been tested only at low altitudes with lithium batteries so as not to damage the expensive solar array in the event of a crash. Plans are to extend the wing to 250 feet and have it flying high within two to three years. Besides scientific applications, the planes could replace some communications satellites; they can fly at lower altitudes without having to move at orbital speeds. The payload increases from 100 pounds to 600 pounds if the Centurion flies at 80,000 feet instead of 100,000, and a successor already on the drawing board called Helios is planned for 50,000-70,000 foot altitudes; but NASA plans to shoot for 100,000 feet because the model could then be used in the Martian atmosphere(!). Still to be addressed: how to replace those bags of peanuts. Lucent To Buy Ascend for $19.3 Billion The deal (if approved by Ascend's board) would give each shareholder 0.825 shares of Lucent for each Ascend share. Negotiations between the two have been underway for about 18 months. The report is that Ascend needs a bigger partner to compete effectively, and Lucent needs Ascend technology to compete with Cisco. SBC Plans Big ADSL Offering By the end of this year (just in time to fail with a Y2K bug), they will offer high-speed ADSL connections to 9.5 million customers, including 8.2 million residences. Intel, Seagate Prosper Intel's quarterly profit was up 18% to $2.1 billion, largely on sales of high-margin high-end processor chips like the Xeon and the Pentium II. Revenue rose 17% to $7.6 billion, but they lowered their cost of goods by $16 million, apparently through the introduction of an 0.25 micron manufacturing process. Seagate showed a $104 million quarterly profit compared to a $20 M operating loss a year ago; their revenue increased 8% to $1.8 billion, partly due to a \"41% rise in computer sales in December\". Liquid-Hydrogen Gas Station Opens In Germany \"Early business was slow\" according to the report; I can imagine. Still, the Shell Oil subsidiary that opened the station in Hamburg claims \"Long term, it replace oil and gas\" since hydrogen engines get 70 percent fuel efficiency compared with 23% for gasoline engines. Car makers are said to be developing hydrogen powered vehicles; no doubt the Geo Challenger and the Chrysler Hindenburg are just around the corner, so to speak. E*Trade Opens Internet Investment Bank Called E*Offering, it will underwrite stock offerings through sales over the net; they claim efficiencies over brick-and-mortar investment banks that let them charge 30 percent less."}, {"response": 14, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Jan 15, 1999 (06:07)", "body": "The Web's New Sugar Daddy by Polly Sprenger 3:00 a.m. 15.Jan.99.PST REDWOOD SHORES, California -- Oracle put US$100 million up for grabs Thursday in an attempt to convince promising technology startups to build software for its new Internet database. Speaking to a group of venture capitalists, the managers of the new Oracle Venture Fund described how the world's biggest database software company wanted to become more friendly with investors and the companies they nurture. \"Our top-line mission is to make a pot of money,\" said David Roux, investment committee member of the fund. \"But we also want to raise our profile in the financial community.\" In August, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the company's new database, Oracle 8i, and described it as a product geared toward the Internet. At the time, Ellison said he intended to position 8i as a new computing platform to rival operating systems like Windows NT and Sun Solaris. Encouraging new software developers to base their products on 8i is part of that strategy. Oracle 8i was originally slated for release in December 1998, but still hasn't come out. As more businesses move their computing systems to the Internet, Oracle hopes to make its products the foundation -- much like Microsoft operating systems are the foundation of desktop computing. The Oracle Fund also will help young companies by lending them its prominence in the information technology market, Roux said. He said the target investment range was $2 million to $5 million for each company the fund invests in."}, {"response": 15, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Jan 15, 1999 (06:19)", "body": "AOL To Offer ADSL To Bell Atlantic Customers They estimate that by the end of the year, 7.5 million customers in the BA service area will be able to access the Internet via ADSL for about $40 a month, $20 over the base AOL charge. BA is said to charge about $60 a month for \"full Internet service over ADSL\", and cable modem providers about $40. Big Transatlantic Cable Planned George Soros' Global Telesystems Group and Bermuda's Flag Telecom plan a $1 billion cable to link New York with Britain and Europe beginning some time next year. Estimated capacity is 1.28 terabits a second, described as 25 times the total of existing transatlantic cables."}, {"response": 16, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Jan 19, 1999 (12:16)", "body": "Philips, Sony, Sun In Home Automation Venture Reaching out to establish a rival to Wintel plans, the three companies plan to use Sun's Java-based \"Jini\" protocol and the Home Audio Visual Interoperability (HAVI) architecture to create devices for consumer automation of home electronic appliances such as VCRs. Microsoft and Intel have created a Universal Plug and Play Alliance (with Compaq, Dell, and H-P) to promote their own standards, which not surprisingly are PC-centered, while the Jini-HAVI groups sees TV remotes and other gizmos as nodes. The two groups are expected to do battle over which protocol is included in TCI's new set-top boxes. NBC's Snap Aims Service At Highly Connected Those without ADSL or cable modems need not apply to Snap's \"Cyclone\" service (they may come to regret that name if they expand to Germany), which is designed solely for users with major bandwidth. It looks like at effort by a second-tier company (the article says \"also-ran\") to carve out a niche. At Home To Buy Excite For $6 Billion Speaking of cable modems, this deal would give At Home a major portal and end the reported bidding for Excite by Yahoo and Microsoft. At Home, worth $10.4 billion, has 330,000 customers and Excite ($3.5 B) claims 20 million \"registered users\". Since AT&T is buying TCI, who owns much of At Home, they are expected to benefit as well."}, {"response": 17, "author": "terry", "date": "Mon, Jan 25, 1999 (10:59)", "body": "Linux Users Demand Refund Not from Red hat, from Microsoft. Instead of automatically clicking on the \"I Agree\" button that says they capitulate to every demand MS makes on them as a condition of using Windows, some have decided to follow the instructions to \"contact the manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused product(s) for a refund\". Although Microsoft wrote the language of the agreement, MS spokesman Tom Pilla says as far as his company is concerned buying the computer with Windows pre-loaded constitutes an agreement to use it and disqualifies users from a refund; another PR triumph for Redmond's Goliath seems to be in the making. [irony alert] More details said to be available at"}, {"response": 18, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Jan 26, 1999 (12:24)", "body": "Microsoft Buys Into British Cable TV They will sink a half billion US $ in the third largest cable service in Britain, a company called NTL Inc. Lycos CEO Denies Sale rumors Robert Davis says \"what we're most committed to is the independence of Lycos\", but \"if there's a partnership out there that respects that ... we'd be interested in it.\" Whatever that means. Sun In Big Jini Push A full-page ad headlined \"Maybe all your toaster needed was someone to talk to\" features a printer that says \"Pleased to meet you\", a washing machine that replies \"Charmed, I'm sure\", and a wristwatch that can only come up with an inarticulate \"Wussup?\". Not what you'd call a killer app. Intel Withdraws Chip-ID Publishing Plan Big news on the privacy front today is Intel's retreat on its design for the Pentium III that identifies the chip serial number to outside agencies, like Caller ID or a hardware cookie burned into the PC. Latest announcement is that the feature will not be activated by default, but will need to be turned on by the user. Undisclosed Buyer Bids on Name thespring.com An undisclosed Silicon Valley startup is bidding on the name thespring.com according to an undisclosed source at Austin, Texas virtual community-ecommerce site, the Spring ( http://www.spring.net) . The source said that the buyer is backed by some high powered venture capitalists. The buyer is an ecommerce startup and is shrouded in mystery and intrigue."}, {"response": 19, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Tue, Jan 26, 1999 (18:48)", "body": "okay, give us more on that last part!"}, {"response": 20, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Jan 26, 1999 (18:51)", "body": "Yep, got a call today. We in negotiations for thespring.com but don't worry, we're keeping spring.net which is our main name anyway. Basically, well, talk to me in inner."}, {"response": 21, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Tue, Jan 26, 1999 (19:10)", "body": "gotcha"}, {"response": 22, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Jan 26, 1999 (21:21)", "body": "See, you find out who reads tech news by throwing in an occasionally show stopper."}, {"response": 23, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Wed, Jan 27, 1999 (18:45)", "body": "I'm here for ya!"}, {"response": 24, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Feb  9, 1999 (14:47)", "body": "Global Electronic Linking Of Stock Exchanges Proposed The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Paris Bourse, and the Singapore International Monetary Exchange are in talks to offer futures and options trading over a 24-hour a day network, to be called the Globex Alliance. Other exchanges are expected to be invited in later. AT&T To Expand Local Phone Service Over Cable Besides the deals last week, AT&T is talking with the third through the fifth largest cable TV companies: Mediaone, Comcast, and Cox Communications. They have 13 million customers, and could offer service to another 7 M homes their facilities pass by. AT&T hopes to enlist them in its drive to offer local telephone services over coaxial cable. USA Networks Likely to Buy Lycos Barry Diller's company includes the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Citysearch, and ISN First Auction. It is reported in a deal to buy Lycos, the 4th most visited Internet portal site. The combined company would have a market value of $18 billion and be called USA Lycos Interactive Network. Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but whatever. The interesting thing about this deal seems to be that instead of basing its revenue model on advertising, it looks toward profits from selling directly to buyers. PC Prices Fall To Zero A Pasadena company descriptively named \"Free PC Inc.\" plans to give away Compaq computers and a no-charge Internet connection, in what may be the ultimate price cut. They'll make it up in volume, ha ha. No actually they figure they'll make it up with ads, with the computer will display as long as it is turned on, whether it's connected to the Internet or not. In a curious wrinkle, anyone who wants one of their PCs must visit the company's web site , which is likely to require a computer up front. Then they have to answer a battery of demographic questions about their age, education level, income, interests, etc., and the company will decide if they are gullible enough, er, suitable to receive the $600 retail computer. A key investor in the operation is one Barry Diller, who is obviously not ready to abandon the advertising revenue model entirely."}, {"response": 25, "author": "terry", "date": "Mon, Feb 15, 1999 (19:27)", "body": "International Wireless Standard In Trouble In the beginning according to the article, there was analog cellular, the first generation of wireless telephones. Then came the second generation, digital PCS (personal communications services); Europeans promoted a standard called GSM (global system for mobile communications) over the American standard in a way that left some hard feelings. In the words of an American trade official their strategy was \"get it to market first, mandate it as a pan-European standard, and make sure it's not compatible with existing wireless networks in North America.\" Now it's time for Generation Three, and the battle lines are drawn. San Diego-based Qualcomm has long promoted CDMA (code division multiple access), over the objections of Sweden's Ericsson who already has a large base built on TDMA (time division blah blah) which is compatible with GSM. Tests showed CDMA, originally designed for military applications, adapted to commercial use better than expected. Just as Qualcomm was feeling justified in its judgement, Ericsson sued them for patent infringement over the technology in October 1996; the slow-moving case is supposed to go to trial this April in Texas. Ericsson appears to have fought CDMA until it proved the better way, then claimed they own the rights to it. Anyway, Ericsson is now ready to use it, but in a form that is not backwards-compatible with the existing US service, since they don't have a piece of that. Qualcomm is crying foul, demanding that the protocol be compatible, and has enlisted as allies the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Commerce, the US Trade Representative, and the chairman of the FCC. The European commissioner for telecommunications has merely replied that American standards will be forbidden in European systems, Qualcomm has counter-sued Ericsson over their own patents, and the ITU...oh, I forgot to mention about them. They are scheduled to meet in six weeks \"to forge a consensus on the next generation of wireless phones\". Ha ha; they might as well try to forge a consensus between Mac and Unix and Windows users. In fact, they have already given up trying, though they will still meet for many fine lunches and dinners at a Malaysian beach resort and spa; instead they say they will not move \"until the property rights are settled\". These are the rights that have been sued over since 1996, remember, and haven't even come to trial yet. Most analysts are pessimistic on any resolution of the issue, and expect instead that the two incompatible standards will continue on separate paths and a single global standard may not emerge for years."}, {"response": 26, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Mon, Feb 15, 1999 (21:43)", "body": "ooh, this sounds like fun..."}, {"response": 27, "author": "terry", "date": "Fri, Feb 19, 1999 (08:38)", "body": "Compaq To Portalize Altavista With all-in-one sites like Excite and Lycos looking like the wave of the future, Compaq plans to beef up the Altavista search site it got as part of the DEC deal with two acquisitions. They just bought shopping.com for $220 million, and for $300 million a company called Zip2 that apparently partners with local newspapers to create Citysearch-type directories on the Web. Digital Watermark Standard Agreed On Up to now two rival formats have been competing to be chosen as the standard by which copying of digital video recordings and broadcasts could be prevented. IBM and NEC supported one, and Hitachi, Pioneer, and Sony the other. They have now settled on a single format and expect DVD recorders with watermark-detection circuitry to be available in a year. A binary code will be stored in every frame of a recording; supposedly it will survive compression and conversion to any other digital format, and should only give a false positive once in over seven years of solid recording. They didn't say anything about degrading picture quality, though. I recommend Google ( http://www.google.com ) heartily. Applications Seen For Slow Light The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,171 miles a second, but it is slower when it passes through materials of different densities. By using a very dense material called a Bose-Einstein condensate, a team of scientists have slowed it down to 38 miles per hour and hope to get it down to 120 feet per hour. The technology is very far from commercial deployment - for one thing, the condensate needs to be cooled to fifty billionths of a degree Kelvin (above absolute zero), which most freezers are not built for - but the physicist in charge says that within ten years major applications may be available. Examples given include \"optically switched logic gates\" and noise filters for optical communication systems. The refractive index of the material can be raised to 100 trillion times that of optical fiber; potential applications include devices that upshift long-wavelength light such as infrared into the visible spectrum, in color. World Economic Network Detailed This is not strictly high-tech news, but it should be of interest anyway. The N Y Times has been running a seriously excellent four-part dissection of global economic interdependence that describes how the Thai, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian currency crises came about and how both technology and politics created a ripple effect among them. The multi-page stories ran Monday through today, and can be found at Definitely worth reading if you're interested in the subject. Firewire Consortium Formed Apple, Compaq, Matsushita, Philips, Sony, and Toshiba have agreed to jointly license their connection technology called Firewire (doesn't it also have an IEEE designation?) and promote it as a standard PC interface. It is described as already in heavy use in Macintoshes, camcorders, and VCRs. Microsoft Says AOL Uses Internet Explorer Out Of Spite In a curious sort of conspiracy theory Microsoft says that AOL, who just bought Netscape, has renewed its contract to use Internet Explorer, but did it to harm Microsoft. Their theory according to Brad Chase is that \"If they switched to Netscape, our market share would drop to 30%; that would make IE the underdog and would be inconsistent with AOL's desire to help the government in this case.\" Just think how happy MS must be that IBM just announced it will ship Linux on its servers, joining H-P and Dell. (IBM says it is even looking at putting Linux on laptops, no doubt to please MS.)"}, {"response": 28, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Fri, Feb 19, 1999 (08:43)", "body": "no doubt..."}, {"response": 29, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Mon, May 24, 1999 (12:09)", "body": "ENGLEWOOD, Colo., May 21 /PRNewswire/ via NewsEdge Corporation -- Holding its commencement exercises on the Internet, Jones International University: The University of the Web (JIU) celebrated its first graduation ceremony as a fully accredited academic institution. The graduation ceremony, which includes a web cast of the degree conferment and web pages for each graduate, is archived at http://www.jonesinternational.edu/graduation . JIU's 1999 graduates are: 1. Bob Bone of Independence, MO, who found that JIU was the most feasible way to complete a masters degree as the owner of a company and father of four; 2. David Chavez of Palmdale, CA , who has five years' experience in marketing and public relations and needed a degree in business communication to achieve his career goals; 3. Joan Crittenden of Waldorf, MD, who learned effective communication skills and how to make a Web page for her employer while attending JIU; 4. Noreen McGahn of Brigantine, NJ, a school nurse and health educator who's on-the-job performance has greatly improved from JIU's rigorous coursework; 5. and Rosemarie Slocum-Rubenstein of Minneapolis, MN, the founder and president of a physician search consulting firm, who believes her JIU education has helped her to run a more effective business. About JIU Founded in 1995 as International University, JIU exists entirely in cyberspace. The online educational environment enables JIU to offer degree and certificate programs to students around the world. The cyber classroom environment also provides more flexibility to students, who may not be able to attend classes on campus because of geographic distances, work schedules or personal commitments. Earlier this year, JIU received accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which is esponsible for the accreditation of colleges and schools in 19 states. JIU is the first online university to receive accreditation from a nationally recognized accrediting body. For more information, visit JIU's campus on the web at http://www.jonesinternational.edu/ or call 1-800-811-Jones. SOURCE Jones International University: The University of the Web (JIU) [Copyright 1999, PR Newswire]"}, {"response": 30, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Thu, Nov 18, 1999 (16:33)", "body": "John should know about this place. I shall email him with the information."}, {"response": 31, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Sat, Nov 20, 1999 (12:39)", "body": "I did and he lamented that all they offered was a BA and MA in communications neither of which would help him."}, {"response": 32, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Wed, Feb  9, 2000 (11:16)", "body": "Yahoo introduces email bug after attack By Paul Festa Staff Writer, CNET News.com February 8, 2000, 5:35 p.m. PT URL: http://news.cnet.com/category/0-1005-200-1545407.html In its haste to recover from yesterday's \"denial of service\" attack, Yahoo inadvertently introduced a bug into its Web-based email system that is causing some messages received through the service to be delivered empty and unlabeled. Some messages appeared stripped of their headers, showing up in the in-box with the subject \"(none)\" and lacking any information about sender, recipient or subject when the message was opened. Those messages, however, did contain the body of the email text. Other messages weren't as lucky, showing up devoid of any content or labeling. Yahoo said the problem arose out of efforts to restore the flow of information between its various services and applications following the denial of service attack. In a denial of service attack, Web sites succumb to heavy bombardment of bogus requests for information. When the targeted server responds, the attackers' system steps up the barrage by sending more requests. The affected Web site struggles to keep up with the mounting number of requests, slowing performance for users or ultimately crashing the system. The assault on Yahoo was followed today by attacks on Buy.com and eBay. A bug accidentally introduced during Yahoo's denial of service cleanup caused some Yahoo Mail messages to become garbled, according to the company. But a company representative said no information was actually lost, and Yahoo engineers are at work restoring headers and bodies to those email messages. Users who deleted those mysterious messages should retrieve them from the Trash folder pending the restoration of data, the representative said. Users who have deleted blank messages and subsequently emptied their trash appear to have lost their email for good. Yahoo would not estimate when the fix would be complete."}, {"response": 33, "author": "vibrown", "date": "Tue, Feb 22, 2000 (18:17)", "body": "The San Jose Mercury News has some good coverage on the Microsoft Antitrust case: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/microsoft/trial Apparently both sides are making their closing arguments today. I'm certainly no fan of Gates and Microsoft, but I have to say I think they're wasting their time arguing about whether Internet Explorer(aka Exploder) is part of the OS or not. To me, the real crime is Microsoft's predatory licensing agreements with PC manufacturers. I understand that Microsoft won't license their Windows operating systems to PC manufacturers if they install competing software products (like Netscape) on new PCs. For one company to dictate what software gets installed on new PCs is unbelievable!"}, {"response": 34, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Tue, Feb 22, 2000 (19:19)", "body": "I see you have found the rest of Spring. Now, make a hotlist which does not quit. Mine has all but about 5 conferences on it. Thanks for posting this and for your comments. Somehow, Mocrosoft has lost sight of the American right to choose."}, {"response": 35, "author": "vibrown", "date": "Wed, Feb 23, 2000 (12:55)", "body": "Microsoft has always found ways to buy or crush competing (and usually better quality) products. It will be interesting to see what happens with this case. I don't want the government to dictate what features can be included in products, and I don't know if breaking up Microsoft would really be the best thing (what good did it really do with AT&T, now that all the baby bells are merging again??). All I know is that Microsoft should be punished for blocking competing products from reaching consumers."}, {"response": 36, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Wed, Feb 23, 2000 (13:00)", "body": "I agree with you both in substance and sentiment. It is not an easy thing to deal with, but it should not have been allowed to dictate to a world-wide communications meduim for as long as it (he) did."}, {"response": 37, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Mon, Mar  6, 2000 (13:51)", "body": "AMD Unveils First 1 GHz Chip Before Rival Intel NEW YORK (Reuters) - The No. 2 computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.N) on Monday unveiled the first 1 gigahertz (GHz) computer chip, beating its far larger competitor Intel Corp. (INTC.O) to the punch to claim industry bragging rights. Advanced Micro said it had begun shipments of its 1 GHz AMD Athlon processors, an announcement that analysts had been anticipating this week. Intel also is expected to follow shortly with its own announcement, perhaps later this week. ``Achieving production of the gigahertz processor is the chip industry's equivalent of breaking the sound barrier,'' Steve Lapinski, director of product marketing in AMD's Computation Products Group. Analysts, however note that these chips will not be available in big volumes after they are launched, and that only a handful of personal computer makers are likely to announce products designed for one gigahertz processors. ``I don't think there is a big push from an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) perspective. It's just bragging rights,'' said Ashok Kumar, an analyst with US Bancorp Piper Jaffray, said. Advanced Micro said it would immediately begin shipping its chips to its two lead partners, Compaq Computer Corp. (CPQ.N) and Gateway Inc. (GTW.N) Compaq said on Monday it will sell computers with AMD's 1 GHz chip with prices starting as low as $2,000 up to $3,300, with the typical price around $2,499. Customers can begin placing orders March 9, with express shipment putting the computers available in users hands within 4-5 days, or 7-10 days with regular shipment. Gateway said Computer machines will begin pricing at $2,999 and products will be shipped within eight to 10 days. AMD also said it plans to begin shipping the high-speed chips to all other computer makers in April. AMD priced its 1 GHz Athlon processors at $1,299 in 1,000 unit quantities. It also announced the availability of a 950 MHz chip at $999 in 1,000 unit quantities and 900 MHz Athlon processors priced at $899 in 1,000 unit quantities."}, {"response": 38, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Sun, Apr  2, 2000 (17:31)", "body": "This story would fit just about anywhere on the Spring, but I thought I's clear the cobwebs out of here today: Granny Missing? No Worry With Satellite Tracking TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese companies have solved the problem of straying senior citizens track them by satellite. A device for finding old people unable to take care of themselves uses a satellite-based global positioning system and a cellular phone network. Local governments in Tokyo and Japan's Kikuchi City plan to test the device, developed by a group led by trading house Mitsui & Co ``We are definitely expecting a market to develop for the system,'' a Mitsui spokesman said. A transmitter attached to the body or on clothing beams coordinates of the person to a local server. Concerned relatives just need to send a request by portable terminal and up pops the runaway's location on a computerized map. Systems already exist in Japan for finding lost people but they rely on technology for personal handyphones a type of mobile phone and do not work well if the escapee jumps on a train or takes to the mountains. And the idea is not simply pie in the sky given the graying of Japan's population. Already there are an estimated 1.88 million elderly people in Japan suffering various degrees of senility. The device will be tested later this year with a planned launch in early 2001."}, {"response": 39, "author": "vibrown", "date": "Mon, May  8, 2000 (23:13)", "body": "Interesting...there was something else about GPS technology in the news recently. It sounded like GPS-based communicators are on the way to being available commercially."}, {"response": 40, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Mon, May  8, 2000 (23:24)", "body": "Wouldn't that be nice!"}, {"response": 41, "author": "sprin5", "date": "Fri, May 12, 2000 (07:07)", "body": "The big news has been the new accuracy of the GPS, which used to be a few hundred feet off, now Mickey, our local \"Czar of the GPS\" notes that he can watch himself change lanes on his GPS. They were once skewed off accuracy intentionally for fear terrorists would use them to drop a missle down a smokestack somewhere."}, {"response": 42, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Sun, May 14, 2000 (18:16)", "body": "Beware of smokestacks and air conditioning ducts (which seem to be out favorite targets from the footage taken in the Libyan altercation. (I think I need one to find my house male in Walmart since he is my ride home...) I had heard from my geek son that they were getting VERY precise!"}, {"response": 43, "author": "sprin5", "date": "Mon, May 15, 2000 (09:25)", "body": "You could use them to find your car in a parking lot now."}, {"response": 44, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Mon, May 15, 2000 (10:36)", "body": "Indeed! Can kids, Granny or wandering spouse be far behind?!"}, {"response": 45, "author": "vibrown", "date": "Fri, May 19, 2000 (13:03)", "body": "I went searching for some information on GPS, and found some urls that look interesting: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gps.html http://gps.laafb.af.mil/ http://www.gpsworld.com/ http://www.navtechgps.com/ http://www.gps4fun.com/ http://joe.mehaffey.com/ I wonder how long before wireless phones and GPS merge?"}, {"response": 46, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Fri, May 19, 2000 (20:42)", "body": "Ok Ginny!!! Thanks! Haven't they merged them yet? Perhaps I saw one on a report from a Hi-Tech show, but I am almost sure someone has one almost ready to put on the market!"}, {"response": 47, "author": "vibrown", "date": "Fri, May 19, 2000 (23:32)", "body": "Navtech has an analog cell phone with GPS powered maps for $400; http://www.navtechgps.com/supply/navtalk.asp They also have a \"World Phone\" that uses GPS to place a call anywhere in the world, but that costs $2850; http://www.navtechgps.com/supply/Wphone.asp"}, {"response": 48, "author": "sprin5", "date": "Fri, May 19, 2000 (23:48)", "body": "How can a gps be used to make a call?"}, {"response": 49, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Sat, May 20, 2000 (00:47)", "body": "Not that - it is a combo deal which fits in your pocket - at least the one I saw was like that."}, {"response": 50, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Sat, May 20, 2000 (00:51)", "body": "Wow, I was right! They are out there for people with lots o' cash. You can locate yourself and call the AAA and guide them to it if our car breaks down?!"}, {"response": 51, "author": "sprin5", "date": "Sat, May 20, 2000 (06:00)", "body": "Lots' o cash, alright, for this Mission Impossible looking cellphone in a briefcase."}, {"response": 52, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Sat, May 20, 2000 (19:10)", "body": "But, Terry..it is SO Cool...! I expect to hear your acquisiton of same in the next few permutations. Competition should bring the prices into more realistic range - I hope!"}, {"response": 53, "author": "vibrown", "date": "Tue, May 23, 2000 (11:52)", "body": "Sounds like that World Phone uses the satellite to reach areas that don't have cell towers, but I don't have a clue how it works."}, {"response": 54, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Tue, May 23, 2000 (13:42)", "body": "It's not with smoke and mirrors anymore, but it has to contain an uplink and a downlink - the reason for the attache case attached, I imagine. Just like a satellite game live from Hilo to Texas!"}, {"response": 55, "author": "MarciaH", "date": "Wed, Jun 28, 2000 (22:03)", "body": "PENTIUM IV By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com June 28, 2000, 9:00 a.m. PT Intel will call Willamette, its next-generation processor, the Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 will succeed the Pentium III and in many ways will be a landmark release for the chipmaker. For one, Willamette, and a related chip for servers code-named \"Foster,\" will feature an entirely new architecture, which will give the company room to innovate or tap new features. For more than five years, new Intel microprocessors have relied on the same basic architecture. The Pentium Pro, which came out in October 1995, effectively features the same \"P6\" design as the Pentium II, the Celeron, Xeon processors and the Pentium III. Although the P6 architecture has enjoyed a good commercial life, the architecture is reaching its performance limits. One of the reasons Advanced Micro Devices has been able to put so much pressure on Intel in recent months is that its Athlon chip features a brand-new architecture with plenty of untapped headroom. This has permitted AMD to raise the clock speed almost at will. Pentium 4 will debut at an initial speed of 1.4 GHz, according to Intel. Rather than increase speed in 33-MHz or 50-MHz increments, the chips will jump by 100 MHz at a time. In other words, the next step up will be a 1.5-GHz chip. As with the earlier Pentium generations, the Pentium 4 will likely be split into sub-brands. Another feature will be a 400-MHz system bus, roughly three times as fast as Intel's current system bus. The system bus serves as a data conduit between the processor and the rest of the computer. The faster it is, the better. When combined with Rambus memory, Willamette computers are expected to establish new levels of desktop performance, analysts have said. The chip is expected to debut late in the third quarter or early in the fourth quarter. Paul Otellini, general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, said in April that Willamette computers would be available for the peak buying season in 2000. An Intel spokesman said \"hundreds of thousands\" of systems will ship this year. Many predicted that Intel would use the Pentium 4 designation. The only thing that may catch notice is the shift from Roman to Arabic numerals. \"They've got a lot of brand equity in Pentium,\" said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64. \"I would be surprised if it was something else.\" Chairman Andy Grove said earlier this year that it could be expected that the company would leverage the Pentium brand name in some fashion. \"Pentium is one of the most recognized brands in the world, and it has strong equity with users,\" said Erik Reid, senior brand manager at Intel, who added that the color scheme of the chip will be blue and orange, rather than blue and green. \"We wanted a bold contemporary look for the new badge.\" techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}, {"num": 7, "subject": "Laura's Internet Stock Report - copyright Laura Lemay", "response_count": 8, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Feb  7, 2036 (00:52)", "body": "Topic 317 [investment]: Hot & Not, Internet Stocks & Investments #190 of 190: nucking futz (mtrbike) Fri Feb 5 '99 (10:04) 93 lines alexsf wrote: > my ebay! sos! Oh Ebay! My Ebay! The NASDAQ day is done, The Internet has held its course, the prize we sought is won, The highs are near, the bell I hear, the analysts exulting, While follow charts the steady gain, the bubble firm and daring; But O stop! loss! limit! Oh the bleeding ticker red; where on the board my Ebay lies, Fallen cold and dead. Oh, I am so very sorry. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Carnage yesterday and today in the NASDAQ. Yesterday's 83 point losss was the 3rd biggest point loss in history, and today's 50ish points loss so far isn't looking too healthy either. Although given that the NASDAQ had been climbing really quickly in January (up almost 15% for the month), a corective loss of a couple percentage points can be viewed as a good thing. (this is your opportunity to get in on some of those big tech names you've been meaning to buy). Speaking of big names, the big news in the tech sector is the scary news from AMD yesterday that Intel is eating its lunch (of course, AMD seems to announce this same news every few years and really, the whole POINT of AMD is to run catch-up behind Intel, so one wonders why this is a surprise, but anyhow). The news of price wars in the chip indsutry has put the serious fear into the big tech names, and where the big tech names go, so goes the NASDAQ. Red, red, red. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Last time I talked about all the excitement in online brokerage stocks. To follow up on that report -- the excitement continued yesterday, with those same stocks continuing upward to record levels (they, like most of the techs and internets, are down again today). Except for one. Etrade (EGRP) picked the worst possible time to have technical problems. The glitch they had on wednesday continued into thursday, with the howls of many furious traders resounding across the country. The New York attorney general got into the act, announcing it would launch an \"inquiry\" in the practices on the online brokerages based on the hundreds of complaints he had receieved about etrade. Etrade is down 15% today (more than the market). $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$__$ Egghead is rumored to be a takeover target by Amazon, so that Amazon could get into the software market. Bunch of analysts are sniffing at that rumor, pointing out that Amazon gets books from Ingram, and surely they could get software from Ingram Micro. Egghead is up slightly in a down market. Lycos is rumored to be in a possible deal with NBC/GE. This goes back to the old takeover/media deal rumors that have been floating around for a while now. Lycos is also up. Yahoo splits today after the closing bell. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$$_$_$_$_$_$_ Bunch of IPOs today. Pacific Internet (PCNTF), singapore's biggest ISP, priced at $17, opened at $88, and is trading at $55 or so. Today's other biggie is Modem Media Poppe Typson (MMPT), which priced at $16, and just opened right this moment at $62. Also today are an enormous GM spinoff, Delphi Automotive (DPH), priced at $16 and trading at $18, and Del Monte Foods (DLM), yes, the del monte fruit packing company, priced at $15 and trading at $15 3/8. I include these last two to note that these are how IPOs *usually* work -- the enormous leaps on day one are an internet phenomenon, not an IPO one. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ The Victoria's Secret fashion show on wednesday was watched by over 1.5 million people, most of whom were journalists. However, given that they had only expected 500K, most of those people didn't manage to get in, or got in and couldn't see things very clearly. The horror! Many of said journalists weighed in on this tragedy, explaining that the Internet is still a new medium, and that we still have a long way to go before the technology matures. So now we know the goal: the internet will be mature medium when as many people who want to watch live underwear models can do so. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Laura's Internet Stock Report is copyright 1999 (c) Laura Lemay lemay@lne.com Permission is Granted to forward as long as this copyright remains intact."}, {"response": 2, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Fri, Feb  5, 1999 (22:47)", "body": "even more stuff to think about..."}, {"response": 3, "author": "terry", "date": "Mon, Feb  8, 1999 (18:08)", "body": "it's L O N G today! Lotsa news after a spectacular NASDAQ day. Another one of those bizarre techs-rule-the-world days. DJIA down, NASDAQ and S&P up. But there are many worried noises coming from analysts about the NASDAQ, mostly because there are fewer and fewer stocks drving it up. The so called advance-decline line -- the proportion of stocks in the NASDAQ that go up versus those that do down -- has been turning negative, and that's not a good sign. But the nasdaq is a weighted index, with only four stocks accounting for 40% of the index (the four horsemen: Microsoft, Intel, Dell and Cisco), so if those four stocks do well, the NASDAQ will still *appear* to do well, even if the rank-and-file are falling over. If the four horsemen fall, though...ouch. Watch out. Ralph Acampora, a Wall St talking-head from Prudential Securities, said that there's a potential of a 5-10% correction in the markets, tech stocks in particular. Given that Mr Acampora has been right in the past (particularly in last october's itty bitty bear), his comments are being credited with spooking the broader market today. Speaking of lack breadth in the nasdaq, internet stocks are not amongst those on the upside. The IIX index was down only 1.31%, but the internet blue chips were down much wider than that. Amazon down 7.5%, AOL down 4%, Etrade down 7%, Lycos and Yahoo down 10% apiece. All except Ebay, which is up on no apparent news -- guess they sold off a bit too much last week and people thought there was value there. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Keyword today: wireless! There's a cellular/wireless conference going on this week (Wireless '99, there's a clever name), so lots of big tech companies are trotting out thier wireless announcements, stuffed full of acronyms only wireless geeks understand, including: + Cisco and Motorola announced a joint wireless IP project, to offer wireless internet access as soon as august (Lucent had already bought a wireless internet access provider earlier). + Motorola on its own joined with Nextel and Netsape to offer a wireless telephone package to offer voice, data and internet access through a cell phone. + Schlumberger announced that they've done a survey that said that people want cell phones with smart cards in them (for things like prepaid cellular). Given that no one else seems to want smart cards for anything, its worth a try. + Tomorrow Nortel will announce something called \"Mobile Webtone,\" which is apparently not a swing band. It sounds suspicously like the same thing Cisco and Nextel are both doing with wireless internet access. + Spyglass, the company that used to do browsers and which has been casting frantically about for a business model ever since, announced a \"content delivery platform\" that will convert internet content into differnt formats that can be read by devices such as PDAs, TVs, and cell phones. Gee. and here I thought HTML WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DEVICE-INDEPENDENT IN THE FIRST PLACE (sound of teeth-grinding). + Not to be outdone, the only two tech and telecom companies left, Microsoft and British Telecom also just announced an internet-over-cellphone project as well. So there you go, everyone throw out your computers, we'll all be using cell phones to read our email in the next year. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Microsoft is supposedly reorganizing to better focus on consumers and the internet. When I was still working for big companies, a reorganization was a sign of weakness, something to be gotten over with and hushed up and accomplished as fast as possible. It was expensive and painful and ugly. Microsoft's reorganization is being hailed in the press as a fabulous move, a terrfic idea, and the best way to position Microsoft for the new millenium. The stock was up 5 to 165 (3%). $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Intel is expected to cut prices on its Celeron chips this week, bringing the price of an entry level PC to somewhere around $1.35. Intel was up 5 1/8 to 132 11/16 (4%). AMD, which makes most of its income from low-end chips, and announced last week it will lose a whole lot of money to Intel this quarter, is expected to repond to the news by bursting into tears. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Computer Literacy bookstores, which keeps insisting that it is an internet stock, is changing its name. But it won't say what its changing it to. Why? Domain name squatters, those carpet-baggers of the new media who register bunches of domain names with names close to a corporate name in hopes of being able to sell them for big bucks to the company that needs them (or to another company that hopes to take advantage of misdirected potential customers who cannot type). If Computer literacy announced, for example, that it was changing its name to, oh, caterwaul.com, then immediately the squatters would register caterwaul.net, caterwaul.org, catterwaul.com, caterwall.com, the-catercaul.com, catarwaul.com, and so on, and computer literacy would have to either pay up for all these oth"}, {"response": 4, "author": "terry", "date": "Tue, Feb  9, 1999 (17:48)", "body": "Yuck! Blargh! Ick! Gross! Bad market day! Ugly market day! Few bright marks in the markets today, not even in the tech stocks: The DJIA was down 158 points (1.78%), the S&P was down 27 points (2.22%), and the NASDAQ was down its third-worst 94 points, almost 4%. The Internet stock index? Brace yourselves. Down 6.71%. Its bad market days like this where its hard not to get obsessed with the short term, particularly since I'm here almost every day reminding you about it. And with internet stocks, every time there's a dip everyone always wonders -- is this the end of the bubble? Is this the crash? is this when it all ends? The answer? Well, yes. Could be. Hard to tell. Could be just a short-term correction. Part of the reason I write the internet stock report is to point out how ridiculous it all is. Stocks that go up 300% on no news. Stocks that go up 300% on stupid news. Stocks that drop by half on rumors being spread around on internet message boards. Day traders who quit thier stable day jobs because they think they can make far more money trading internet stocks on E-trade for four hours a day. The internet sector is effectively investment as extreme sport. But you know, motocross is an extreme sport. Motocross gets your heartrate up, you get in great shape, its a lot of fun....but it also has a tendency to give you really ugly bruises and scrapes and you occasionally break things like legs and collarbones. And spines. Which is why quite a lot of people think that motorcross is just too dangerous, and if you're going to do a sport, maybe something like golf is a MUCH better idea. And there's nothing wrong with that. What you have to figure out, as an investor, is if you're a motocross kind of person or a golf kind of person. Or somewhere in the middle. If you own an internet stock, and it drops 30%, 40%, or more, are you going to freak out and set yourself on fire? Even if you were up 40%, 50% the month before? Then maybe you should be buying something else. Or maybe you should be selling some of those stocks when they run up, lock in some of those profits. Or play in the internet with some amount of money that you won't mind losing (keeping below your setting-yourself-on-fire threshold). Sports analogies! I've really sunk low. Moving on. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ As I posted earlier in a news alert, the big internet news today is USA Networks purchase of Lycos. It was a really complex purchase, difficult to figure out. But from the moment it was announced, investors didn't like it much, and as the day went on, they decided they liked it even less. Lycos closed down 33 (26%) at 94 1/4. Ouch! The fact that USA Networks did NOT pay a premium over Lycos' existing market cap weighed heavily on the sector as a whole, and cast a pall over future mergers. The top ten point losers today were all internet stocks: Cnet, down 25 3/4 points (20%), Ebay down 18 1/8 points (7%), Yahoo down 17 7/8 points (11.26%), Ameritrade down 15 15/16 (18.57%), CMG down 14 3/4 (13.53%), Go2net down 13 1/2 (12%). $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Network Solutions (NSOL), aka the internic, is having its own problems, badly timed with the internet sector problems. Its first problem is that Our Government is supposedly examining NSOL's monopoly on internet domain name reigstration, with an eye for breaking that monopoly. The other problem is that NSOL is about to issue a secondary stock offering of 4.58 million shares. A secondary stock offering is somewhat like an IPO, in that its a way for a company to sell stock to the public -- except that secondaries get much less brouhaha, and, in fact, are often considered kind of a bad thing, because it means the market will end up with a whole lot more shares on the market. More supply, less demand, lower prices. Particularly bad for NSOL's shareholders who held the secondary stock -- the offer priced at $170 last night, but NSOL closed at $148 today. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Ross Perot supposedly made some comments today about how the internet sector is dangerous and speculative, and warned investors not to get involved in those stocks. Given that Mr Perot's company, Perot systems, came public last monday at 18, rose as high as 85 and 3/4 and as been sinking ever since, including losing 12 points (20.73%) today to settle at 46 1/8, well, I propose to take up a collection to go whack Ross Perot repeatedly with a rolled up newspaper. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ 3Com Park. Network Associates Coliseum. Staples Arena. Arco Arena. And now, perhaps, the Yahoo! Pavillion. The San Jose Mercury News rumors that Yahoo! is talking to Bill Graham persents about putting its corporate stamp on Shoreline Ampitheatre in Mountain View. Both Yahoo and Bill graham deny the rumors, but the Merc claims to have a memo. If the rumors are true, Yahoo would be expected to pay many tens of millions of bucks to put its stamp on the ampitheatre. The cost of attaching a cporporate name to arenas has gone up quite a lot in recent years"}, {"response": 5, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Feb  7, 2036 (02:13)", "body": "Abbreviated LISR today, as I have to run to catch a plane. My real job is intruding on my fun for the rest of this week, so I'm afraid you'll have to live without LISR until next Monday, unless I can squeeze out a few update in between conference sessions (yuck). Market did absolutely nothing today, for once. Less than a percentage point moves in all the major indexes, with the techs slightly down and the industrials and S&P slightly up (although, its funny, when I wrote an earlier draft of this report, I had \"up\" and \"down\" in the reverse places!) We're basically treading water here. No news is good news, I guess. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Lycos continues to bleed, losing another 7%. Today, however, only took the independent portals with it: CNet, Go2Net, Infoseek are also down, but many other internet stocks are up, some of them quite well: Ameritrade was up 28% (!), DoubleClick was up 7%, Broadcat.com up 8% and Excite up 4% and Yahoo up 1%. DoubleClick can thank the Goldman Sachs technology conference for its jump today; in its appearance at that conference it announced it would break even in the year 2000. DoubleClick is also linked to this new Free PC venture, where you can get a Compaq PC for free in return for having ads on your desktop and having your movements tracked and sold to advertisers. What was up with Ameritrade? Probably a combination of two things. One could be called the Big Cojones Effect, if I may be so bold. Ameritrade was up in sympathy with another stock, which you'll learn about at the end of this report. The other reason could have been that E-trade, its main online competitor, has been socked with a class action lawsuit thanks to the outages it had last week. But there was no real news that I could find to cause Ameritrade to soar quite so much today. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Ford is rumored to be in talks to merge with BMW. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet, its just a juicy rumor I had to pass on. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Vertica Software, a tiny penny stock trading over the counter, has been getting a HUGE boost over the last few days. Did it account a web play? Did it make deal with Lucent? Did the day traders get ahold of it? None of these things. It just happened to have a pretty darn good stock symbol: VERT. There's an IPO coming up this week, a company called VerticalNet. VerticalNet is a Web IPO, specializing in \"business-to-business communities.\" Investors, assuming VerticalNet's stock symbol would be VERT (and perhaps there were reports to that effect, its not clear), have been placing orders in anticipation of the actual IPO, and surprise! buying shares in Vertica instead. And so Vertica's stock has gone WAY up in the last couple of days. The NASDAQ rules go that if an OTC stock has a symbol that a larger, listed company wants, the larger company gets it. This happened with Amazon as well -- Amazon the book company took over the AMZN stock symbol from Amazon Natural Treasures. So today, VerticalNet is indeed VERT (and is expected to open for real any day now after pricing last night at $12), and poor Vertica Software is now VERI, and is left to languish on the OTC boards. The moral of this story: If you must place market orders on stocks about to go IPO -- generally a bad idea in the first place -- at least know what the stock symbol is. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Big Cojones Award of the Day: Rushmore Financial (RFGI), a financial services company, announced a web site. Oh, but not just any web site. They picked a good one. RushTrade.com is designed specifically for day traders, and will provide online trading and level II market data (real-time quotes, effectively). Rushmore went public last may at 6, and has been trading around 2 since September. They are incredibly unprofitable. Yesterday they closed at 2 1/2ish. This morning, on the news, they opened at 5. The close? 11 3/4. One day gain of 422%. Rushmore financial. Rush More! AHAHAH! $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Laura's Internet Stock Report is copyright 1999 (c) Laura Lemay lemay@lne.com Permission is Granted to forward the LISR in its entirety with this copyright intact."}, {"response": 6, "author": "stacey", "date": "Tue, Mar  2, 1999 (16:52)", "body": ""}, {"response": 7, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Mar  4, 1999 (07:22)", "body": "From today's LISR: $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Stop! Please! First there was Go2Net. Then there was Go.com. Now there's Go Call Inc (GOCA), a penny stock that does offshore casino gambling under the moniker gocasino.com. They've been doing quite well at that business, making actual money at it, so they decided to go into e-commerce and lose some of it instead (which will theoretically make them more of an internet stock play and pump up their stock price). Actually, they already are in e-commerce, sort of. They also run a banner ad clearinghouse (gobannerad.com), where you can sign up to have banner ads put on your pages and you get some cut of the profits. But what they're all excited about is a new site called Indexus.com, a shopper's search engine that will compare prices across different e-commerce sites (so you know you're getting the best price when you go shopping for books or CDs or whatever). Will that make money? Who knows. The announcement of it, however, pumped up the stock from below 1 to 6ish before it settled to the 2 1/2 its been trading at ever since. But 1 to 2 1/2 isn't that bad a gain, overall. $_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$_$ Laura's Internet Stock Report Daily (LISRD) is copyright (c) 1999 Laura Lemay lemay@lne.com all rights reserved. For more information, send mail to majordomo@lne.com with \"info\" in the body of the message or \"subscribe lisrd your-email\" to subscribe."}, {"response": 8, "author": "terry", "date": "Sun, Feb  3, 2002 (08:17)", "body": "No more Laura's reports. She stopped doingit. techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}, {"num": 8, "subject": "temp agencies in a high tech world", "response_count": 8, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "terry", "date": "Sun, Feb 14, 1999 (11:59)", "body": "Topic 405 [work]: Do we need fleshpeddlers? #1 of 1: Michael Edward Marotta (mercury) Sun Feb 14 '99 (07:57) 187 lines Do We Need Temporary Agencies? (c) Copyright 1999 by Michael E. Marotta [In the wake of downsizings and restructings, temporary employment agencies have expanded their roles. Are their needs the same as yours?] You could build your own car, but you choose to buy one built by someone who does the job better. It is a basic truth of economics that we buy goods and services to minimize risk. It is also a basic truth that in any free transaction, both parties profit. You pay a dollar for a loaf of bread because to you, the bread is worth more than the dollar. When your company hires temporary or contract workers through an agency, you expect to profit through lower risks and increased efficiency. However, the hidden costs take a huge toll. You might be better off creating internal procedures for temporary and contract employees. Your human resources department will take on all of the same costs and risks that an agency has. Unlike an agency, your human resources department will not tack on a profit margin. The profit margin garnered by an agency can be surprisingly large. In a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, many firms went public. Driven by the stock markets, these companies now must produce quarterly earnings. In order to do well on Wall Street, those earnings must exceed expectations. Your company pays to make their company's stock go up. WHY USE TEMPS? There have always been temporary workers. In ages past, unattached workers were available for farms and crafts. Itinerant workers are a bright thread in the tapestry of American history. Telegraph operators were called \"boomers\" because they moved from one boom town to another, knowing that their skills would always be in demand. In our day, the computer programmer occupies a similar niche. There are two basic reasons for using contract labor: * Temporary workers meet specific, short-term needs. * Temporary workers bring esoteric skills. There are other reasons, of course, based on your company's history and policy. * Temporary workers can tried out before being hired. If your company has a probationary period, this is one way to extend it. * Temporary workers can be paid less. Comparing the billing rate for contractor to the burden rate for an employee has been the usual procedure. Contract workers earn no vacation or sick time, no profit sharing, or retirement. On the face of it, temps are cheaper. * Temps can be paid differently. Most companies have several classes of workers: hourly or salaried; full time or part time. Some might be paid weekly, others semi-monthly. Invoices to agencies are on another schedule entirely. * Contractors have different productivity cycles. People tend to work hardest just before or just after being paid. Most people are more productive two hours into the day and two hours before the end of a shift. Being on a different schedule than your other workers, a block of temps can lift production. WHY USE AGENCIES? Temporary employment agencies work hard for their money. They advertise for candidates. This includes common Help Wanteds in the local newspaper. It also includes time at trade shows and advertising in industrial magazines. Recruiters often spend their evenings calling and interviewing candidates. Agencies also screen people for you. Their interviewing processes sort candidates in ways that are good for their clients. Agencies get paid, in part, for knowing the chemistry of human social dynamics. They promise (and usually deliver) a good fit beyond the technical skills. Agencies can also screen candidates for drug use and financial problems. Agencies minimize the cost of turn-over. They have a broad talent pool to draw on. If a temporary worker leaves your company, the agency can have another one in place quickly. Production or clerical workers can be replaced in a matter of minutes. Even a senior systems analyst can be replaced in a few days. Agenies encourage accountablity and reporting. When a production department brings in a pool of temps, you know where to distribute the costs. On the other hand, the costs of all other employees are not usually posted to lower level accounts. Temporary agencies pay taxes. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, contract computer programmers developed a nasty reputation for making a lot of money and spending it all without paying income tax. In response, the IRS developed a list of \"20 Questions.\" These were the standard by which the IRS decided whom to chase for back taxes. Most often, the client paid. The IRS looked at who managed the worker, where they worked, who provided the equipment, who set the starting and stopping hours, and so on. The IRS decided that most of these so-called contractors were really employees. As a result, temporary agencies got a big boost. Your contractor is their employee. They withhold payroll taxes. They pay workman's compensation and soc"}, {"response": 2, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Thu, Feb 25, 1999 (17:51)", "body": "which are the best temp agencies in Austin, Terry?"}, {"response": 3, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Feb 25, 1999 (19:30)", "body": "See my response in the other topic. These aren't the best, but they are likely to find you a job. I'd have to think about the \"best\". Probably O'Keefe and Associates. The \"best\" aren't always the ones that will get you job. Try a bunch of 'em. Luck has a lot to do with it."}, {"response": 4, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Thu, Feb 25, 1999 (22:29)", "body": "got it..."}, {"response": 5, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (12:07)", "body": "Okay, got a job that's over now, and no new ones currently waiting..."}, {"response": 6, "author": "aschuth", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (12:45)", "body": "The low-down approach: Get a one to two page CV together and mail or fax it to any temp place within 100 miles range. Get any IT experience you have into the picture (UNIX knowledge, however basic, never hurt a-body), you got that agency stunt, you help maintain this place since years. I guess that's a start. Another approach: drop applications at any banking/finance institution around. They are looking for IT staff in banking - especially investment b., ask Mikey - all over the world. Perhaps there are chances to get a foot in as supporting IT staff on currents projects, like Y2K, even if that would be more administrative or organizational in nature. The open slots at that agency: Did you apply for them? Keep looking in that area - government jobs don't pay too hot, but benefits aren't bad, I guess. And they pay. What IT companies hang out about Austin? If need be, apply for \"junior\" positions that would let you grow into specialization later... Like support jobs: helpdesk work, network and PC support teams are places to gather lots of know-how by doing stuff. You can always move on from there..."}, {"response": 7, "author": "aschuth", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (12:46)", "body": "Or become an entrepreneur."}, {"response": 8, "author": "terry", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (19:03)", "body": "Do a search on austin360.com for email addresses, eg. search for .com or @ and then email all the tech companies that have job openings. techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}, {"num": 9, "subject": "so you need a tech job...", "response_count": 4, "posts": [{"response": 1, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (12:12)", "body": "well, I need a job. quick. preferences would be just about anything web-related, followed by desktop publishing, then word processing and/or data entry..."}, {"response": 2, "author": "aschuth", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (12:26)", "body": "Oh no! Whazzat! Did you grill their mainframe?"}, {"response": 3, "author": "KitchenManager", "date": "Thu, Jun 10, 1999 (14:44)", "body": "nope...contract ran out...I'm one of several applicants for the perrmanent position..."}, {"response": 4, "author": "aschuth", "date": "Sat, Jun 12, 1999 (05:26)", "body": "(*thumbs crossed*) techbusiness conference Main Menu"}]}]}