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Internet
business news and analysis by Dylan Tweney
| 18 October 1999 | |
Holiday spiritLooks like HP has learned the TRUE MEANING OF E-CHRISTMAS: The company, together with food bank Second Harvest, is offering its "e-services" expertise and technology to build a site called ResourceLink [1,2]. This charitable portal is matching up manufacturers who have surplus food with charities who can deliver that food to those who need it. The service is timely: Despite the economic boom, almost 1 in 10 American families are going hungry, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture announced last week [3]. So ResourceLink could really do some good. I checked the site [4] just four days after it was announced, and it noted 28 tons of food have already been donated. Hundreds of companies have signed on to help, according to HP. (Memo to the guys at resourcelink.com: Please put a link to resourcelink.org on your home page. If your traffic just spiked in the past few days, it's probably because people are looking for the food portal, not your careers site. Do the right thing and send them along.) Later, ResourceLink will start matching surplus clothing and building materials for affordable housing with those who need these supplies. ResourceLink is a classic vertical business-to-business marketplace, using the distributed nature of the Internet to match up suppliers and distributors in a highly efficient way. It's great to see someone applying this model to charitable services. Even better, through this model the Internet may help mitigate one of the really shocking disparities of modern life: Mountains of surplus food in one place, and hungry people in another. Bravo, HP. [1] HP deploys e-services to help charities feed the hungry [2] HP ResourceLink press release [3] Hunger hits almost 1 in 10 households, government says [4] ResourceLink STUPID, STUPID: Let's say you've got a computer superstore. The biggest chain of computer stores in the U.S., for instance. And you want to get on the Internet, because dot coms like Buy.com are starting to nibble away at your big, three-martini, steak-and-cigars lunches. So, do you leverage your ubiquitous brand and your massive bricks-and-mortar infrastructure to blow the dot coms out of the water? Well, that would be just a little too obvious for the marketing geniuses at CompUSA. Rather than pump up CompUSA.com (which was a serviceable, if unglamorous, Web catalog) they decided to create a brand new spinoff company called Cozone.com [4]. Never mind that this new company's name is confusingly similar to that of direct-mail competitor Zones.com (operator of the PC Zone and Mac Zone). Never mind that Cozone.com is a totally unknown, new brand, and that to help overcome its obscurity they hired Donald Trump to star in their commercials (bet he wasn't cheap). And never mind that the site is plagued with intermittent glitches. The kicker is that people who order products from Cozone.com *won't* be able to return them at a convenient, nearby CompUSA store. Did these guys just sleep through the whole "clicks and mortar" brainstorm that's been sweeping the Internet industry over the past few months? [4] Trump stars in ads kicking off online venture The debate continues: TicketMaster/CitySearch issued a statement on DEEP LINKING last week that actually sheds some light on what has seemed, to many people, like a backwards and benighted approach to the topic [5,6,7]. The statement actually clears up a number of things. Ticketmaster is not opposed to deep linking altogether, the company claims -- it just objects to "systematic and wholesale" linking by a direct competitor (in this case, Tickets.com). I had a phone conversation with Ticketmaster/CitySearch CEO Charles Conn that cleared things up even more. "I think that most people recognize that the Web is based on linking and that linking is a good thing," he told me. "But Tickets.com has systematically linked to every page on Ticketmaster.com. I think most people would look at that and say Gee, they're building their business on the back of a competitor." Deciding whether any given deep links are fair, for Conn, comes down to three questions:
So, Conn says, it's no problem if a fan site wants to link to a few concerts on Ticketmaster.com -- they don't even need to ask permission. Concert venues may link to Ticketmaster to sell tickets for events at their own locations -- but this is generally done through a partnership agreement with Ticketmaster. Likewise, search engines don't present a problem. But when a competitor spiders Ticketmaster's entire site, essentially cloning the Ticketmaster database, then Conn gets mad. Conn's "common-sense" test makes a lot of sense to me, and seems to address most of the issues raised by people who have written to me on the topic. Let's hope it provokes a thoughtful discussion. [5] Ticketmaster: Think Before You Link [6] Ticketmaster: Consensual Linking Only, Please [7] TicketMaster/CitySearch press release archive, including deep linking statement In a sure sign that dot com mania really has reached a fever pitch, the Internet is about to create the first BILLIONAIRE POET. Susan Polis Schutz, who writes harmless little pastel-colored books of poetry, also founded a greeting card company called Blue Mountain Arts -- which now operates the 13th-most popular Web site in existence, at Bluemountainarts.com. People just love those musical electronic greeting cards, I guess. Anyhow, it seems that Blue Mountain Arts is up for sale -- to the tune of about a billion dollars. The news reports say Web startup EToys is the most likely buyer at this point. If it goes through, the sale of Blue Mountain Arts would probably be the first time in history a poet has ever become a billionaire through her poetry. It figures that the first billionaire poet would be somebody like Schutz [10], and not a really excellent writer, like Frank Bidart, or Yusef Komunyakaa, or Billy Collins, or heck, even Maya Angelou. It does make me wish I hadn't stopped writing poetry, though! [8] Blue Mountain in talks to sell site [9] So Much for the Starving Poet Missed my talk at Internet World? Don't worry -- you can still find out WHAT WON'T BE on the Web in 2004 by checking out the online version of my presentation [11], available in HTML (graphic and plain-text versions) and in PowerPoint. [11] The Web in 2004: What Won't Be NET
PROPHET: Batten the hatches: Here comes the flood of holiday I-shoppers
AMERICANS WILL PURCHASE $6 billion to $12 billion worth of gifts via the Internet this holiday season, say some recent reports from research companies Jupiter Communications, Dataquest, Harris Interactive, and Forrester Research, among others. According to some estimates, that's more than was spent online by consumers in all of 1998. That's a lot of bricks and mortar. ... click for more ... ~ Back issues ~Virtual bricks: AFL-CIO launches new Web site; traditional retailers jumping online; even virtual companies need bricks and mortar (10.11.1999). Billboard economy: EBay wades into deep-linking controversy; Net tax ban redux; Amazon.com's mega-mall; online advertising is on its last legs (10.4.1999). More than markets: GIF going, going, gone?; SDMI infighting and clueless record companies; how the Net makes demographics moot (9.27.1999). The whole blinkin' Tweney.com archive...
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