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The News – 05/21/01
Briefly
Noted
- Shameless Self-Promotion Department: Geneer has published Open Source and
Your Business the latest in their newsletter series, The Geneer
Business Report. The article was written by yours truly.
- Jupiter Research says 32.7 percent of US Internet users'
online time was spent on AOL in January. As if that weren’t enough,
74.8 percent of US residents with home Internet access visited sites
within AOL's community.
- KB Toys successfully bid $3.4
million for eToys' intellectual property. As a shareholder of the
now-defunct eToys, I’m a little disappointed. eToys had a tremendous brand
and seemed like a survivor. However, the downturn in B2C eCommerce and a
dismal Christmas performance shot them down.
LA
Times
- Who knows what will happen in the
area of mobile commerce, or "m-commerce"? Nobody, really, but
that doesn’t stop the pundits from making projections. eMarketer
presents a roundup of
current thinking.
- Cahners In-Stat
Group predicts that almost 1 billion
Bluetooth products will ship in 2005.However,
Forrester predicts that Europeans will be slow to adopt mobile
payment systems until after 2005. And AT
Kearney says interest in mobile shopping is falling off. In June
2000, 32 percent of mobile phone users in Asia, Europe, and the US
said they would buy products or services from wireless retailers. Now,
only 12 percent remain interested.
- eMarketer
also
reports on trading volumes on online exchanges. For example, almost 11
percent of the cattle sold in Q1 were sold online. Moo.
- The US moratorium on Internet taxation
ends in October. There have already been some rumblings from the
states about taxing online purchases. So naturally Congress appointed
a commission
to look into the matter. Oddly, that didn’t help. But if Internet purchases
are to be taxed, something must be done about the 7,500 tax
jurisdictions in the US. Otherwise it’ll be mayhem for online
retailers.
- NeuLevel,
the domain name registrar in control of the new .biz domain, has
announced a three-step process for beginning registrations. Trademark
owners can start the registration process today and have until July 9
to try to reserve their trademark.biz name.
- The American
Arbitration Association (AAA) has released its “B2B E-Commerce
Readiness Study.” The survey
of 100 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies found that more
than 70 percent of those surveyed have already moved part of their
supply chain online and a like number expect to complete building
their B2B e-commerce supply chain within the next two years. This is a
rather small sample, so I wonder how representative it is. Still, the
study represents a tremendous vote of confidence in B2B eCommerce.
- Spreichen zie
Web? US-based English-speakers are already the minority on the Web.
This means businesses need to get serious about globalizing their Web
sites. An Aberdeen Group report
states that by the end of 2000, fewer than 35 percent of Web users
were US citizens and only 48 percent of total users were
English-speaking.
- DeliveryPoint has created a solution for Internet
retailers of hard goods and groceries: a pass-through refrigerator
accessible from outside the home and secured via electronic codes
customized to the delivery. This is a really great idea, but is a little
pricey at this point: ₤7000. The unit has freezer, refrigerator and
ambient temperature compartments. The delivery person has a one-use-only
code to open the unit, and the consumer can open it from the inside to
retrieve the purchases.
Can’t Get Enough of ME?
In the unlikely event
that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the
fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a
datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a
Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you
can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP
access, and the free software from www.blogger.com.
This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts
to your Weblog.
I’ve dubbed my Weblog
entries “Stratlets”, and they are available at www.stratvantage.com/stratlets/.
Let me know what you think. Also check out the TrendSpot for ranking of
the latest emerging trends.
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