Digital Economy News
August 2000 Published by Pagweak Consulting Inc.
Electronic books or more commonly eBooks are handheld computer devices that hold thousands of pages of reading material and emulate many of the functions of a paper-based book.
The eBook (sometimes called an electronic book, e-book, digital book, or virtual book) is meant to look and "feel" as much as possible like a real book---except they are not. They are computers small enough to be carried by hand and used for reading material whether at work, on trips, at the beach, or in bed. They are not made of paper and ink; instead, they are made of bits and bytes and their contents are easy to download directly from a website or from a computer.
Typically they use a backlit adjustable high-resolution screen. You can make margin notes, underline special passages, and bookmark pages. EBooks further enhance the reading experience with features such as search, annotations, and hyperlinks.
Material available for download includes literature of all types---textbooks, self-improvement books, books for children, poetry books, humor books, and many other book topics---- as well as magazines and newspapers.
Electronic books are inexpensive. Online fiction and non-fiction books cost a fraction of conventional book prices. There is no cost for paper or ink, binding, wrapping, postage, or transporting truckloads of heavy boxes from place to place. This means that e-books, online literature, fiction, non-fiction, textbooks, self improvement books, books for children, poetry, and humor are available at extremely low prices. In fact, hundreds of virtual books are free.
EBooks can be used conveniently in business applications at a substantial cost savings. For instance to distribute operating procedures to production workers the day they go into effect, or helping to maintain ISO certification. The benefits of distributing large manuals by means of e-books can be measured in the reduced paper costs of creating, copying, and disposing of thousands of document pages. Also, by moving distribution from costly and slow courier services to instant downloads via the Internet.
With eBooks you can live anywhere and yet be able to call up the best books and periodicals--instantly. You don’t have to worry about storing books or waiting forever to get them. You'd be able to dial up Tom Clancy or Joyce Carol Oates--read regular commercial books, and reference material whenever you had the urge.
EBooks are convenient. With virtual books, there are no more wasted trips to the library or bookstore, only to find that the book you want is gone. With online books, you will never be disappointed to discover that the novel or non-fiction book you want is "out of print." Electronic books are always in stock.
With eventually many books stored in an individual’s e-book and many more available online, looking up favourite passages or vaguely recollected phrases will become much easier with built in search functions.
EBooks are environmentally friendly. Unlike conventional printed books, not a single tree must be felled to create an electronic book. Not one sheet of paper enters the waste stream when you download an electronic novel, online fiction, digital textbook, or any other kind of virtual book.
EBooks can be used by aspiring authors who cannot get access to the traditional press or for specialty runs of a nature that might be too small to be economical for a printed run.
One of the greatest contributions of e-books is their eventual ability to improve literacy and education in less-developed countries. Today people in poor countries cannot afford to buy books and rarely have access to a library. But in a few years, as the cost of hardware continues to decline, it will be possible to set up 'virtual' public libraries which will have access to the same content as the Library of Congress.
EBooks can be used to raise national literary and educational standards and aid publishers and writers along the way. This could be done by creating a national library online offering a long list of free readings and videos that could be downloaded to an e-book computer. While much of this might come at a low cost for such things as the classics many others could be bought from publishers at a fair price before distribution. Collectively all of these costs would be far less than we currently pay for library services and yet the potential would be far larger.
With such a scheme it would not only be possible to increase the distribution of books to cities and towns but also to the inner-city ghettos and impoverished rural areas, where children are growing up today in bookless homes.
Examples Of E-Books
NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook
This "book" plugs into the serial port of a PC, from which you can download manuscripts and then transfer them to your Rocket eBook reader
The Rocket eBook is the size of a paperback book, and weighs 22 ounces. It weighs 22 ounces holds about 10 paperback novels, that's about 3,200 pages of reading materials, bestsellers, magazines, web pages or other documents.
For more information, check out www.rocket-ebook.com/Products
SoftBook
The SoftBook more closely resembles a real book than some of its competitors. It has a soft leather cover and an 8.5x11-inch screen making it easy for reading, but it adds to its size, which at 2.9 pounds is a bit heavy. It also holds more pages than the competition if you buy the optional expandable memory for up to 100,000 pages.
The SoftBook doesn't require a PC, since it uses its own modem. You can just plug it into a phone jack and download titles from the SoftBook library/online store, which offers thousands of books and a daily news feed.
For more information, go to www.softbook.com.
Every Book Dedicated Reader
This is the mother of all e-books. It weighs 3.7 pounds and can store 500,000 colored pages. The concept is radically different from other e-books. When you open the reading device, you are presented with two large screens, similar to the facing pages of a printed book. Each screen is 13-inch diagonal, high-resolution, back-lit, full-color, passive LCD.
With the Dedicated Reader's large dual-page format, practically any book can be displayed. And the device can easily handle electronic editions of newspapers, magazines, newsletters and professional journals. Everybook also has simplified the conversion process for print publishers by using Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) technology, which faithfully preserves the layouts and typography of the printed editions."
For more information see http://www.everybook
The E-Book To Come
These eBooks are effective but tend to be a bit high priced and crude. Within the next 2-4 years we should have a computer shaped like a real book, complete with pages one can flip, each embedded with programmable "type" that can reproduce anything from a trigonometry text to The Great Gatsby. These eBooks will contain audio and video, such as a chef demonstrating how to prepare a meal described in an electronic cookbook.
One company working on this is E Ink, a small company founded by MIT researchers. They are working on using a flexible electronic paper that looks and feels like standard paper, and electronic ink that can change into different characters. E Ink's displays are more readable than any electronic display, and require little power to change content. In addition, the displays stay on even when the power is off, so an E Ink book would not need to be powered after the user has loaded content.
E-books Are becoming Progressively Fashionable.
The. New York Times reports that, at the University of Texas at Austin, circulation of regular books is down, "But with a bare minimum of promotion, the university's newly purchased electronic books, like From Barbie to Mortal Kombat or Euthanasia: A Reference Handbook, are suddenly circulating like freshly published Grisham novels."
According to stories in Wired News and the New York Times, e-book sales are increasing. For example sales of The Best Laid Plans by Leta Nolan Childers topped 6,000 copies, an e-book record.
Preparing for the possibility of a "surge in demand" for electronic books Random House has already digitized 5,000 titles and plans to convert its entire backlist of 20,000, while Simon and Schuster plans to digitize 4,000 of its 20,000 backlist titles next year.
Microsoft and Barnes & Noble have combined to sell paper-free books that can be read on personal computers and handheld devices using Microsoft's Reader software. Under their "eBook initiative" Barnes and Noble’s customers can buy and read thousands of titles using Microsoft Reader, a free software application designed to deliver a clear and customizable on-screen computer reading experience rivaling that of traditional paper-based text. Barnes & Noble, will promote the books and sell the reading devices at its locations.
Stephen King’s successful sale of 500,000 copies of his novella Riding the Bullet over the net using e-books has proven a motivator for lots of others to join the race to get similar books and sales off the net.
The June And July copies of the Digital Economy News contain many other examples showing that E-Books are becoming progressively more popular with both readers and writers.
Summary
There's nothing new about the debate surrounding the future of the eBook. Pundits argue that books will disappear as pixilated screens and monitors replace printed texts and card catalogs. Others say that digital books will never replace the look and feel of the printed page.
Electronic books have been slow to catch on with consumers, but big Internet companies are betting that the time for e-books is coming. Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, Xerox and many other smaller companies are getting into the act. There are literally hundreds of websites now from which the contents for eBooks can be downloaded.
Just a few years ago, conventional wisdom said that e-books would never fly. Readers, pundits insisted, were too attached to the feel and portability of paper. That idea, like so many other pessimistic predictions by the old media about the new, is slowly being discarded. While "booming" might be too strong a word to apply, there are signals that E-books are gaining in fashion.
Economics and computer-wise youth will eventually determine the outcome in favour of eBooks. Improving technology and cost improvements in the order of 50 to 75% in the costs of a book will be very persuasive. Hard covered books in a decade hence will become art objects, historical conversation pieces and in the hands of the relatively well off. The rest of us either will opt for the much less expensive and more convenient version or, as in the youth population—prefer them anyway.
As always when new technologies---mediums---replace a previous technology there are direct and indirect impacts. In this case the inevitable move to eBooks will be felt by our library system, that will need to be rethought, and on the publishing industry from the production of pulpwood through to the printing presses.
The company has released a 750-MHz Pentium III and two Celeron processors running at 650 MHz and 600 MHz for the mainstream notebook market.
In addition, the company released two low voltage processors for the ultra-portable market: a 600-MHz Pentium III that consumes an average of less than 1 watt of power, as well as a 500-MHz Celeron that consumes less than 2 watts.
Some of these ultraportable systems, which generally contain smaller screens than other notebooks but weigh three pounds or less, will be able to run for 5.5 hours on batteries.
The Next generation Internet will gradually come into being as technology advances. Three primary advances constitute the next-generation Internet:
First, broadband networks will provide data transmissions that are up to 1,000 times faster than current modems.
Secondly, video-rich media, interactivity, joint access by more than one end-user, 3D design and display capabilities, and other programs will be the major applications driving the Internet.
Last, a greater amount of intelligence will be stored in the network, and this data will be managed, distributed, stored, and cached by a better quality of service.
Techies love the open-source operating system created by Linus Torvalds. Unlike Windows, they can modify it to do just what they need.
Message to the Linux counterculture: Expecting consumers to abandon the de facto Windows standard to go to Linux is like asking them to return to DOS. It's not going to happen. But Linux can succeed if it does two things successfully: gets big (becomes a popular choice for large enterprises) and gets small (becomes embedded OS of choice for small devices).
But Linux has barriers to becoming the enterprise OS of choice. Dataquest put together the latest stats about why businesses don't use Linux. These are obstacles that Linux must overcome to grow:
GET SMALL: Cell phones, PDAs, Web pads. They all need operating systems. But users don't have to know which one because they never see it. Linux is already making strides here, but will have to make more. Some examples:
Linux stands a chance to become a major force in modern computing. But it won't be on the desktop, where consumers have already made their choice. But Linux can succeed in business, where its reliability is well known, and in small devices, where the OS is invisible to consumers.
The prospects for Linux has gotten rosier since Dell Computer joined the parade of PC makers working to make the relatively new operating system more appealing to big business.
Dell, well behind Compaq Computer in sales of Linux systems, will work with Red Hat to beef up marketing, support and Linux itself. Dell has been the computer maker most closely aligned with Microsoft and Intel -- the two halves of the "Wintel" alliance -- but this news marks a new step back from Microsoft.
Under the new arrangement, Dell will elevate Linux to the status of Microsoft Windows and Novell Netware, building ties with Red Hat's programmers, customer support team, sales force and others.
Dell hopes the alliance will increase pressure on traditional rivals IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems by allowing Dell to sell more equipment to build up the Internet, according to Mike Lambert, senior vice president of Dell's enterprise systems group.
New "optochips" developed at the University of Southern California and the University of Washington offer information-processing speeds that are upward of 10 times faster than speeds from current modulators. The optochips, also known as polymeric electro-optic modulators, transform electrical signals into optical signals at speeds as high as 100 Gbps. New polymers replace standard lithium niobate in the electro-optic modulators, which serve as a link between electronics and fiber-optic equipment. New polymers are intended to bring about the development of high-capacity devices with low noise and low power usage.
Although the technology is focused on optical modulators, manufacturers of integrated optical devices are also showing interest in the technology. Some believe the optochips will improve the performance of routing switches, sensors, directional couplers, and other optical-networking equipment.
Long-distance and high-speed communications are among the applications for the technology
A subsidiary of IBM has developed a new software product allowing people speaking different languages to communicate across the Web.
The new system, called Lotus Translation Services for Sametime (LTSS), translates Web chat and communications as typed in real time, and will go on sale in September, Lotus Ireland said.
The software employs Java technologies, and the global target market includes businesses, government agencies, service providers, or any organisation with a dispersed workforce or a need to work with remote colleagues or partners. The LTSS engine uses the simultaneous translation tool Gist-In-Time™ from Montreal-based Alis Technologies who have been working with Lotus since 1998.
Microsoft has unveiled its new business strategy changing the plan's name from Next Generation Windows Services to Microsoft.Net. The company envisions a Microsoft-centric Internet and a full integration of PCs, cell phones, set-top TV boxes, handhelds and digital picture frames and cameras. The plan is big on handwriting- and speech-recognition tools, and uses open standards such as the data-exchange programming language XML. Software such as Office will be subscription-based online services someday, and MS will change the names of all its products: Office.Net, MSN.Net and, yes, Windows.Net.
Microsoft is also working to make Web hosting a single click from within its development environment.
The new component, will allow reception of an enormous variety of mobile services through cellular telephones, palm pilots (PDA), and other communications devices. Among other things, the new platform will accommodate high-speed Internet, conference calls from mobile devices, two-way video transmission, online use of e-wallets, remote control monitoring of homes and businesses, remote control medical treatment, and so forth.
The Motorola component includes 100 million transistors. It can perform 3,000 calculations per second, compared with 80 calculations per second currently performed by existing devices. At this stage, Motorola has no plans to offer the platform for sales as a shelf product, but intends to adapt it individually to the requirements of each customer. The platform will be available to customers at the beginning of 2001.
The new architecture in effect constitutes a complete-system-on-one-chip, including three powerful innovative processors. The platform will facilitate production of a device no larger in size and weight than a regular cellular phone that combine a much longer speaking and waiting time with the computing power of an advanced home PC.
The PalmPilot can now take pictures. Kodak is selling its PalmPix gadget in Canada for $269. It allows the entire Palm III line as well as the Palm VII (which isn't available in Canada yet) to take digital photographs which can be transferred to your computer through Palm's 'hot sync' cable. A special adapter is needed to use the Palm V series.
Operating the tiny digital camera is easy and needs no instruction. It simply attaches to the bottom of the Palm unit.
This is an ideal unit for people such as real estate agents. They could take a picture of a house, or some feature inside, and pop it straight on the Internet. It would even reproduce and print well, as long it wasn't taken above passport size.
International Business Machines Corp. has revealed a new technology on that effectively doubles the amount of memory in a computer.
The memory-doubling is achieved by a chip that acts as an intermediary between the processor, which is the brain of a computer, and the memory. The chip encodes data so that it takes up half the space, IBM said.
To compensate for the time it takes to encode and decode the data, the chip will store the data used most frequently by the processor in a special "cache," speeding up access.
IBM's Memory eXpansion Technology (MXT) is 10,000 times faster than software-based schemes. Consequently, the technology could save a typical Internet service provider millions of dollars in memory.
Already a vehicle for high-end content and asset management on the Web, XML, the industrial-strength markup language is poised to break into shrink-wrapped applications.
Over the past few years, the markup language derived from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) has gained a lot of ground in high-end information-management applications. Lately, XML has also become an industry buzzword, a must-have feature for anybody working in modern content-processing applications.
While XML has been the backbone for high-end applications for some time, the market for shrink-wrapped XML products is also starting to take off.
Quark Inc. just shipped avenue.quark, its XML import/export extension for QuarkXPress. Meanwhile, Adobe Systems Inc. has released FrameMaker 6.0, which exports (but doesn't import) XML and has announced XML support for the next version of Golive.
As for Microsoft Corp., the company's recently announced .Net strategy for Internet-based services is also based on XML.
Microsoft Corp. has rolled out a new programming language called C# (pronounced C-sharp).
Microsoft officials said the new language will have "all of the features that Java has" -- and more.
Layman said that C# will include "some facilities making it easier to program XML." XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the crux of the Microsoft .Net platform; Microsoft is enabling the next versions of all of its tools, operating systems and applications with XML.
The new language may allow Microsoft to get out of the Java jam that they've been in for some time. Microsoft is still embroiled in a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems Inc. over Java.
Although not due until at least late next year, a replacement for Athlon will run at 2GHz and above, offering 64-bit memory addressing. The new chip will be based on technology from AMD's 64-bit server chip, code-named Sledgehammer.
What makes 64-bit memory addressing more desirable than the current 32-bit memory addressing is the ability for processors, applications and operating systems to utilize a larger amount of physical memory, in theory up to terabyte levels (although not every application, operating system or processor chip set will support a terabyte of memory).
The benefits of having 64-bit memory addressing on the desktop would come on high-end applications. Graphics applications, such as Adobe PhotoShop, would see performance improvements from 64-bit memory addressing
IBM has developed a monster computer the size of two basketball courts that draws enough electricity to power a small town.
Over the next two months IBM's ASCI White will be assembled at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the U.S.'s leading nuclear research labs.
When it is up and running, ASCI White will be the most powerful computer on the planet. It will be used to simulate nuclear test blasts at an unprecedented level of detail and speed. One of the simulations will run for 30 days. A Cray supercomputer built in 1995 would take 60,000 years to perform the same calculations.
ASCI White can perform a mind-boggling 12.3 trillion operations a second, or 12.3 teraflops. It is three times faster than the previous fastest machine, another IBM giant known as ASCI Blue, which runs at 3.8 teraflops.
ASCI White is so powerful, it makes Deep Blue, its famous chess-playing cousin, look like a cheap pocket calculator. It is not one computer, but a massively parallel machine made from 512 of IBM's RS 6000 servers. Each server has 16 processors -- supercharged versions of the PowerPC chips used in Apple's Macs -- which also operate in parallel. Total processors: 8,192.
The new chip is expected to fill the void between the 1GHz Pentium III and the first Pentium 4 processor.
Intel is touting the launch of the new chip as evidence of its "technology leadership" versus its competition.
Intel has also announced that it will name its next-generation desktop processor, know by the code-name Willamette, Pentium 4. The first 1.4GHz Pentium 4 chip is expected in the fourth quarter.
Three mathematicians at Brown University were awarded a patent for a system that encodes every second of music downloaded from a Web site with a different encryption key, breaking a typical song up into more than 200 different codes. The system, which utilizes “public key” encryption, makes it impossible to play a song on any other device except for the one owned by the authorized user. The system works for virtually all data transmissions between computers, cell phones, digital music players, or any consumer electronic device that has Web access.
Once a consumer orders music online, the user’s computer or music player gives the Web site’s server the encoding key, which is used to encode the data and then thrown away, and the music is sent back to the user’s computer, which already knows the key.
Your next trip to the pay phone may be cheaper and longer than you expect. You'll wait in line at the terminal while people make phone calls, play video games, check email, access the Internet, and videotape themselves so their photographs can accompany email messages. Calls, even long-distances ones, will be free, because advertisers will sponsor the booths.
As prices drop and cellular phones become ubiquitous, companies that own traditional pay phones are scrambling for ways to compete against a rapidly growing mobile industry.
An estimated 1.6 million pay phones remain nationwide, compared with about 80 million cell phones, according to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
U.S. telecommunications giants AT&T and the Bell companies are abandoning their traditional phone-booth model. They're developing kiosks and terminals with touch screens that access the Internet and allow users to send and receive email, including photographs of themselves in the phone terminal.
IBM and Compaq Computer have formed a pact to integrate their data storage systems, creating greater ease of use for customers. The plan, which will cost $1 billion over three years, will allow the companies to resell each other’s storage hardware and software to joint customers, making it “a heck of a lot easier” for customers to create storage systems with components from both companies.
Digital Payloads has unveiled a new technology that allows content owners to embed audio advertisements within MP3 files. The innovation could aid in the development of a pay structure that will compensate artists, publishers, and labels by creating music files that can be distributed for free while generating revenue
"It's a free promotion in the same way the labels hand out free promotions to MTV and radio stations to promote acts or whatever other monetization models they want to use," said John Brewer, president and co-founder of Digital Payloads. "In that sense, that gives Napster and Scour a licensed track to trade, and the labels get the branding, and we can put links within the file so that people are encouraged to buy the CD."
Since there is no way to track the MP3 once it's downloaded from a site, advertisers would pay a one-time sponsorship fee to place a five-second commercial in the music file. That money would then be distributed between the songwriter, musicians, and label.
Compaq Computer Corp. is teaming with Pacific Bell and Southwestern Bell to offer its computers as part of a high-speed Internet package. Customers who sign a two-year contract for a digital subscriber line, or DSL, can receive a customized Compaq Presario desktop computer in a package that costs $59.95 per month.
The latest version of Internet Explorer, released by Microsoft, has enhancements that only a developer could love -- and by extension, users, too.
For most end users, the new enhancements of IE 5.5 will mean an easier-to-use Web browser with the flexibility to configure it to their liking. The new browser promises to make printing more reliable and faster, but more importantly will make page-loading faster, as well.
But developers are Microsoft's real target with its new browser. IE 5.5 incorporates enhanced multimedia support and improved editing services to help developers make faster and richer Web-based applications and services.
IBM has a prototype LCD that may be the future for flat-panel displays. The prototype is based on IBM's Roentgen technology offering a new class of resolution categorized as quad SXGA (super extended graphics array).
Analysts say that the new resolution will result in paper-like readability. "There will be no more running to printers, the new resolution will allow users to read displays faster and retain information better,"
The prototype offers 200 pixels per inch over a 2,560 by 2,048 grid for a total of 5.2 million color pixels. According to IBM officials, the panel can display two full-sized 8.5-inch by 11-inch documents side by side.
AOL has agreed to implement RealNetworks software for streaming audio and video over the Internet across its network, in an “unprecedented deployment” that will bring streaming media to the mainstream. AOL’s Netscape unit will integrate RealNetworks’ RealPlayer with its Web browser software. Meanwhile, RealNetworks has agreed to equip RealPlayer with software that facilitates subscribing to AOL.
The Internet2 Abilene backbone is serving as a testing ground for IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol that will eventually replace the existing IPv4. Abilene, which connects over 100 universities and runs at 2.4 Gbps, is a joint effort of the University Corp. for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and Qwest. Researchers are now using Abilene to test the capabilities and shortcomings of IPv6, which experts say will provide more IP addresses, increased security, and improved quality of service compared to IPv4.
Yipes is now in nine major cities, offering high-speed and low-delay Internet, MAN (metropolitan-area network), and WAN (wide-area network) access services. Yipes uses IP over Ethernet over DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing).
The company offers twice the bandwidth at 80 percent of the price of old telephony-oriented services based on ATM over SONet (Synchronous Optical Network).
Yipes decries the expensive lumpiness and provisioning delays of T1 (1.5Mbps), DS3 (45Mbps), OC-3 (155Mbps), or OC-12 (622Mbps) services. These require expensive, speed-specific CSU/DSUs (channel service units/data service units) connecting to ATM switches interconnected regionally and nationally using SONET.
Instead, Yipes runs fiber directly into one of its IP routers in your building -- up to 70 kilometers without repeaters. You get Ethernet-to-Ethernet or Ethernet-to-Internet service from 1Mbps and up to GigE (1Gbps Ethernet)
Yipes offers 1Mbps and 10Mbps bandwidth increments on demand. If you need an extra few Mbps every Thursday for your company's video Webcast, call Yipes and schedule it. If you see you need a few more Mbps later that same day, call and get it dialed in to your local Yipes megapop. Ethernet ports are already 25 percent the price of ATM ports and falling.
Over 86 percent of computers with Web browsers have Internet Explorer installed, according to the latest figures from research firm WebSideStory Inc Netscape's once-dominant browser has slipped to an all-time low of just under 14 percent as of June.
A remarkable jump of 20 percent in the last two months has cemented IE's position as market leader, and relegated the firm that popularized the Web browser and the Internet to a potential footnote in computing history.
Called Intel Solution Centers, they are aimed at providing hardware, software, lab-testing equipment and engineering services that Web integrators will use to set up one-stop offerings to enable e-business.
The announcement, is the latest in Intel's moves to boost demand for its semiconductors beyond the PC industry and is also the latest example of the chip giant moving to develop sales in areas outside its historical market for microprocessors.
With its nearly $30 billion deal to buy Seagram Co. Ltd., French media and utility group Vivendi is hoping to make a hit with music for the wireless world.
Vivendi's deal to buy Seagram highlights what many experts believe will be the next big thing -- wireless distribution of digital music.
In the latest merger to marry a technology company with a content provider, Vivendi hopes to distribute Seagram's holdings in films and music over its vast mobile telephone network in France, its new pan-European Internet portal, called Vizzavi, and its wireless Internet services in Europe.
With the music industry already in flux due to the Internet, many industry members see the future of digital music delivery in wireless technology that will enable fans to hear their favorite songs via the Internet on portable devices.
Several experts said the Vivendi/Seagram deal will crank up the momentum in this rapidly evolving arena. Some see the Vivendi-Seagram deal as an endorsement of music in the Internet era.
The service, to be launched in November, will allow passengers to use their own portable computers to connect to an on-board server, instead of having to use the choppy and expensive air lines currently in use. As a result, e-mailing in the air will become less expensive and more reliable.
During Air Canada's trial period, the Montreal-based airline will offer the service for free to about 5,000 frequent fliers. Eventually, customers would pay a subscription fee that would allow them unlimited airplane access.
Passengers will also be able to access what the airline is calling the "best of the Web." A limited number of Web pages will be stored on the server and updated regularly throughout the flight.
In-Flight Network said it would join with Qualcomm and satellite provider Globalstar to offer Net access and email on commercial flights.
In-Flight, a joint venture of media giant News Corp. and Rockwell Collins -- which makes aviation electronics -- said it would be able to provide low-cost, high-speed services by early next year.
In April, Boeing said it would offer access to the Internet and television over a high-speed satellite network on its planes. Partners in the Boeing "Connexion" service are CNN, CNBC, Mitsubishi, and Loral Skynet
Oracle, the giant U.S. software company known for its database products, has partnered with Waterloo, Ont. based Research In Motion Ltd. to bring the Internet to two-way pagers. Through the partnership, users of RIM's popular Blackberry pagers will be able to pluck snippets of data off the Internet by sending an e-mail request to Oracle's new wireless portal service, operated by OracleMobile, a new subsidiary of Oracle.
If you thought the likes of America Online and Yahoo! had the Internet portal industry pretty much sewn up, then Europe's mobile phone companies would urge you to think again.
Armed with deep pockets and a direct line to millions of customers, operators such as Britain's Vodafone AirTouch and Sonera of Finland are building portals in the belief that the battle for the gateways to the Internet has barely begun.
With wireless devices expected by 2003 to overtake computers as the most popular way of accessing the Internet, the mobile operators are convinced they can beat Yahoo! at its own game.
The networks will profit from call charges regardless of which portal their customers use, but owning the web sites that guide people to other services would add to their bounty significantly.
The money lies not so much in the traditional portal cash cow of advertising -- the industry is still thinking about how to make that work on a handset's small screen -- but through controlling e-commerce in a way that lets the operators share the revenue.
The idea that most excites the industry is that of people charging online shopping to their phone bill instead of a credit card. In return for providing a link to the retailer on its portal and collecting money from its customers, the operator would skim off a commission charge.
When it comes to doing business using wireless devices, the United States is ahead in most categories.
We are seeing the beginning of an explosion in mobile commerce (m-commerce), as multiple players move swiftly to develop and roll out services to provide wireless access to the Internet.
By 2005, worldwide transactions using mobile wireless devices are expected to generate more than $100 billion in revenues. And m-commerce is not merely a stripped-down version of e-commerce. Wireless offers unique capabilities, including information about the user's location, highly personalized interaction and constant connections to the Internet.
Many pundits expect the hotbed of m-commerce to be in Europe because of the region's already high wireless usage, uniform network standard and early experience with text messaging. But it's not that simple.
M-commerce will take several forms, and a substantial portion of the activity will take off first in the United States, where e-commerce is already a powerful force.
M-commerce is emerging in three areas -- finding and buying goods and services over a wireless network, using a wireless device as a digital wallet, and sending targeted ads and promotions to a wireless device. The United States is ahead in two of three of these emerging areas.
Virginia Airlines is developing a system allowing passengers to send and receive e-mails. The phone system, developed by British Telecommunications, allows passengers to charge air-to-ground calls to their accounts and to receive mobile calls on the plane’s handsets. After boarding, the passenger swipes a Mobile Connect card through the aircraft handset and dials a registration number. Callers pay only for the ground call.
The first satellite for broadcasting coast-to-coast digital radio is now in space. Sirius Satellite Radio, which launched the orb, wants to revitalize an industry that has remained mostly unchanged for decades by getting people to pay for radio.
The satellite is one of three that Sirius will use to broadcast its 100 CD-quality music, news, sports, and talk radio channels for a monthly charge of $9.95. In addition to the satellites, Sirius will also deploy 100 terrestrial repeaters to provide coverage in areas where structures could interfere with the broadcasts.
Sirius and competitor XM Satellite Radio believe that, like cable TV, customers will pay for niche channels that match their interests and include little or no advertising.
The companies are readying reggae, jazz, classical, and world music channels that will challenge the AM and FM radio stations analysts say aren't serving the 200 million car owners desperate for something else to listen to.
Analysts believe that although there will eventually be portable and home digital receivers, XM and Sirius were smart for going after the auto market first.
The service allows people to use the same phone number in more than 100 countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
The landmark service allows roaming between the GSM networks used in most of the world and the TDMA system favored in the United States.
Consumers in North America will soon be able to tell from packaging labels if their cellphones or digital phones meet government radiation-level standards, under new guidelines adopted in the United States.
The new measure goes into effect Aug. 1, and will apply to all new handset models submitted by phone manufacturers for certification which currently represents more than 130 carriers and manufacturers of wireless equipment. (The policy doesn’t formally extend to Canada, but observers say the new labelling guidelines will force similar moves here.)
In September, Dell will introduce a new line of Latitude notebooks featuring fully integrated wireless networking and internal antennas. Right now, Dell notebooks can be bought with add-on cards that allow consumers to turn their laptops into wireless Internet terminals. By contrast, these upcoming notebooks will come wireless-ready from the factory.
Apple Computer already offers internal antennas on its PowerBooks and iBooks, but Dell will also integrate the other major part, the wireless LAN (local area network) component, inside the box. Apple's LAN card comes separately.
Toronto-Dominion Bank has launched a new wireless service that allows customers to do their banking or manage their stock portfolios from a mobile digital phone.
The bank said the service is now available to customers who have a digital phone with a mobile Internet browser capability on the Bell Mobility network in Ontario and Quebec. The wireless service will expand across the country as TD launches it on additional carriers.
Telus has purchased CAG-TAMS Inc, a Calgary-based provider of software that integrates and manages telecom invoices for large customers, and its affiliate Electronic Billing Solutions, which manages bills on a outsource basis.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that local governments cannot require that AT&T provide rivals with open access to its cable lines, citing federal regulators’ exclusive power over the topic. The ruling comes after AT&T sued Portland, Ore., for requiring that it provide open network access to rival ISPs.
AT&T Canada has signed a three-year, multimillion-dollar deal with WestJet Airlines Ltd. to be the airline's primary supplier of phones, data and Internet services.
Last month, Air Canada announced its plans to have Internet and e-mail access on all of its planes at a cheaper rate to passengers.
Following the lead of its neighbours in Quebec, Ontario has emerged as the latest province to announce a series of regional and so-called “condominium” fibre builds that promise to deliver gigabit links to schools, libraries, and hospitals for a fraction of the cost of carrier-owned connections.
At the provincial level, the Ontario government recently earmarked $57 million to create the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION). In late May, various public and private partners converged in Ottawa to form the Optical Fibre Consortium, creating an optical fibre network for the federal capital. The City of Toronto is expected to announce its plans for a mega-city fibre build this fall.
The Optical Fibre Consortium in Ottawa, of which CANARIE is a member, will link 25 partner sites. Each participant will own and control individual strands of fibre. The network will serve clients like Cisco and the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) in the western suburb of Kanata, to Telesat Canada and the National Research Council (NRC) in the eastern city of Gloucester.
Although the quality of phone calls over the Internet is imperfect, consumers are increasingly attracted to Internet telephony because of the lure of free or extremely cheap calls. About 15 million Americans now use Internet-based voice communication, up from 5 million a year ago. As the market grows, about two dozen companies have begun offering online voice communication. Internet telephony is relatively simple, requiring an Internet hookup, headphones, and a microphone.
After signing up with an Internet telephony provider, users can make local or long-distance calls to people with any type of phone. However, since voice transmissions are carried over the Internet in small packets in the same manner as data transmissions, conversations are often subject to delays. Without a high-speed Internet connection, the quality of an Internet call can be very poor.
However, companies are working to improve the quality of Internet telephony. Within five years Internet telephony will represent at least 15 percent of long-distance traffic in the U.S., compared with about 1 percent currently.
Blockbuster will try to establish itself as the leading name in video-on-demand services, the company announced. Later this year it will provide movies, games, and related services through high-speed broadband connections. Customers will pay slightly more than normal rental fees to watch their selections on their televisions or even their PCs.
As part of its initiative, Blockbuster has formed a partnership with energy trader Enron, which will store and transmit the movies over its fiber-optic network. Blockbuster CEO John Antioco claims that the company's customer base of 65 million could give it as high as a 50 percent share of the video-on-demand market, which he believes could soon be worth $3 billion a year.
Blockbuster will face heavy competition from the cable industry, which hopes that the convenience and speed of video-on-demand technology will finally push pay-per-view past video rental in the preference of customers. The pay-per-view industry currently generates $1 billion per year -- a small amount compared to the video-rental industry's $10 billion-a-year business.
Companies with next generation switches are claiming they can match the functionality of traditional Class 4/5 telephony switches at a fraction of the cost.
These switches, touted by a host of start-up companies, have the ability to move voice over a packet network (ultimately IP, of course) while coexisting with the PSTN. While the first round of companies supported Class 4 features, a half-dozen or so now are offering what might be called a Class 5 softswitch. It won't happen tomorrow, but by mid-next year, expect next generation carriers to start deploying this technology in their networks.
Microsoft is adding free Internet long-distance telephone service to its instant messaging software in an effort to catch up to AOL, which currently dominates the messaging game. Billing the development as a world first, they say that MSN Messenger 3.0, the latest version of the instant messaging software it introduced a year ago, will allow consumers whose personal computers are equipped with microphones and speakers to make free long-distance calls via the Web anywhere in the United States or Canada.
They will be able to call other people in North America whose PCs also are equipped with the new software, and also use their PCs to place calls to telephones around the globe.
The new software, which can be downloaded free over the Internet, also will let people send text messages to any devices that use Microsoft's mobile wireless Internet software, including pagers and mobile telephones. About 18 million people currently use Microsoft's MSN Messenger, while more than 50 million use the instant messaging service offered by AOL .
German phone giant Deutsche Telekom wants to enter the lucrative U.S. market via the purchase of a major U.S. firm and may try to buy Sprint Corp. if its merger plans fail with MCI WorldCom. Deutsche Telekom wants to find an American enterprise with a substantial Internet transmission and telephone network.
Long-distance telephone powerhouses WorldCom Inc. and Sprint have canceled their $120 billion merger plan following regulatory complaints.
Regulators feared that the merger would cripple competition in the Internet and long-distance telephone markets.
U.S. Federal regulators gave final approval to an $86 billion merger between Qwest Communications and US West after Qwest agreed to divest its long distance services, customers and assets in 14 states. Under the agreement, Qwest, a long-distance telephone and Internet carrier, will lose about 200,000 long-distance customers in the 14 Western states where U S West does business.
AT&T researchers are jumping back into the privacy business, lifting the veil on a they say will allow people to post content online completely anonymously, without fear of censorship.
The Publius Censorship Resistant Publishing System aims to make it possible for anyone to put something online without fear of retribution or censorship. Backers cite the advantages this will have for political dissidents or corporate whistle-blowers, who can find even pseudonymous online postings traced back to them fairly easily.
Publius was the pen name used by the authors of the federalist papers. Publius.net hosts a remailer service.
Rogers Cable says it added more than 50,000 customers to its high-speed Rogers @Home Internet access service in the second quarter ended June 30, more than double the 24,500 customers added in the quarter a year ago.
The cable TV arm of Toronto-based Rogers Communications Inc. now boasts 265,866 customers for its Rogers@Home service, which was launched five years ago in Newmarket.
NetZero, one of the biggest providers of free Internet access in North America, is rumbling into Canada, threatening to scoop up customers from mom-and-pop operators and then drain on-line ad revenue from large players such as Sympatico.ca.
NetZero, which has four million registered users in the United States, will provide free Internet access for Canadians starting in the fall. Subscribers to services such as NetZero provide demographic and geographic data as well as information about their hobbies and interests in exchange for free Internet services. Providers earn money from advertisers and sponsors.
Canadian Internet service providers (ISPs) should be afraid because NetZero’s clout with advertising and e-commerce companies is a threat, said Brahm Eiley, president of Convergence Consulting Group in Toronto. “Over time, as a free ISP builds up enough of a subscriber base, it begins to take advertising and e-commerce revenue away, and that will surely impact the larger ISPs."
Norigen Communications has an agreement with Canada’s third-largest property manager to install its One Source technology that allows small and medium-sized businesses to access a host of services while receiving one bill.
The agreement with O&Y Enterprise, a division of O&Y Properties Inc., will mean the company will have access to more than half of Canada’s major metropolitan office buildings. Norigen is a Toronto-based telecom company that offers 18 services, including Web hosting, cellular, local and long-distance phone services, and an integrated services digital network.
Software subscriptions that provide access to a large number of titles for a flat monthly rate are gaining popularity among consumers, and experts say the trend could transform the software industry and fuel the growth of high-speed Internet services.
Walt Disney's Disney Interactive has announced a subscription service for Disney software, and Comcast already offers its $9.95-a-month PlayNow service, which provides access to more than 100 programs. Consumers appear to be enthusiastic about the subscription services, since paying a flat rate can be cheaper than buying new games for about $40 each.
The merger of liquor and entertainment giant Seagram Co. and France's Vivendi will propel both companies headlong into the Internet world of the future, where wireless phone links to the Web will drive hundreds of billions of dollars in new services and revenues. For Seagram, the move means expanding its movie and music content through Europe, and using Vivendi's mobile phone Internet portal to eventually expand into the world's key market in the United States.
While major record labels and Napster are dueling in the courts, recording companies are deciding to be proactive by doing some online music marketing themselves. Recording companies object to Napster because they say that the music-sharing site contributes to widespread piracy. But now BMG, EMI, Warner, Universal, and Sony are entering the game: this summer they are expected to begin offering authorized downloads of popular music via promotional programs.
The five major labels may also introduce Napster-like online music services, only users will have to pay to download complete albums or single tracks. Record companies are also exploring music subscription services and other royalty-accruing ventures to increase the industry's already sizable revenue. The industry is also devising various digital schemes to decrease piracy, from encoding CDs so they cannot be transferred to MP3 files and supplying graphics exclusive to authorized downloads. The debate continues over whether such ventures will hurt or help record sales.
The company, Sightsound.com, has several films available from its Web site that can be viewed using Microsoft's Windows Media Player and its digital-rights management technology, which is intended to prevent piracy. The files are generally larger than 100 megabytes, which can take a long time to transfer, but the company is focusing on users of new high-speed cable and digital subscriber line network connections.
The new distribution plan, analysts said, is an effort to leverage the file-sharing qualities of the Gnutella system to increase the marketing reach of commercial products.
Until now, Internet file-sharing software like that developed by Napster, iMesh, Scour and others has created a bitter dispute over the threat that the Internet might pose to the music and video industries as they move into the digital world.
Some analysts argue, however, that while the Internet might force content distributors to jettison their traditional business models, the current controversy over music piracy does not present an ultimate threat to intellectual property in the digital era. This is because these kinds of distribution schemes will become increasingly common as the music and movie industries realize the kind of threat they are under.
Gnutella was originally developed by programmers at Nullsoft, a subsidiary of America Online, but the company forced the programmers to stop developing the software soon after it was made available to the public because of its potential use in pirating content.
Since that time, other independent software developers have continued to refine the software. Gnutella differs from the Napster music distribution system in that there is no central index. Rather, indexes are created in a composite fashion based on each Gnutella client program querying other Gnutella users.
The various files that are shared are stored locally on individual users' machines.
Despite pending charges of copyright infringement, Internet measurement firm NetValue reports that Napster has experienced a 480 percent increase in unique visitors since February.
Visitors to the site 15 to 24 years old represent 35 percent of the total audience, the largest segment.
Forty percent of Napster's visitors are students, even though Napster was banned at many colleges and universities throughout the country this year.
Even if Napster is stopped in its tracks, Gnutella has made that legal battle irrelevant.
Gnutella -- while harder to use than Napster -- distributes the information regarding what songs are on whose computers within the entire network. Originally developed by an America Online subsidiary -- and later cancelled -- Gnutella is now being developed by various groups of hackers. The fact that Napster keeps its directory of songs on a single server is what has opened up the company to a lawsuit.
Instead of suing a single company such as Napster to stop the copying of music, the music industry would have to sue every user of Gnutella to end its use.
"The great thing about MP3 and Napster is that they poke holes in the music industry's plans to triple wrap all popular culture in copyright law, electronic locks, and contract law, with click-wrap licenses," said one of the hackers working on Gnutella.
Called the "Digital Locker," Sony's service will provide users with access to not only their music content, but other multimedia files as well.
The service will link Sony customers to online repositories that can include music, movies, videos, photographs, and video games from a variety of devices. "By separating the media from the medium, Digital Locker aims to be your ubiquitous, networked Personal Digital Living Room," Sony states.
As part of its overall music play, Sony also announced its SonyStyle e-commerce site where consumers can purchase audio, video and PC products from its electronics division.
Disney fears that the proposed $183-billion merger between AOL and Time Warner will create a tremendous gap in the balance of media power. "We weren't sure we could even think of all the technically sophisticated discriminatory things they could do," said a Disney lobbyist.
Disney, along with several consumer groups, have raised concerns about AOL-Time Warner's potential market dominance. The new company, besides its established Internet and entertainment services, would also have subsidiaries in the fields of satellite television and high-speed Internet connections. Disney wants federal regulators to split the company's content and distribution services, in effect creating two companies.
Nearly 400,000 copies have been sold worldwide by Amazon, making it the biggest selling book in e-tailing history.
In the meantime, Chapters Online and Canada Post joined forces on July 8th to provide Saturday shipping for the new Harry Potter book. Canada Post was expected to deliver up to 10,000 pre-ordered copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the first official day of publication, which happened to be on a Saturday. Chapters Online had guaranteed that any order for the book placed prior to July 5th would qualify for Saturday delivery at no extra charge.
Literary agents traditionally hold auctions to sell book rights but , Sobel Weber Associates will hold the first auction for an e-book written by a well-known author.
"We are exploring new ground here and we are going to try to be as careful as we can in who we chose," Sobel Weber's said.
Among considerations will be who can provide the best security to protect the digital book, who will be able to reach the widest audience, and how soon the e-book can be launched.
The Ellroy auction is just the newest announcement in an industry that has been racing to bring e-books to the public since last spring, when Stephen King's e-book Riding the Bullet sold over 500,000 copies.
In other news, the July issue of Esquire magazine offers another first: a special summer e-book reading list available only online. Barnes & Noble is the first superstore to feature an e-book bestseller list on its website.
Major Australian media organizations are preparing to begin phasing out newsprint and deliver daily newspapers and magazines over mobile phone networks.
Organizations such as News Ltd. have been in trials of a variety of electronic reader devices including Softbook and senior News Ltd. Sources say the company plans to begin phasing out newsprint as early as next year.
The move could see mobile phone company One.Tel replace newsagents as the major distributor of text based news and magazines within five years in both Australia and Europe.
News has been working with prototypes of electronic readers, including the California-developed Softbook, that are flexible, lightweight and capable of storing more than 10,000 pages of text and graphics. They also have audio capabilities so users can have the news read to them.
The e-book world has recently seen everything from Stephen King self-publishing a serial to Mary Higgins Clark's entire backlist going electronic.
Now, Seth Godin, author of the best-selling Permission Marketing, is offering his new book online for free. This is the first book to be distributed in its entirety by a best-selling author online for free.
Unleashing the Idea Virus is available from Godin's website (PDF file). It will be given away on Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, AOL and Peanut Press.
The e-book, which will be featured as the cover story in the August issue of Fast Company, will also be available in a hardcover edition, available in September. Then it will be available for sale only at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.
But what about the reward? Godin expects that many people who read at least a portion of the book for free online will then purchase the hardcover. "That is one of the ideas in the book so I'm putting my money where my mouth is and testing it out," Godin said.
The concept that a writer will get paid for writing may soon be a thing of the past, Godin said. He predicts that corporations will begin sponsoring writers and financing both fiction and nonfiction in order to have content to offer.
Meanwhile, Bookface.com and St. Martin's Press are now allowing online users to read content directly on the Internet at www.Bookface.com.
Among the books available for unlimited free browsing are The Hades Factor, by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds; The Year's Best Science Fiction: 17th Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois; Four to Score, by Janet Evanovich; and JonBenet: Inside the Murder Investigation, by Steve Thomas with Don Davis.
A $10,000 award to the firm or the individual showing best understanding of how to utilize and market new publishing technology will be given jointly in October by the Small Publisher's Association of North America (SPAN) and iUniverse.com.
Criteria include creativity, quality of content, design, sales volume, effectiveness of marketing and use of technologies such as print-on-demand or digital applications
The grand prize of $100,000 will go to the best book originally published in electronic form. Other $10,000 prizes will be given to best fiction and nonfiction works originally published as e-books and the best fiction and nonfiction print books converted to e-book form.
An e-book venture from the horror author is the highest-profile end run around traditional publishing yet. Stephen King has let the monster out of the closet.
Four months after the author and his publisher garnered as many as 400,000 downloads for the short story Riding the Bullet, King has decided to release an e-book on his own. The work, a 15,000-20,000-word novel called The Plant, will go up on the author's private site in three installments. The catch? He will only post the third part if at least 75 percent of downloaders send a nominal fee of $1 per installment to the author.
As the most commercially successful author of this generation, King is also, by definition, the best-known author ever to bypass traditional publishing.
724 Solutions has secured an agreement with CheckFree, to provide mobile electronic billing and payments for their customers. Banks that use CheckFree and 724 Solutions software will be able to offer their customers the ability to receive and pay bills on Internet-enabled devices, including mobile phones and personal digital assistants.
724 Solutions has set up an interactive wireless software for North Carolina’s Wachovia Corporation. Under its agreement with Wachovia, 724 Solutions will be creating software for Wachovia’s retail and commercial banking customers offering real-time account information, transferring funds, paying bills and tracking performance of stocks on internet devices such as mobile phones, pages, and personal digital assistants.
Intel has unveiled its first so-called Web appliance, which gives consumers a built-in phone, Internet access and e-mail, in the company's latest move beyond its core business of microprocessors for personal computers.
The Web appliance would be offered by Internet service providers, most likely as part of an overall service package similar to those for cable TV set-top boxes or cell phones.
Besides Internet access and e-mail, the Intel Dot.Station would provide features such as a built-in calendar, address books and note-posting capabilities.
The Dot.Station, which consists of a single free-standing unit with a monitor and a separate keyboard, has a high-resolution screen that can show the full width of a Web page and includes a built-in phone.
It's fundamentally a family communications product that unites Web-browsing, e-mail, some nice home organizational applications, even an integrated telephone. It's targeted to those households that don't yet have a PC but are nonetheless interested in getting online. Installation consists of plugging in the power, plugging in the phone line, plugging in the keyboard and turning it on.
While the devices are most likely to be provided as part of an overall service package, the cost would be comparable to low-priced PCs in the $500-$700 range.
The appliance comes with software that allows service providers to remotely manage and upgrade the devices. Service providers would be able to customize the content and services of the devices to match their brands.
Canadians will soon be able to pay many of their bills through the Internet, two recent studies by major research companies indicate.
The surveys show that there is a growing number of companies interested in being able to bill their consumers on-line, reducing billing costs by as much as 75 per cent.
A study by Gallup, found that 82 per cent of the 486 Canadian companies interviewed had a knowledge of e-billing. Of these companies, 27 per cent are currently preparing to offer Internet billing in the next year.
More than 60 of the surveyed companies offer e-billing. 87 per cent of Canada's top billing corporations report that they are actively discussing using this new method.
Internet advertising is poised to more than double this year to $140-million from $66-million, with nearly two-thirds of companies saying they will buy on-line ads in the next 12 months, according to a recent survey of 300 companies.
The largest deterrent to advertising on-line is difficulty measuring results, but companies are turning to performance-based measures such as click through rates and number of sales leads or transactions generated.
United Parcel Service soon will roll out new capabilities to let customers access shipping information through wireless devices. Beginning in September, U.S. customers using wireless phones, PDAs and two-way pagers will be able to track their UPS packages, find drop-off locations, look up shipping rates and find out how long a shipment will take. The information available via the wireless devices will be a subset of the data and services already available to UPS customers over the Internet.
Lehman Brothers convertible bond analyst Ravi Suria wrote a scathing research report, saying Amazon.com is "displaying the operational and cash flow characteristics of a normal retailer, despite its 'virtual' pedigree.
The terrifying combination of sluggish sales, serious debt concerns and, so far, nine-figure losses in each quarter make Amazon.com seem as vulnerable as some of the second- and third-tier 'Net stocks that have crumbled in the past six months.
"From a bond perspective, we find the credit extremely weak and deteriorating," Suria wrote. "The company's inability to make hard cash per unit sold, is clearly manifested in the weak balance sheet, poor working capital management and massive negative operating cash flow - the financial characteristics that have driven innumerable retailers to disaster throughout history."
"Adding to the operational weakness is the mounting pile of debt, as Amazon has essentially funded its revenues through a variety of sources over the past year," Suria said. "From 1997 through the last quarter, the company has received $2.8 billion in funding, while its revenues have been $2.9 billion - a whopping $0.95 for every dollar of merchandise sold."
Eastman Kodak Co. has launched a new online service to print digital photos stored and shared over the Internet.
PrintatKodak, the company's new Internet photofinishing service, will provide prints for a variety of customers including photo-sharing sites and software manufacturers, such as ememories.com, MyFamily.com, and PhotoAccess.com.
Kodak its agreements give it a stronghold in the U.S. market for online photofinishing, an industry expected to reach $1.4 billion in annual sales by 2003.
They will offer electronic banking in two states, continuing CIBC foray into the U.S. financial market offering a full range of products through automated teller machines, telephone call centers, the Internet and in-store pavilions under the banner "Safeway Select Bank.'' The program will begin in Sacramento and San Jose, California and Denver, Colorado later this summer.
In an aggressive move to expand its Net efforts, IBM plans to spend an additional $1 billion to boost sales for its family of application servers and software that help companies build their Web businesses. The computing giant, which has already invested more than $1 billion in this area over the last two years, said it will spend another $1 billion in 2000 with plans to increase that investment by double digits next year.
Big Blue intends to hire more than 1,000 sales professionals and engineers to help push its set of Net products to new clients. IBM said the new version of its WebSphere line of Internet products include a number of new and improved features. The software help businesses personalize and analyze Web content, handle complex transactions and extend back-end business data and applications to the Web, provide data security measures and includes new Web portal tools that make it easier for developers to build and customize vertical portals.
Chapters Online and RadioShack Canada have announced an agreement resulting in the launching of an extensive consumer electronics site located at Chapters.ca. The site offers thousands of consumer electronics products, including calculators, video cameras, and remote control cars. In return, Radioshack.ca now offers new product categories on its Web site, including music, movies, books, and gaming software that will be fulfilled by Chapters Online.
Laurentian Bank of Canada's B2B Trust unit has agreed to offer retail financial services to customers of Bombardier Capital Ltd.
Under the agreement, it and other retail-financing partners of its B2B Trust will offer their services to Bombardier Capital's customers using Web sites linked to B2B Trust's site.
B2B Trust is an Internet wholesaler of generic and complementary financial products and services for independent financial advisers, Internet companies and retailers.
Six major airlines plan to launch a Web site this fall called Hotwire.com, in an effort to compete with Priceline.com in selling heavily discounted tickets for empty seats on scheduled flights.
America West Airlines, American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Northwest Airlines, United Airlines, and US Airways Group are backing the venture, along with private investment firm Texas Pacific Group. Hotwirecom will allow consumers to name their route and then choose from existing discount fares.
In contrast, Priceline users name their own fare and wait to see whether the bid is accepted—a process that some analysts say is inconvenient. Priceline works with 30 airlines and sells about 80,000 tickets a week, but despite its large business volume, the site is not profitable.
Compaq has partnered with WebEx, a digital collaboration company, to include a “Compaq Online Meeting Center” button on its new keyboards. This will launch a Compaq branded version of WebEx to allow users to launch web-enabled meetings with a single click of a keyboard button. Capabilities will include the ability to share data, voice, video and telephony through a standard browser without pre-installed hardware.
Yahoo has acquired closely held eGroups Inc. for about $420.1-million (U.S.) in stock to add group e-mail features to its service. San Francisco-based eGroups is a free service that lets users create and join e-mail groups to share documents, digital photos, music files and calendars. Yahoo! wants to integrate the eGroups service into its Web site properties, such as auctions, clubs and stores, to ease communication between its 145 million members. Yahoo foresees its users being able to discuss purchases and meetings with friends or co-workers.
Canada’s oldest retailer finally caught up to the Internet age and has announced a comprehensive strategy to take the company onto the Web. The move will see the company, which runs both The Bay and Zeller's, create a Web presence to sell a large portion of its retail product line.
The company plans to move online with toys and cosmetics and offer between 7,000 and 10,000 products through its Internet site by the end of October.
Advertising spending on the Internet rose 54 percent from January to June despite talk of a dot-com slow down.
America Online led top Web sites in June at $65 million in revenues, with Yahoo.com following at $46 million.
Online postage may help small business owners lick the annoyance of waiting at the post office to buy stamps, but adoption of the new technology has been slow and the ballyhooed industry has yet to deliver a profit. So far, online postage companies have racked up multimillion dollar losses, failing to convince enough people to pay extra for the ability to create prepaid envelopes using a computer and a printer.
Those who regularly use their PCs as virtual postage meters say the process is not without its own aggravations, and technology analysts say the sector is threatened by a new, albeit also unproven, technology: online bill payment.
Irish post offices and small shops should move into playing a major distribution role for e-tailers to ensure their survival, professional services firm according to Deloitte & Touche.
Deloitte said post offices and small retailers should become pick-up and delivery depots for products ordered on the Internet, a move which could help small post offices and firms in declining rural markets.
The threat of rural bank and post office closures has cast a shadow over much of Ireland amid criticism the e-commerce and telecoms revolution is being confined to large urban areas.
A new Internet company is hoping to turn the massive file-swapping communities developed by technologies like Napster and Gnutella into an e-commerce engine.
The company, called Lightshare, is preparing a service that will allow individual computer users to sell digital goods directly from their computers rather than going through centralized servers from companies like eBay or Amazon.com. It is staffed largely with former Netscape, America Online and Time Warner engineers and is funded by executives from Microsoft, Netscape Communications and Google.
The Mountain View, Calif., company will be Web-based, in the sense that anyone who wants to sell or buy something will go through the Lightshare site to make the transaction. But the products themselves--initially digital files like songs or software-- will actually be traded between consumers.
An enormous question mark looms over Lightshare. Tens of millions of computer users have turned to file-swapping networks for free goods, most often for such things as copyrighted songs they would otherwise have to pay for. No one has yet established that these networks are strong and secure enough--or that individual people actually trust each other enough--that surfers will risk spending actual money.
Wells Fargo is launching an Internet portal designed to serve all the major needs of mid-sized and large businesses from a single online destination.
Called the Commercial Electronic Office, the new service will enable Wells Fargo customers to conduct transactions, access information and receive online service for their credit, cash management, electronic payments, foreign exchange and other investment needs.
E-learning is the latest tool companies are using to cut costs, boost efficiency, and maintain a highly trained workforce. Online learning is increasingly displacing the more expensive and harder-to-update CD-ROMs, and the trend is expected to grow in corporate use from 10 percent of all corporate learning currently to 50 percent in 2003.
Sun Microsystems' assemblers can maximize efficiency by logging on to company computers to take a company-produced online course when assembly lines are slow. The assemblers can also consult screens hanging throughout the plant for alerts, which in paper form were often lost or misfiled. Distance learning programs are also infiltrating such old-line manufacturers as Kodak, Motorola, and Rockwell Collins. In addition to e-learning's around-the-clock availability, it can also be tailored to an individual student's needs. Furthermore, e-learning is one way that new economy and old economy companies alike can address labor shortages in fields where large numbers of workers must be trained thoroughly, efficiently, and on an ongoing basis. However, traditional classroom instruction will still have its place in training workers to perform more detailed manufacturing tasks.
Multi-year agreement makes Learn2.com primary learning provider for consumer products by world's largest PC supplier.
It will be offering e-learning to Compaq's current and prospective consumer customers as part of a plan to provide customers with the information and assistance they need to get the most from their Compaq Presario Internet PCs.
The multi-tiered agreement includes a custom library of multimedia content, deliverable over the Internet that will be distributed on co-branded Learn2.com Smart Cards. Consumers can purchase Compaq Presario On-line University Library courses when they order Presario computers over the phone, on Compaq's consumer Web site and in retail stores. Compaq Presario On-line University Library includes popular titles from the Learn2.com Microsoft Office, Programming and Web Development, Soft Skills and End-user desktop libraries. In addition, Compaq plans to employ Learn2.com custom content and patented StreamMaker(TM) and LearningAgent(TM) technology for Web tours and tutorials on the Compaq Web site.
College across the U.S. are considering high-quality online video networks for dormitories, meaning lectures could be only a mouse click away.
Northwestern University is in the middle of a $2 million network upgrade that will deliver digital video to all of its dorms, allowing students to watch lectures or other instructional videos without ever leaving their homes away from home. Other colleges are following suit. Students will be able to watch lectures in real time or hook up to the video later.
University computing chiefs say the technology is one step toward linking hundreds of institutions through a new type of Internet.
Digital video conveys crisp images into a computer through extremely high-speed connections, eliminating jumpy images and long download times associated with typical Internet video.
Northwestern plans to finish its upgrade within a month, allowing all 6,000 students in its dorms to send and receive digital video.
The video capability was made possible through Northwestern's participation in Internet2, an experimental computer network with speeds 45,000 times faster than the best telephone modems used to surf the Web. The network is limited to the academic world.
Other schools participating in the Internet2 project include the University of Pennsylvania, which expects to have its dorms wired and ready by 2002.
Participating schools also must develop high-quality video classes and tools that universities can share through the network.
"The really hard thing is to take the kind of education that we do in classrooms and turn it into the kind of education that we do for someone sitting in front of a screen,'' said Gregory Jackson, chief information officer at the University of Chicago.
World Bank President James Wolfensohn has electronically launched the Global Development Learning Network (GDLN) in Washington, with the aim to close the knowledge gap in the fight against poverty.
Using interactive video, electronic classrooms, satellite communications and the Internet facilities, the Network allows people everywhere to share their know-how and experience, regardless of time-zones, distance or national boundaries.
"This is another form of globalization, using technology to ensure that everybody has access to knowledge and can share experience with each other", he said
Bulky backpacks, a fixture on college campuses, could go the way of typewriters and slide rules.
Students may no longer need to lug heavy books around if goReader, manufactured by an Internet start-up of the same name, catches on at universities across the United States. About the size of a laptop computer with a color screen, the goReader can hold all of a student's textbooks and weighs less than five pounds. The company works with publishers who supply content that students can download off the Internet.
Students also can take notes directly on the device and highlight passages just as they would with a marker pen in an actual textbook.
MBA students at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley will soon be able to take classes at each other’s universities over the Internet. The three business schools will use chat rooms and videoconferencing to teach classes on the relationship between business and Internet technology.
The University of Michigan proposed the partnership after its MBA students studying abroad had success with similar online programs, and the dean of Michigan’s business school thinks students taking classes online are receiving an education comparable to those in more traditional classrooms. Although some critics charge that online classes damage the interaction between professor and student, perhaps the greatest challenge the partnership will face will be logistical. The three universities must work out differences in grading policies and scheduling and also must determine how to transfer credits among one another.
PC Data reports that companies such as Varsitybooks.com and Bigwords.com saw traffic at their Web sites increase by 140 percent in the second half of last year. These e-tailers have spent as much as $100 million selling themselves as an alternative to traditional college bookstores and claim to offer savings from 10 to 40 percent.
Although e-tailers still represent a small fraction of total textbook sales, college bookstores are taking steps to counter their influence. Many bookstores have begun their own online services, and others are trying to reduce the cost to students, who often have to pay 25 percent to 33 percent above wholesale, by offering more used books.
The Internet has increased library patrons’ hunger for information as well as their reliance on reference librarians—contrary to librarians’ original expectation that the medium would supplant their job duties. Library patrons expect to be able to find all the answers to their questions on the Internet, and knowing that librarians have access to the Internet, they are calling librarians more than ever in their quest for information.
Advances in information-sharing technology could lead to the more efficient transfer of student transcripts among school districts, colleges, and provinces and federal government agencies.
Although information-sharing technology would cut down on paperwork and eliminate errors, school officials say the real benefit would be faster delivery of transcript information. Several public school systems and state departments of education are transferring data with the University of Maryland, and the Rochester School District participated in successful transactions with the university.
Universities involved in the Internet2 project, a test-bed for advanced applications, are experimenting with technologies such as virtual reality and distance medicine that would be impossible on the commercial Internet.
The University of Pennsylvania, is creating an integrated database for digital mammograms allowing doctors to view a patient’s mammogram taken years earlier in a different city. Meanwhile, several Internet2 universities have teamed with the National Tele-Immersion Initiative to develop virtual reality tools that would allow professors wearing 3D goggles to take part in roundtable discussions with colleagues around the world.
“The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War" the Internet-based archive presents more than 5,000 digitally-scanned pages of diaries, photographs, maps, newspaper articles, church and census records, wills, and military rosters — in other words, anything that documents the lives of the citizens of two Shenandoah Valley counties.
Franklin County in Pennsylvania and Augusta County in Virginia are separated by just 200 miles, but fought on different sides of the Civil War. Unlike history texts or documentaries, the online archive has no narrative, but instead is intended for users to investigate and analyze independently. The archive is, however, organized by a searchable database and can be found at valley.vcdh.virginia.edu.
Blackboard and infiNET Solutions, have formed a strategic partnership that will provide colleges and universities a seamless Internet-based solution for all their administrative, teaching and learning needs.
About the products:
-- CampusWebConnect(TM) consolidates multiple information systems used by university business and administrative offices onto a single, secure Internet or Intranet site.
-- Blackboard 5(TM) is an end-to-end solution that enables higher education institutions to provide their students, faculty, staff and alumni with a full slate of online services -- including an extensive campus portal -- in one scalable package that places teaching and learning at its core.
The integration of these two products allows students, faculty, staff and alumni to easily conduct all matters of business within their .edu environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The ultrasound video of Sister Margaret Ritchie's carotid artery raced over an Internet phone line from Fort Lauderdale to Bethesda, Md.
”Looks fine," said a doctor seeing her test results instantaneously on a computer at the headquarters of the National Cancer Institute. With that demonstration, Holy Cross Hospital and the NCI unveiled a first-in-the-nation telemedicine experiment that promises to elevate the level of cancer care in South Florida.
The bank of computers and ultra-sharp video screens lets national cancer experts see CT scans, MRI scans, tissue samples from a microscope and even live examinations of the patient via video. The experts then help local doctors diagnose a patient and plan the treatment. Chemotherapy or radiation? Should surgery be done first or later?
"Normally, you would send all this stuff in the mail, and you would hear back from them two or three weeks later. This way, if you have a question, they can answer it in 30 seconds," said Dr. Leonard Seigel, a Holy Cross oncologist.
Lila Nachtigall, a Manhattan doctor for 30 years, says she has never considered putting her practice online, hardly an encouraging sign for Healtheon/WebMD as it tries to persuade physicians to use its services to file claims, prescribe drugs and keep up with the latest research.
Nachtigall uses a computer in her practice to generate bills, labels and reminders, but sees little reason to sign up with an Internet health-services provider such as Healtheon/WebMD Corp. , the emerging field's leader.
Nachtigall's attitude seems typical of her profession. Atlanta-based Healtheon has had only mixed success in trying to lure doctors onto the Web, despite promises of reimbursements at lightning speed, instant insurance verification and universal access to medical records.
The reasons for the medical profession's collective shrug, experts say, are varied. Doctors seem to be less attuned to the Internet revolution than other professionals, and they are unaccustomed to paying for extras to run their offices more smoothly. Online privacy is also a looming issue for medical practitioners and their patients.
The company is aiming to build a system of services and software to enable doctors, patients, drug companies and insurers to do business over the Internet. It sees itself as the hub of an emerging online community that promises to transform the way the business of medicine is conducted, taming the notorious inefficiencies of the U.S. health-care system.
IDC reports the U.S. market will expand from less than $250 million in 1999 to more than $18 billion in 2004. The online market for prescription drugs will account for more than 80 percent of these revenues, or $14.8 billion. “Powerful drug-industry players, including managed-care organizations and prescription benefit managers, are developing e-commerce strategies,” explained senior research analyst Jim Williams. He expects managed-care organizations and prescription benefit managers to encourage Web transactions as a way of reducing expense, much as they have mail-order fulfillment. Consumer acceptance of payer groups will be driven by simple economics: People will get their medications where they’ll get reimbursed
Eckerd Health Services (EHS) is offering the industry's first voice-enabled prescription refill service. The company, one of the largest 'prescription-by-mail' services in the United States, handled more than 10 million refills. Over 1.3 million of these transactions used advanced speech recognition capabilities.
Nortel Networks' eBusiness solutions have enabled Eckerd Health Services to provide a sophisticated, highly-reliable - better than 99 percent speech recognition accuracy to date - and consumer-friendly application, that helps increase customer loyalty and retention, enhance customer service offerings and reduces operating costs.
Canadians are among the world's most frequent on-line banking customers, and the banks are betting they will like wireless transactions just as much, a survey from pollster Angus Reid Group and Royal Bank suggests. Nearly one in five Canadian Internet users has tried Internet banking, nearly one in three plans to do so soon and nearly everyone who has tried it plans to do it again.
In a new effort against Internet gambling, lawmakers are proposing to choke off the ability of online casinos to collect bets through the most common methods of transferring money: credit cards, checks or electronic funds transfers. The measure opens a second front in what is proving to be a tricky battle against Internet gambling, which has proliferated into a billion-dollar industry.
The proposal is an "innovative" approach to combating Internet gambling but continuous advances in electronic commerce could give the industry new methods to collect money.
The Collections of Information Antipiracy Act, if passed, would essentially give databases copyright protection, thereby encouraging the creation of these valuable information resources.
Database creators spend significant time and money to provide businesses and consumers alike with easy access to vast quantities of data. Current copyright laws do not protect databases because they are not creative works, and courts mostly reject the “sweat-of-the-brow” argument, which maintains that protection should be provided on the basis of a compiler’s efforts and investments. The lack of copyright protection for databases means that any company can simply replicate all of the information a creator has worked to compile.
Getting away from it all may not be as easy as it used to be.
Many campgrounds and outfitters around the U.S. have jumped on the e-bandwagon in pursuit of a postmodern camping experience for campers and hikers. Computers, modem hookups, and cell phone rentals are now part of the outdoor landscape.
Kampgrounds of America (KOA) has already established Internet-accessible kiosks in locations all over the U.S. and Canada. Many independently owned campgrounds are offering modem-friendly sites, and even outdoor adventure planners are sending digital phones that can access the Internet along with campers.
Clinton said says the e-signature law had far-reaching positive ramifications for the economy.
"This new law will give fresh momentum to what is already the longest economic expansion in our history, an expansion driven largely by the phenomenal growth in information technologies, particularly the Internet, with its almost unlimited potential to expand their opportunities and broaden their horizons."
The new bill is officially known as the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, and eliminates legal barriers to using electronic technology to form and sign contracts, collect and store documents and send and receive notices and disclosures. The system ensures that electronic messages are from the person or party that sent the message and that the message was not altered through a technology called public key encryption, which is utilized by all of the dominant e-signature companies.
Developments in DWDM in recent years have given the impression that the cost of providing bandwidth will soon be so low that there’ll be no point in making a big song and dance about using it efficiently.
However, Professor Payne says it’s vitally important to use bandwidth efficiently because we’re going to run out of it surprisingly fast. “Bandwidth is like health care. You can never have enough,” says Payne, one of the inventors of the Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier.
Payne bases his argument on supply and demand calculations that illustrate that growth of Internet traffic will overwhelm telecom infrastructure within the foreseeable future.
On the supply side, he sees the following developments boosting bandwidth:
- the average cable will have 128
fibers rather than 8
- the number of wavelengths per fiber will rise from 1
to 512
- the bandwidth per wavelength will increase from 2.5 to
40 Gbit/s
- mesh will replace ring topologies, doubling effective
capacity
When all of these effects are multiplied together, they add up to a 204,517-fold increase in the overall capacity of the average telecom network.
More than enough for anything? Not so, says Payne, who reckons all of that huge amount of extra capacity will be used up within four years if Internet traffic volumes continue growing at their current rate.
Right now, volumes are doubling every 100 days in English-speaking countries, according to Payne, who says it's every 150 days elsewhere. There's a strong likelihood that the this rate will increase in the future, as broadband access technologies such as DSL (digital subscriber line) and cable modems become more widely deployed.
Electronic trading is forcing changes in how the titans of Wall Street do business in the financial markets.
Buying and selling stocks, bonds or commodities online is no longer a fringe activity for the high-rolling day trader, or the baby boomer rejigging a stock portfolio from a home computer.
But no one knows exactly how electronic trading will reshape financial markets. Major brokerage firms can no longer ignore electronic trading because it cuts down on paperwork and saves them money. It makes pricing more open and competitive as trades blip instantly onto screens worldwide. And it's fast.
"I can do a trade now from beginning to end ... in 10 to 15 seconds," said Jim Keller, portfolio manager at the world's largest bond fund, Pacific Investment Management Co. That's one-eighth the time it would have taken four years ago.
The cost savings are a major factor driving Wall Street and beyond into electronic trading. An e-mail confirmation of trade can wipe out back-office paperwork, mistakes and delays.
For stock trading, a spaghetti network of computers can electronically match huge orders to buy a certain stock at a fixed price with sell orders for less than going through an NYSE market-maker who adds a commission.
For bonds, posting products with prices on the Web site can remove the need for a commission-based sales staff or middleman.
Another major advantage of Internet trading is its ability to shine some light on pricing, promoting competition. Corporate bond trading, for instance, has long been a clubby world where dealers and clients telephone each other to seal the deal, and there is no public quotation system to price shop.
Canada and the rest of the world's leading industrialized countries have agreed to create a special task force, dubbed the dot force, to help bridge the divide separating the haves and have-nots of the digital age.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien told reporters that technology has the potential to rapidly spread democracy, literacy, better health and prosperity to the developing world.