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BREAKING SURF
Rights to ".tv" Domain Sold for $50 Million
A new startup called DotTV has bought the rights to the ".tv" domain from its rightful owner, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. DotTV will pay Tuvalu $50 million over the course of the next decade and will use its new domain to host television-related domain names - for a reasonable profit, of course. In a twist, DotTV isn't just sitting back and waiting for business. It is actively auctioning domain names. Visitors can bid on all sorts of domain names at the site, but keep in mind that bids start at $1,000 per year. The prices are not discouraging bidders - at press time the high bid, on Soap.tv, had reached $9,000 per year. CNet has the story.DotTV: http://www.tv/
Tuvalu: http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/tv.html
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1665681.html
The release of Netscape 6 was the one remotely interesting event at this year's Spring Internet World conference. Last week, we wrote it was "All in all emphatically worth the download". A few readers who played extensively with the program took us to task for that, noting that the program was extremely buggy. In our defense, let us point out that the version is still early beta software - "Preview Release 1" in Netscape parlance. Was it worth the download to find out it was buggy? Depends on whether you like to play with early software and new features ahead of the stability curve. We find it hard to review software in ten lines - pointing and yelling is what we do best, with pride - so we'll leave that task to this Wired article.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,35526,00.html
Lord of the Rings Movie Trailer
A trailer from the highly anticipated movie treatment of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy burned up the Net download lines last week - probably not only because we reviewed Sir Ian "Gandalf" McKellan's site in NSD 6.11. We found the movie's Web site rather busy and too heavy with JavaScript and plug-in action, but it will provide you with the trailer in QuickTime format in the Preview section. Check out the fan site for more information about everything under the sun of Middle Earth. The books themselves are now considered classics, and indeed easily meet the standard of great literature.Movie: http://www.lordoftherings.net/
Fans: http://www.thelordoftherings.org/
Books: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345340426/netsurferdigest/
Online promo company iWon hands out money. How? You register with the site and collect points by clicking on its various links. Each point enters you in a drawing for free money. How can they do this? Advertising. Every click exposes you to an ad and brings in some revenue to the company. As long as the ad revenue exceeds the awarded cash prizes (and expenses), iWon will make money. It's giving away $10,000 per day and isn't bankrupt yet, so it must be working. To generate interest, iWon will award a $10 million prize and three $50,000 prizes to randomly selected registrants (already chosen, by the way) in a splashy TV event to be hosted by Leeza Gibbons on April 15.
http://www.iwon.com/
Unilever/Ben & Jerry's Free Ice Cream Day, April 18
Ben and Jerry, the socially conscious ice cream moguls, have been hogging the news lately. Ice cream magnate Unilever (it also owns Breyer's, Good Humor, and Klondike) just agreed to buy their company for $326 million, a sale that comes on the eve of one of their most visible annual PR/charity events. Over the years, the two have raised socially conscious business practices to an art form. As part of their commitment, every year their company gives away free ice cream cones to encourage donations to charity. Head to any Ben & Jerry's shop after noon, April 18, and you can take advantage of the offer - and maybe donate a buck or two to charity. As befits their different-thinking business policy, Ben and Jerry use Macintosh computers extensively in their operation, which accounts for an informative article about them at Apple. Find out about how Free Ice Cream day got started, check out the iMovie they made, and read the answers to several Ben & Jerry FAQs.Ben & Jerry's: http://www.benandjerrys.com/
Sale: http://cnnfn.com/2000/04/12/deals/benandjerrys/
Article: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2000/04/ben_jerry/
Online Credit Card Transaction Rules Tightening
Recent credit card company crackdowns on card charge-backs (repudiated customer transactions) are causing problems for legitimate e-commerce vendors. The charge-back problem is most acute in the online porn industry, where charge-back frequency can reach 30%. This has led Visa and MasterCard to impose stiff financial penalties on sites whose charge-back percentages exceed the low single-digits, a frequency not unusual even in more traditional online stores. Some are grumbling that the card companies aren't treating all sites equally, giving preferential treatment to large outfits like Amazon and Earthlink. A good article to read if you are planning to get into online e-commerce - and who isn't these days?http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2524002,00.html
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Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond
Blue Angel: A Novel
Windows 2000 Security Little Black BookSURFING SITES
This, Our Spring Internet World Issue
All the items in this issue (save for the Breaking Surf section) caught our eye at last week's huge Spring Internet World show in LA. The remarkable thing about it was how unremarkable it was. We found little innovation - maybe the industry is moving from creative adolescence to the no-nonsense boring maturity of Serious Commerce. We've written about some of these sites before, but half the time we don't remember what we covered last week, so if we noticed them again they're probably worth writing about again. We're presenting a good cross-section of companies, fairly representative of the kind of products found on the show floor. If we had a bias, it was to skip over the many business-to-business companies, the vast majority of which had names beginning with "e" and descriptions which started "We facilitate e-commerce..." and went on for three pages of incoherent marketspeak without once mentioning a substantial product or service. Enjoy.http://events.internet.com/spring2000/
Oddly, one of the best Internet World tips we got came not from the press room but during a chance encounter at a swanky Hollywood party (charity auction for Planet Hope - good cause, good party, and is Leonardo DiCaprio's hat really worth $750?). A casual chat over some decent chicken with a Ms. Bukow revealed her as the CEO of a new startup called MsMoney. Guess what the focus of the site is. It's a great niche - as Ms. Bukow noted, women have quite different financial needs from men. Consider that they earn less and live longer, and consequently need to start saving and investing sooner in life. MsMoney even managed to score an endorsement from Hillary Clinton, who spoke up in favor of a "new girls' network". By and large, the site delivers sound financial advice, the usual message boards, impressive big name affiliations, and a low-key feminine spin. It's a good site for anybody who wants to learn personal finance.
MsMoney: http://www.msmoney.com/
Planet Hope: http://www.planethope.com/
So you want to get into the dot.com business, but all that hard work needed to produce a site sounds like - well, a lot of hard work. In a perfect application of the Ouroboros Net Principle - coined by us just now in reference to the mythic self-eating snake - you can use the Net to go into business on the Net. iSyndicate represents over 800 content providers who are ready to pour material into your Web site. The impressive selection of content providers includes Rolling Stone, Reuters, Business Wire, and CBS Sportsline - we're talking big name media here. All it takes is a bit of money - oh, that's an application of the Ouroboros Financial Principle: it takes money to make money.
iSyndicate: http://www.isyndicate.com/
Ouroboros: http://www.dragon.org/chris/ouroboros.html
eNow had one of the best mottos at the show: "A Million Minds a Minute". The company has built services around the straightforward idea of searching IRC chats. The basic ChatScan applet will let you do keyword searches on existing IRC channels. You get a few lines of cached conversation around the keyword and the option of joining in. The company has expanded this feature into two chat search portals: MarketTalk, based on financial chats; and ChatMatch, for "romance". MarketTalk lists the top ten stocks being discussed at any give time - surely fodder for daytraders. While eNow demonstrated the three at the show, online versions need to be more stable. Nevertheless, an IRC search engine is a great idea, and probably a money maker once all the glitches are worked out.
http://www.enow.com/website/home.html
Cams Galore: It's Big Brother's World and We Are Him
In his book "The Transparent Society", David Brin proposes that pervasive surveillance may be a good thing - provided that the power to watch is not confined to an elite, such as the state. A surprising amount of the world is already under surveillance. Many people even revel in exposing themselves to the collective oculus of the Net. All of which is a long way of getting around to EarthCam, one of the largest online camera portals around (see NSD 2.32). There are tourist location cams, animal cams, and myriad "me in my cubicle" cams. But what are we to make of the 82 entries under the "Unexplained Cams" section? Just what horrors lurk beyond the "4 Hairy Apes Webcam"? Surely the end of culture as we know it. Oh, and before you ask, the only cam in the Adult category shows an empty parking lot outside a strip club.The Transparent Society: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738201448/netsurferdigest
EarthCam: http://www.earthcam.com/
Surprisingly, the only regional government body that promoted itself at the online trade show was the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC). It does a pretty good job of it online, too, with its Web site. If you want to do business with Hong Kong, this is your stop. In addition to an invaluable database of 100,000 business contacts, the site offers information on shipping, setting up businesses, local industry news, and more. Give the HKTDC great credit for recognizing the communicative power of the Web and actively promoting where it will do the most good. In fact, why not have an entire trade show where only these kind of business development bodies promote their Web sites? Or better still, a Web site aggregating such Web sites. Netsurfer World Trade, anyone?
http://tdctrade.com/
All the Statistics You Can Swallow
Research pros and students bedeviled by pointless homework will appreciate this little gem of a site. It aggregates links to the numerous online sites which provide statistics about everything under the sun. Sure, you'll find extensive links to Net stats (total domains registered worldwide: 15,719,462), but you also get information on business, sports, entertainment (top album search: "No Strings Attached" - unclear if it's by N'Sync or Those Darn Accordions) and even an entertaining Wacky Stats section (Finland has the most islands of any country in the world: 179,584). The only thing missing is a section which teaches you to lie with statistics.InternetStats: http://www.internetstats.com/
Those Darn Accordions: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/music-glance/B000005R1A/netsurferdigest
Let the Merchant Bid for Your Business
Buyer's Edge wants to turn the business model of sites like eBay and Priceline.com on its head. Instead of consumers bidding for items, Buyer's Edge lets them specify what they want and has the merchants compete to sell the item at the lowest price. The trick is getting enough merchants to engage in this cut-throat competition, and pay for the privilege of doing so. So far, judging by the quality of the merchandise available, this does not appear to be a problem. The site is straightforward and worth including in your online shopping toolchest.http://www.buyersedge.com/
The Net has always been a great place to get answers to just about any question. Several companies have built businesses around the whole ask/answer process. EXP.com, one of these, opted to match people who seek advice with rated experts who can answer them. You send your question to the expert of your choice, get your answer, then pay and rate your expert. The vital rating system in theory prevents just any idiot from mimicking an expert and collecting your money. Not a bad idea, but as with all rating systems, it's prone to the dreaded Philadelphia Effect that lets even mundane experts get high ratings (see NSD 5.37). The only fly in the ointment is that with a bit of search engine savvy you can usually find your answers faster and for free elsewhere on the Net.
EXP: http://www.exp.com/
Philadelphia Effect: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v05/nsd.05.37.html#OC3#OC3
"Where can I find out about Hades of Greek mythology?" Let's say you're in a hurry and you can't wait for a human to answer your query at organic speeds. Furthermore, you don't have the time to take a course on Boolean algebra so that you can formulate an intelligent search engine query. Solve your dilemma with Ask Jeeves. Ask a question in plain English, and Ask Jeeves will check its database and toss out an answer. It'll also submit an intelligent distillation of your question to several search engines. Ask Jeeves gets smarter with each question it answers (over 150 million so far according to the site). We like the voyeuristic peek at what people are asking right now: "Where can I see pictures of the female celebrity Jennifer Lopez?" and "How do you make a baby?"
Ask Jeeves: http://www.askjeeves.com/
Hades: http://www.encyclopedia.com/articles/05541.html
Jennifer Lopez: http://www.celebritypro.com/jennifer_lopez.htm
Making a baby: http://www.babycenter.com/refcap/7056.html
The Art of Giving a Presentation
The speaker gets to a podium, launches into long and incoherent, or lively and amusing talk, flashing PowerPoint slides on the screen and enduring the inevitably broken sound system. The audience wants the presentation archived on the Web. That's where Presenter.com comes in. Somebody did some absolutely sterling technical work at this site, which lets presenters publicly post their talks in full glory with audio, video, and/or slides. Browse and you'll likely find several talks which will interest you (Internet World presentations, John Scully on the future of photography). We think this terrific site should be the standard for posting conference presentations - and Presenter.com did help record and post talks at Internet World. The site also offers a marketplace for selling presentations. It's an excellently executed all-around great concept. Insist on it at your next conference.http://www.presenter.com/
One of the nicer experiences at giant trade shows is to come upon a small booth, way at the back, not too flashy, and discover a hidden treasure. Such was the case with iExplore, a nifty portal to adventure travel information. The low-key aspect of the booth belies the big name funding of this site by media giant Tribune Co. iExplore spent its dollars building a top-notch site loaded with relevant information about cool wilderness trips around the world. It's a fun place to browse, planning your dream vacation to odd corners of the world. Try looking up your own neighborhood on the Trip Search menu to find local adventure - you may be pleasantly surprised. There's the usual e-commerce gear/book store and a large stable of athletic looking travel experts who stand by to answer your questions. As travel bookmarks go, this one's a definite keeper.
http://iexplore.com/
Let's face it, the corporate T-shirt is a tired cliche. Anybody attending Internet World probably picked up enough to use as disposable diapers. It's time for some cool promo gear targeted at the Gen-X cubicle rats who swarm dot.coms and sneer at the logo-on-a-shirt marketing gimmick. On cue, in waltzes 360Merch with such logo vessels as retro lunch boxes, harmonicas, glitter sunscreen, flip-flops, garter belts, and even walnuts. Hey, that sounds like the makings of a pool party! The best gimmick by far - in a technogeek sense anyway - is the Interactive Business Card, essentially a CD-ROM literally cut down to the size of a business card. Your logo on the label and your data on the tracks. Trippy. Oh yeah - for the traditionalists, they have shirts, too.
http://www.360merch.com/
For a time, there was fear that after the British withdrew, China would smother Hong Kong. These days, it seems more likely that Hong Kong will infiltrate China with the subversive and dangerous viruses of capitalism and democracy. If you have doubts, visit eHongKong, a vast media site spilling over with the vitality of that world-class metropolis. The site presents a vast tub of Hong Kong news and resources with a generous dollop of Western material on top. It's big, it's sprawling, cosmopolitan, and brimming with life, and it's a good place to visit if you're traveling to the region.
http://www.ehongkong.com/
ThirdVoice Buzzing in Your Ear
At a level of abstraction, a Web site is really a private conversation between two parties: the content creator and the visitor. The creator speaks to the visitor, who responds by going deeper, providing information, or ending the conversation. These days third parties seek to inject themselves into this conversation. ThirdVoice (see NSD 5.16) makes once-controversial software (see NSD 5.18 and 5.21) which plugs into the browser and links words on the page you're looking at to related content. It also allows you to comment on the page, and have other people see your comments. Take their tour to see how it works - particularly nice if you have the Flash plug-in. A company called Flyswat does something similar without the page comment capability. Both work on Windows only right now, and both have browser limitations, but if you're a glutton for hyperlinks and have lots of time to follow them the programs are fun to play with.ThirdVoice: http://www.thirdvoice.com/
NSD 5.16: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v05/nsd.05.16.html
NSD 5.18: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v05/nsd.05.18.html
NSD 5.21: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v05/nsd.05.21.html
Flyswat: http://www.flyswat.com/
They Put a Spell (Check) on You
If your site has message boards or Web-based e-mail, Spellchecker can provide a nicely integrated spelling and grammar check function. They can spell check in English, French, German, and Italian. That's it. Elegant, simple, and useful. A small company and a nice focused product. We like that.http://spellchecker.net/
Slap together an exercise machine, a computer, and a Net connection and you have a company called Netpulse, which is going to make tons of money. If you're on an exercise machine going nowhere fast, why not be everywhere at once with the Internet? The beauty of the concept, aside from the captive audience, is that these days you can use the LCD computer display not only for surfing the Net but for streaming music and video of your choice. Of course, this will do nothing for those of us who exercise just to get away from the Net....
http://www.netpulse.net/
India, a vast and diverse land, has been captured - as much as possible, anyway - in a neat and accessible portal site. It's a typical portal, brimming with India news and typical services such as food reviews, e-mail, chat, and a plethora of well targeted ads. There's nothing particularly innovative here, but then again there's no need for it. The Web has long since settled on what such sites need to deliver a useful experience and eIndia successfully adheres to the conventions. The fact that the site resembles a big city magazine site gives some comfortable familiarity without overwhelming you with information. A good, solid, quietly useful site.
http://eindia.com/
Spotlife: A Video Window on the Net
The trouble with most webcams is that they generally provide still pictures unlikely to capture the five-nanosecond attention span of the MTV generation. As a result, a large number of amateurs aspire to move on to video webcasting. Spotlife neatly serves up this niche with a site devoted to streaming amateur Net video. They divide the submissions into 14 categories with such catchy names as Chemistry, Wire, Glimmer, and Think. Don't let the ravey ambiance put you off, the content is certainly worth browsing. The selection includes both live video webcams and archived video streams. Right now, this may well be the cheapest and best way for you to stream your videos, but note that while Spotlife allows mature topics, it won't host adult sexual content.http://www.spotlife.com/
Tokyopop is infomerce. This is a perfect example of an e-zine-style site dedicated purely to driving e-commerce sales. Tokyopop in effect bottles Asian pop culture and sells it. The content includes Asian entertainment, fashion, and games. A free print magazine complements the online site. The focus, an online shop, contains a mind-boggling selection of Asian pop merchandise. You can get "Adventures of Mini-Goddess" videos, Hello Kitty cell phone cases, Akira Arm T-shirts, Shaolin Kung Fu posters, countless manga comics, and even a Little Red Mao Lighter. Savvy business sense and a razor sharp focus goes a long way.
http://www.tokyopop.com/
We first expressed skepticism of DigiScents in NSD 6.03, and Internet World will let us do so again. We have to admit, though, that the company's purchase of a display booth at the show ratchets up its plausibility. DigiScents hopes to surround the Net with smell, and is scientifically serious about this in a whimsical kind of way. Say you're watching a RealVideo cooking show and you catch a whiff (pumped out by your DigiScents iSmell box) of that monkey-brain chutney glaze, which inspires you to click on a URL where you can buy a jar. You get the idea. It works by means of a small device hooked up to your computer which mixes scents on demand from chemicals. Food and perfume manufacturers are intrigued, but it's all a bit suspiciously vaporous at the moment. There was no demo device at the Internet World show booth, though there is a Software Development Kit. But hey, how could we resist announcing the coming of the Snortal?
DigiScents: http://www.digiscents.com/
NSD 6.03: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/nsd.06.03.html#SS4#SS4
Atom Films is by far the largest and best known source of high-quality independent short films online. People submit short films to Atom, which screens them for quality. If the folks at Atom like what they see, Atom will not only stream it online, but help distribute the film to TV stations, movie theatres, and other Web sites. There's a lot of cool content here, not limited to films; Atom also accepts animations and downloadable computer files. Maybe your computer screen isn't the best venue for watching the next Spielberg in action, but think broadband and wall-mounted monitors and you see how well this company is positioned for the entertaining future.
http://www.atomfilms.com/
"Get your free X here! Everybody needs X!" rang the feral cry of the booth babe in her natural environment. This blatantly abusive use of suggestive innuendo was all the more irritating because it worked. Numerous specimens of Nerdus internetensis crowded the X:Drive booth only to be told to set aside their raging hormones for 25 MB of free file space. X:Drive was only one of several companies offering free file space. FreeDrive offers 50 MB, while MySpace will give you a whopping 300 MB with a special limited time offer of 1 GB until April 30 - all useful if you have large Web pages, or MP3s and MPEGs you want to password protect and share over the Net (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more). X:Drive, however, does have one geek-cool piece of software which when installed on Windows will make your X:Drive space appear as just another drive letter on your hard disk.
X:Drive: http://www.xdrive.com/
FreeDrive: http://www.freedrive.com/
MySpace 1 GB offer: http://www.myspace.com/gig/
Give a Man a Camera and He'll Give You His Life
CameraPlanet is gambling that the average Joe can make a better documentary than seasoned TV pros. It wants to give digital cameras to average people and let them loose to tell their stories. It's not as crazy as it sounds. MTV did just that recently with fairly engrossing results. CameraPlanet will add some production gloss, stream the videos, and syndicate to other sites. We don't understand why, instead of the slick promo on its site, CameraPlanet didn't just hand the camera to the cube grunts who work there and let them make a video about the back lot of CameraPlanet. Also, you can tell CameraPlanet is made up of TV people because they don't know how to design a Web interface. The site only works with a Flash plug-in, forces you to endure a long file download on entry, and has weird modal navigation menus. To be fair, this is "pre-beta v4.1" so there's still time for the Web designers to come to their senses. Content-wise, though - the idea works and we'll see about the execution.http://www.cameraplanet.com/
WWW.com unabashedly considers itself the Net's largest radio broadcast network, dismissing competing claims: "Now, some nitpickers state that we ought to admit that Yahoo's Broadcast.com is #1, since that's where PCData ranks them...nah, they're simply 're-broadcasters', not 'broadcasters' - our 'stations' are all originally programmed by our own team of battle hardened music junkies." Given the sheer volume of broadcast content here, who cares? The huge site hosts music feeds in 22 genres, such as Big Band, College Radio, Christian (say, where's all that Buddhist rock?), and even Adult Only feeds. Each genre offers multiple stations and there's text and video content, as well. A worthy and entertaining audio bookmark.
http://www.com/
Creative Technology, best known for its SoundBlaster sound cards, is also starting to produce some nifty consumer electronics. Its Nomad Jukebox, in particular, was a huge hit at Internet World. The Jukebox is a portable MP3 player about the size of a largish portable CD player. The little gizmo can hold about 100 CDs worth of music on its built-in 6 GB hard drive. Think about that - 100 CDs worth of music in a package you can clip to your belt. Is life glorious or what? The Jukebox costs about $500, which is a bit high but not bad for a first-generation mini-jukebox with a USB interface, support for four-channel surround sound (!), multiple sound format capability, and downloadable firmware updates. It's truly a beauty all around, right down to its slick package design.
http://www.nomadworld.com/products/nomad-jukebox/