Rough Drafts

Hope for the future: A couple of recent news stories point to the incredible resourcefulness — and speedy learning — of young people encountering the Internet for the first time. The Financial Times reported late last week on Indian street children discovering free Internet terminals placed on the s

eCompany Now is now Business 2.0, and they’ve debuted a new site design under the new URL. My work as the “Defogger” continues under the magazine’s new name, with a weekly Web column and a monthly print column. This week’s column on slimming down your home page leads the new site’s lineup today.

Good news for California citizens: Now you can be notified by pager when your neighborhood is scheduled for a rolling blackout. “Oh goody,” millions of power-hungry Californians are no doubt thinking. “Now I can plan ahead for those enforced hours of idleness and darkness when the power cuts out.” P

A Georgia State IT administrator is being prosecuted for installing P2P software on college computers. The university says that in so doing, he robbed them of more than $400,000 worth of bandwidth. This, even though the software primarily ran during the December break, when the computers were otherw

I have to admit I didn’t call this one: Webvan is going out of business, making official what observers have been speculating for months. In the two years since it got started, Webvan burned through about a billion dollars of investors’ money (OK, it was actually $800 million, but whats a few hundre

I bet you can’t wait for this site to go live: Coca-Cola has a Web strategy and will launch its site this summer. “The new site will allow visitors to view branded Coke products in various indoor and outdoor settings.” Be still, my heart! E-Coke

Oops — so much for that trend! Investors are getting spooked about B2B e-commerce now, too. Analysts see hard times for e-commerce firms

The Washington Post published a nice history of B2B e-commerce this week, tracing its roots back to EDI: B2B: Almost as Old as the Internet

A panel at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference agreed: Broadband opens a can of security worms for unsophisticated home users. Panel: Broadband security threat no exaggeration

Web sites are becoming obsolete, as I’ve long argued. This article by Harvard Business Review editor Nicholas G. Carr makes the point convincingly. He points single-function applications like Napster, interactive email tools like Zaplets, and mobile/wireless commerce tools — all of which utilize the

The U.S. Commerce Dept. has launched a site to help small and midsize businesses in the U.S. break into global commerce. The site features research, multimedia webcasts, and a virtual exchange where businesses can get leads from overseas companies looking for products or services. Also, the site is

Six old-school, high-culture institutions, including Columbia University and the London School of Economics, are teaming up to cash in on the Internet-based-education trend. Their new site, called Fathom, will “will seek to address one of the most serious weaknesses of the Internet, its founders sai