Rough Drafts

Do Web companies have the right to send “bots” out to scan other companies’ online databases? That’s the crux of a debate on Capitol Hill now — and of a fight between eBay and auction-watch site Bidder’s Edge. The outcome of this battle has serious implications for Internet business, since it will a

The largest e-grocer, it turns out, is British supermarket chain Tesco — and they’ve got a decidedly low-tech approach to e-commerce, with little more than Dell servers, BackOffice software, and 7,000 packers who wander down the aisles of your local Tesco store picking up the items to fill your orde

E-business outsourcing, the next generation? Andreessen’s new company, Loudcloud, thinks it can bring dot com startups to market 2.5 times faster: Loudcloud surfaces with e-commerce hosting solution

Disney finds it can’t make a Go of the search engine business — tries for a “leisure site” strategy instead: Disney Plans to Recast Go Portal As Entertainment, Leisure Site

PC Week columnist John Taschek says the AOL – Time Warner merger means the end of the Internet as we know it. He writes: “AOL has the capacity to paralyze this highway system by adding traffic without enhancing the infrastructure necessary to support it.” ZDNet: PC Week: AOL’s buyout of Time Warner

So AOL is buying Time Warner. What’s next? EBay should buy PBS, of course. An Internet Pledge

This is kinda cool — soon you’ll be able to buy tickets online, and print them out from your own printer. A bar code scanner at the venue will verify that your ticket is the real thing. Ticketmaster Lets You Print Your Own

Confused by all these online pet stores? Can’t figure out why VCs are throwing tens of millions at each of them? Wondering why all their ad campaigns look the same? You’re not the only one. Online pet stores throw shoppers a bone

John Dodge discovers B-to-B marketplaces, then goes on to write up three very interesting profiles — a fish marketplace, a steel trading community, and an electronic parts marketplace. At the end, he writes “What’s clear is that the B2B revolution will be driven, for the most part, by the distributi

Rebuffed by Lycos last year, Barry Diller finally gets to buy a dot com of his own. Early market reports show that Styleclick’s stock is already heading downward. Can’t Barry get a break? USA Networks takes $500 million stake in Styleclick

Web retailers are going to hate this one: A new site, Nosaleisfinal.com, lets consumers post information about online purchases they just made — so competing retailers can jump in with better offers while there’s still time for the consumer to cancel the original purchase. New E-Commerce Site Raises

AOL acquisition of Time Warner puts it in head-to-head competition with Microsoft — the merged company’s fat pipes will enable it to deliver applications that may compete with Windows apps for end-users’ attention. Microsoft, AOL on collision course (1/14/2000)