Rough Drafts

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)

Fresh from its record-breaking $5.5 billion IPO, UPS is ready to stake its claim as the logistics enabler for the Internet economy: Forbes (1-10-00) Cover Story Logistics in Brown

Media Metrix touts numbers that show dot-coms performed better than bricks-and-mortar companies in this year’s online holiday shopping spree — only two of the top 10 Internet retailers (Barnes & Noble and Toys R Us) come from physical-world roots. The rest of the Net’s top 10 are Internet pure-plays

A new report shows that in Silicon Valley, the Internet boom is benefitting the well-off far more than it is other classes: Valley of the Digital Divide

The WSJ has assembled an impressive array of articles on today’s announcement that AOL is merging with Time Warner: AOL Time Warner — WSJ Interactive Edition

People aren’t as adamantly against Internet commerce taxes as you might think — but those who actually use the Internet are less likely to approve of Internet taxes, and those who *shop* online are even more opposed. More genius-level research: Survey: Consumer opposition to Internet taxes is soft

Economist Manuel Castells is questioning the wisdom of allowing a global economy to run completely automated and unregulated over the Internet. In his view, a completely “wired” global economy will lead inevitably to turbulence — rapid devaluations of tech stocks, for instance — that will prompt som

Trouble ahead for online retailers? Many dot coms are offering free shipping and other perks in an effort to attract new customers. Now, a Forrester report claims, they may find themselves locked in to continuing those money-losing practices. With negative margins, free shipping, and logistical prob

More on the coming wireless boom: Wireless E-Commerce Said to Be Heating Up–December 29, 1999