Rough Drafts

The next Net battle: Time. The UK government wants to create a universal Internet time standard based on Greenwich Mean Time. They’re giving it a new name: “Get,” for Greenwich Electronic Time — although it’s not clear how Get differs from GMT. To get Get accepted as a standard, of course, the Brits

Here’s an interesting review of the year in Internet access appliances, from a site devoted to news about Net devices. As the review points out, wireless access to the Web really started to take off in 1999, with Sprint PCS introducing a Web phone service, and Nokia selling WAP (Wireless Application

Most online holiday shoppers are happy with their experiences, reports say — although online toy stores may have produced more than their share of dissatisfaction: Web Shoppers Report Satisfaction (registration required to access site)

EToys, Amazon stock prices dropped Monday despite record e-commerce volume — analysts suggest investors are worried about the impact of fulfillment and customer service problems. EToys Was No. 3 for Holiday Shopping But Worries Over Service Hurt Stock (paid subscription required to access site)

While the Internet economy booms, the Linux and open-source software movements are thriving on a “gift economy” that values intellectual contributions over market share, Salon writer Andrew Leonard observes. Of course, Wall Street loves the gift economy too, pushing Red Hat and VA Linux shares into

Red Herring has a nice piece on the “unsung heroes of the Internet” — the ordinary working folks who make e-business happen through their decidedly un-virtual jobs. Profiled in the story are a DSL installer, a Webvan warehouse worker, a call center employee, and a manager at an Exodus data facility.

Toy company says its sorry for late shipments with $100 gift certificates: Toys R Us Pays for Missed Gifts

E-commerce sales during the holiday shopping season will add up to the predicted $4 billion, the Mercury News reports. And, despite pre-Christmas reports of retailers’ inabilities to deliver presents on time, most online merchants performed respectably, according to early reports. Net sales soar pas

Dire predictions about holiday e-commerce notwithstanding, the top online retail sites seem to be performing pretty well this holiday season, according to Keynote Systems, which measures Web page availability and download times at major e-commerce sites. Holiday Shopping Web Sites Continue to Perfor

The U.S. Postal Service is in fact working on an “e-post office box,” as I suggested last month. This article has few details about the proposed service (the explanation of how it will work is a little confused and the article doesn’t say when it will be available) but it does indicate the service w

Online merchants may be throwing away 25% of their business this holiday season, an Andersen report suggests. In the study, Andersen employees made 480 orders on 100 different e-commerce sites this month — and only 350 of those were completed. Web site crashes, buggy forms, and other problems famili

Online sales are pretty much on track, merchants report in a new IDC study: Most Web merchants to meet sales forecasts (12/20/1999)