Peter Sinclair
Web Walk
Even for geeks, the speed with which Internet trends flicker in and out of existence is bewildering. I mean, whatever happened to push technology? A couple of years ago it was as central to Net thinking as the portal is today. Maybe there's a lesson in that.
Media
Metrix figures [www.mediametrix.com] reveal a decline last month [as high as 9% in the case of Lycos - www.lycos.com] in visitor numbers at almost every major 'destination' site.
A blip or a trend? Already it's being suggested that creeping portalisation, the all-things-to-all-men approach to generating Web traffic, may have crested; that newbies, having gained a little confidence, are surfing away from the hit-hungry commercial giants like Yahoo! [www.yahoo.com], Microsoft [www.msn.com], and Disney [www.go.com].
Or is it just that northern surfers have woken from hibernation, abandoned the keyboard, and emerged blinking into the spring sunshine? Television viewing figures are down, too, but then they always are...
Worst-case: is portal ennui merely the symptom of a wider disenchantment? The Barnes & Noble IPO [www.barnesandnoble.com] last week came in below expectations, and as for Juno's [www.juno.com]… the pioneer free emailer saw its shares sag instantly from $US13 to $11.63.
But although Nasdaq's Composite Index fell another 3%, extending the fall from its April record high to 10% [the Morgan Stanley Internet Index is down a full 33%], on average the top 100 Nasdaq entities are still trading at a feverish price-earnings multiple of 81 times current earnings.
None of these explanations will offer comfort to the venture capitalists who spent last year pouring billions into buying, merging and converting simple search engines into giant gateways offering everything from free email and Web-based calendar services [www.amplitude.com] to e-commerce. Particularly if they're the same ones who fruitlessly lavished similar amounts on push technology the year before…
Meantime, at home, commentators more perceptive than myself are analysing the decision to fold The National Business Review's ground-breaking business portal [www.nbr.co.nz] two days from now.
The site's complexity, and what is best described as a sort of inhospitality, never engaged the loyalty of the broader, more profitable readership attracted by its tree-based parent. But one can't help wondering whether the steely insistence of its owners on 'adequate' short-term profits should have been allowed to outweigh the long-term publishing implications of the Internet itself.
Some will see in the Colmans' decision to rejoin the small players rather than remain among the larger ones a wisdom denied to Jeff Bezos [Amazon shares last week fell to $US104 versus $221 a month ago] and other pioneers - visionary, but essentially penniless - of cyberspace. Others may see a failure of nerve.
At all events, some smaller local portal sites drawing on NBR content - www.thehub.co.nz, www.msn.co.nz and www.nzcity.co.nz - are being forced to find alternatives. Some, like The Hub's optimistic Kelvin Lea, welcome this incentive to upgrade from the sluggish Java feeds offered by NBR.
Perhaps the Colmans should have held their breaths a little longer and waited for Equinix [www.equinix.com], which is building 35 Internet business exchanges around the world to interconnect companies providing Net services and e-commerce.
Despite the current portal fatigue, its major investors Cisco and Microsoft obviously don't hear the fat lady hitting high C just yet.
BOOKMARKS
MOST VIRGINAL: Virgin Megastore
As one portal closes, another opens. Awaking with a start, Richard Branson has suddenly discovered e-commerce and now intends to build the Virgin brand into the most popular and profitable all-purpose Internet site in the world: a one-stop shop, with the emphasis on 'shop'. That this modest proposal involves [among other things] knocking Amazon.com, the colossus of the Net, off its perch is a mere detail to the visionary tycoon. By year's end he plans to offer a larger number of titles, though where he's going to find them… Virgin's huge promotional budget will be funneled online as he consolidates all his enterprises into Virgin.com.
Advisory: better late than never…
http://virginmega.com
NOSIEST: Company Sleuth
Despite declining visitor numbers, Lycos turns the heat under the portal wars up a notch with nifty new software from Infonautics which scours the Internet for free, legal, inside information on user-selected companies, e-mailing daily updated reports on their unreleased business activities. Soon to be incorporated into Lycos' investing section and given global reach, the service is aimed at execs, serious investors and job seekers.
Advisory: still in its infancy…
www.companysleuth.com
MOST MEMORABLE: Memory+
Software bloat shows no sign of going away. Today's hulking memory-hogs often demand more than the average PC can deliver, and if you spend as much time freezing and crashing as working on your spreadsheet you might want to check out Memory+ 1.0 from TFI Technology - a free trial version [561Kb] runs indefinitely but starts nagging after 30 days [registration $US19.95]. Offers to "make programmes quicker and more responsive, put unused apps to sleep freeing their memory for other uses, recover large amounts of RAM without affecting the Windows cache… " If it delivers half of what it promises, this is for me…
Advisory: I'll let you know…
www.tfi-technology.com
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