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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Cool Entertainment (CULE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tobin sears who wrote (375)	6/15/1999 9:17:00 PM
From: burner	Respond to of 488

Hi tobin, My guess is that they will start with e-mail. and that may be a good idea. Personally, I hope they can get advertising going right off the bat. I feel that we are going to get a( i hesitate to say) blockbuster NR re a partnership with a big name company. Things just seem to be winding up and ready to recoil. The stock did OK today but my 6th sense says to keep a sharp eye on the market and the stock. I picked up 3000 share yesterday as I got tired of seeing a "bargain" screaming at me to exploit. I remain very confident. Dan

To: tobin sears who wrote (375)	6/17/1999 9:15:00 AM
From: burner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 488

Interestin article from the Globe & Mail that applies to Cool's distribution plans: Net firms must scrap the grunt work Eric Reguly Thursday, June 17, 1999 What is astonishing about the cyberstock collapse is not that it happened -- it was so widely anticipated that it was anti-climactic -- but that it did not happen sooner and was not bloodier. Internet shares are down by a third to a half from their April peak and though they are no longer losing ground, the selloff reminded investors that the era of easy gains through brainless, across-the-board buying is gone. From now on, the investment game switches to separating the winners from the losers. One theory that is gaining momentum is that the electronic-commerce companies, the Internet players that have generated the most interest and the highest hopes, have little hope of becoming profitable unless they stop simply attaching Web sites on to traditional businesses. While the Web can expand the potential market to anyone with a computer and deliver information efficiently, these businesses are still saddled with a bricks-and-mortar infrastructure. Avoid this and you avoid your biggest cost. Amazon.com is one example of an E-commerce company burdened with traditional costs. The leading Internet retailer, as the Financial Times of London noted last week, is "reinventing the dinosaur" by becoming the Sears catalogue in all but name. The company started with books and is now expanding into a broad range of general merchandise, including music. The goal is to build the same dog-like customer loyalty that the Sears catalogue enjoyed in its heyday. In theory, customers who are hooked on buying books on-line can be convinced to shop for other items in the same way. This would dramatically increase revenue per customer, giving the company a better chance of making a profit. As it is, Amazon loses more money the bigger it gets, and the problem is not just the cost of recruiting new customers, estimated by analysts at $24 (U.S.) each, but the cost of ordering, storing and delivering the goods. Amazon may be one of the best-known names in the industry, but the back end of the operation, with all its warehouses and armies of sales and mailing clerks, looks suspiciously like the infrastructure of an old-style retailer. This helps to explain why Amazon's losses increased more than five times (to $61.7-million) in the first quarter of this year even though revenue tripled to $293.6-million. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Amazon will disappear into the ether if the financial trend is not broken. Amazon, of course, realizes the danger of its predicament and is doing something about it. Specifically, it is borrowing a concept pioneered by the car makers and Wal-Mart called just-in-time delivery, which eliminates the need to stuff warehouses full of goods that may sit around for weeks or even months before they are sold. Large inventories aren't required because deliveries are not booked, as the name implies, until the moment customers make their purchase. There is another way for E-commerce companies to make money and that is to avoid handling physical goods completely. This is the model used by eBay, which offers a 24-hour automated garage sale. All the company does is match buyers with sellers for everything from Pez dispensers to teddy bears. It holds no inventories and it's up to the sellers and buyers to arrange delivery. EBay has been a hit because it dramatically expands the potential number of buyers. A local store can only draw customers from the local community; eBay users can be anywhere on the planet. Not surprisingly, it is one of the few E-commerce companies to make a profit. A new generation of E-commerce companies is working on the idea that success hinges on avoiding the handling of physical goods. Instead, they will let existing companies do all the grunt work for them. One potential winner in this category is brandwise.com, which is to be launched later this summer by Whirlpool, the appliance maker, Hearst, the publishing group, and Boston Consulting. Called a "navigator site," brandwise will allow consumers to comparison shop for appliances such as washing machines. All the manufacturers' wares will be on display, accompanied by reams of data and independent product-testing information. Once shoppers decide which appliance they want, they can hunt for the best price from the list of retailers or manufacturers that are capable of making deliveries in that particular region. Microsoft's CarPoint service, which allows buyers to shop for cars and receive competitive quotes from dealers, is another example of a navigator site with a promising future. About 7 per cent of American car sales are now done with assistance of the Internet. Companies that handle physical goods, like Amazon, are not doomed. If they can slash inventory costs and gain millions of loyal customers, their chances of ending their losses rise dramatically. But it increasingly appears that the key to E-commerce success is not having to worry about inventories at all.