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To: Jenne who wrote (10896)	6/25/1999 9:27:00 PM
From: Lockeon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19700

On Chemdex....The Economist... economist.com Regards to all.... __________________________________________________ <snip> Whether sober Chemdex Corporation ever gets around to becoming a virtual coffee machine for biologists and lab technicians to gather around and swap the latest jokes about cloning, it is certainly serving a community and offering a commercial opportunity. Founded within weeks of Adauction, Chemdex provides a one-stop shop for academic researchers and companies in the pharmaceuticals and biotechnology business to purchase all their supplies. Already it claims to be the world's largest source of biological chemicals and reagents, with more than 170 suppliers and a vast electronic catalogue listing more than 460,000 lab products. Chemdex's founders, Dave Perry and Jeffrey Leane, had the right background to bring together life sciences and e-business. Mr Perry had previously set up a biotechnology company and Mr Leane had been responsible for developing Bargain Finder—one of the web's first shopping robots. They found the market inefficient and fragmented. Scientists were taking up valuable research time struggling to purchase their supplies, using dozens of (frequently out-of-date) catalogues and making many fruitless telephone calls. Life-science companies, under increasing competitive pressure, were desperate to find ways of speeding up R&D processes and reducing their cost. Suppliers were hamstrung by the logistical inefficiencies inherent in paper-catalogue distribution. Chemdex's founders created a single, efficient marketplace on the Internet for all three of the communities it serves. For researchers, it has created chemdex.com, a web-based catalogue with powerful search engines and all the information needed to base a purchasing decision on. For business customers, Chemdex has developed its own procurement and integration software to complement its website. This means firms can purchase through their own intranets and get the cost benefits of automated approval and consolidated invoicing and billing. For its suppliers, Chemdex has developed another range of software that offers supply-chain automation as well as support for their reporting and decision making. And it is cleverly using its technology and close integration with its partners' buying and selling systems to make it more difficult for them to switch to a potential competitor. At present, Chemdex is handling about 2,500 transactions a day, but it expects that number to grow to 30,000 a day over the next two or three years. With more than 2,500 life-science companies and research institutes, and over 250,000 lab scientists in America alone, that does not seem over-ambitious. Each of these three companies—NTE, Adauction and Chemdex—exemplifies an entirely new sort of business that uses the Internet to change the way markets operate. Ms Lief of Forrester Research identifies three new business-to-business market models. First, there are aggregators, such as Chemdex, which help buyers in fragmented markets select products by providing up-to-the minute price and product information and a single contact point for service. Next, there are online auctioneers, such as Adauction, which offer a reliable channel for sellers to dispose of perishable or surplus goods or services at the best possible prices, and for buyers to get bargain prices without taking a leap into the unknown. And lastly, there are exchanges, such as NTE, that create liquidity in otherwise fragmented markets, lower average stock levels by matching bid/ask offers and act as neutral third parties, enforcing market rules and settlement terms. ____________________________________________________________