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To: gdichaz who wrote (486)	10/22/1999 11:41:00 AM
From: pala	Respond to of 1817

Cha2; Listen to this call on Ariba's Qtr. Its really pretty simple, not unlike a farmers market on the internet. vcall.com Also i2's white paper on business velocity, if you ignore the $5 words its just common sense. i2.com Enjoy Doug

To: gdichaz who wrote (486)	10/22/1999 11:44:00 AM
From: James Sinclair	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1817

What do you suggest we can do here to stimulate more Icarus scoring (and checking against Fool criterea) for B2B companies? chaz, While I know your question was directed to Bruce, I'll throw my 2 cents in. There are individuals on many of the company specific threads that have experience in the field. We may need to either take our questions over there and then bring the results back, or recruit some of those folks to come participate over here. I had a very useful discussion recently with a gentlemen who was about to evaluate Broadvision and some of its competitors on his job. My first reaction to the Icarus scoring system was that it would be hard to apply to B2B, or to infrastructure type companies (the guys selling the picks and shovels to the miners). I also think we need to start developing our own Icarus scores so we can evaluate companies not mentioned in the RFM.

To: gdichaz who wrote (486)	10/22/1999 3:27:00 PM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1817

Cha2, I had a beautiful (IMO) response to you all typed out. Disconnected from the Internet before I put the finishing touch on it so I could eat dinner with the family. The wife and I polished off a bottle of Chianti and I came back to my laptop to find my son playing Quake. He shut down Netscape before I could send my long answer off to you about scoring B2B and things we have no personal association with on a personal level. Oh well, at least he got a high score in Quake. Now, I'm buzzed from the wine, so I will have to trim my thoughts since I have to pack my bags for a weekend in Bavaria. It's not easy to get a handle on the scoring of the B2B sector. The incubators make sense from a Index Fund sort of view. I own shares of ICGE (which was upgraded today by the way) in my IRA. I'm going to ask Moore on the list serve list how we can apply those Icarus scores to companies that aren't 100 percent B2B and those that are incubators. The book mentions the models of companies that bring many to many: eBay E-Schwab E*Trade eChemicals Channelpoint IMX Arbinet RateXchange The B2B wave will be so large that I don't see a Godzilla type player emerging anytime soon. Most likely a lot of niche players and already established outfits like Siebel, Oracle, i2 using a vertical/horizontal market approach to capitalize on the $$$$. I've combed the message boards of the Fool, SI and Raging Bull in hopes of gleaning some focused approach. As has already been mentioned, one has to wade through a lot of trading mud slinging before finding any chestnuts. Sand Wedge (SI member) might be able to help us focus on certain aspects of how to look at the B2B area. I did read this on an i2 board recently: "When are people going to realize that i2 owns B2B?!!!!" I had to laugh at that one. Maybe I should go back and find that poster and ask him to clarify what he means and how we could apply it to our quest. Nevertheless, at pure play B2B companies like eBay, the Icarus metrics do work. I think pure plays would value such a similar scoring technique more than incubators and partial B2B companies. How can we score parts of a company? Where to from here? I'll seek out that i2 poster and see what I can dig up on Ariba and ICGE in terms of analysis and scoring. BB (buzzed and bewildered)