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Non-Tech : Tulipomania Blowoff Contest: Why and When will it end? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EL KABONG!!! who wrote (2510)	1/10/2000 8:20:00 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3543

Maybe you should recalculate those currency conversions again. Dot.com shares seem to be pretty valuable in mainstream corporate America: Roll Over, Henry Luce, and Tell Hearst the News! By Dave Kansas Editor-in-Chief 1/10/00 7:10 AM ET Oh my. It's hard to hear with all the jaws slamming into the ground on Wall Street. In one masterstroke, Time Warner (TWX:NYSE) and AOL (AOL:NYSE) have set the world thinking anew about the possibilities of the Net, the possibilities of this new media so widely doubted by the bears. This deal is awesome, in the old, awful, inspiring definition of the word, because it makes so much sense. AOL's broadband strategy? Solved with Time Warner's RoadRunner division and dominant cable business. Time Warner's fumbles with Pathfinder? Solved with AOL's mammoth online presence. CNN's access? More global than ever, with the Net and cable converging with this massive deal. How much has the Net changed the world? While stumbling into the office in the dark predawn of lower Manhattan, I played through my head: Who would be in charge of this company? Who was bigger? No contest. Steve Case of AOL is the chairman. Case, laughed at five years ago, is now in charge of Warner Bros. movies, of Ted Turner's global cable news empire, of Turner Classic Movies. He's in charge of Time magazine! Sure, in the days ahead we'll hear about how Gerald Levin is really going to run this thing and how the old hands at Time Warner will take over the real operations of the business. But don't make a mistake: AOL is taking over Time Warner. AOL is the big dog in this show, despite all the history and expertise at Time Warner. What does this mean? Convergence is upon us. Long-discussed issues like broadband and the merging of the Net, broadcast and cable are here, no longer some idea out there a few quarters. Like Citibank and Travelers combining to declare Glass-Steagall dead, AOL and Time Warner are declaring convergence here, even if it will take some time to sort it all out. For investors, it is time to figure out what's next. The networks -- CBS (CBS:), GE's (GE:NYSE) NBC, Disney's (DIS:NYSE) ABC and News Corp.'s (NWS:NYSE) Fox -- have now got to get moving quickly on the Net. There's no more time for dallying. Also, the big Net companies -- Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq) chief among them -- now take on a different light. The valuations previously decried as crazy now have taken on real-world meaning with this deal. And Time Warner and AOL have shown how to combine the old and new. It's a whole new ballgame in this space, and this is not going to be a single tree falling in the forest

To: EL KABONG!!! who wrote (2510)	1/11/2000 5:10:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3543

Have you guys used this service? What a joke:" Kozmo.com to Get $100 Million From Investors Led by Amazon By ANDREA PETERSEN and GEORGE ANDERS Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Investors led by Amazon.com Inc. are pumping $100 million of venture capital into Kozmo.com Inc., a fast-growing company that delivers movies, snacks and other items purchased over the Internet, generally within an hour. The latest financing comes just seven months after Kozmo began expanding outside its original New York City market. Kozmo (www.kozmo.com) also offers its service in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C. The company plans to enter 21 more markets by year end. Closely held Kozmo doesn't disclose its finances, but people who have looked at its books say it isn't profitable. The start-up doesn't have nearly the polish or logistical smoothness of carriers such as FDX Corp.'s Federal Express Corp. or United Parcel Service Inc. -- most of Kozmo's deliveries are carried out by an arsenal of more than 1,000 messengers, most of them on bicycles. But in the general ebullience about the Internet and its impact on traditional ways of doing business, Kozmo has become somewhat of a darling among strategists thinking about new ways to get goods to consumers. "Someone like Kozmo could partner with a lot of different merchants to provide the immediacy and convenience that people demand right now," said Ken Cassar, an analyst at New York research firm Jupiter Communications. "Now, if you order from Amazon you live on the whim of UPS." Amazon officials declined to spell out their reasons for investing in Kozmo or even to confirm the investment. But people involved in the financing said Kozmo is raising $60 million from Amazon and nearly $30 million from an affiliate of Softbank Corp. of Japan, which has been an active backer of Internet businesses. The identities of the remaining investors weren't available. Until now, Amazon's big bets on distribution have focused on building giant warehouses in Nevada, Kansas and other rural locations -- and then using UPS or the U.S. Postal Service to make most deliveries of books, movies, tools and other goods a few days after orders are placed. Amazon officials have said that strategy makes more sense than trying to run giant warehouses in costly urban areas, closer to where most customers are based. But Amazon last year also bought a sizable minority stake in HomeGrocer.com Inc., a Bellevue, Wash., company that provides next-day home delivery of groceries ordered online. While that service hasn't been integrated into Amazon's main businesses, the two investments in HomeGrocer and Kozmo suggest Amazon may want a faster-delivery option in some urban areas. Amazon's $60 million is purchasing about a 23% stake in Kozmo. All told, the new investors are acquiring one-third of the company. As a result, Kozmo is being valued at $300 million after the capital infusion. Even in Internet circles, that is a remarkably fast rise. In October, the company snared $28 million from venture investors including Flatiron Partners of New York; Oak Investment Partners of Palo Alto, Calif., and the Chase Capital Partners affiliate of Chase Manhattan Corp., New York. Kozmo was valued then at less than $100 million. A public-relations agency hired by Kozmo declined to comment on the new investment. Kozmo was founded by Joseph C. Park, a 28-year-old former employee of New York financial-services concern Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Recently, the company hired executives from Federal Express, of Memphis, Tenn., and Ethan Allen Interiors Inc., a Danbury, Conn., furniture maker and retailer, to handle the logistics of its growth. Kozmo also has been expanding its product mix. While the service initially focused on books, music, video and digital-video-disk rentals, Kozmo has branched out to offer everything from batteries to Tylenol and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. If Kozmo is to achieve profitability, analysts say, it must increase customers' average orders and create a dense enough route structure that messengers can make multiple deliveries on something approaching a door-to-door basis. "They'll never be profitable if each time a delivery person leaves the warehouse they take one order," Jupiter's Mr. Cassar says. "They may be able to achieve the scale in some densely populated cities, but in the vast majority of the country that delivery person is going to be driving an awfully long way."