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To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (103968)	5/24/2000 10:50:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

that was "traitor," not "trader" ! just kidding, Glenn! Good luck with it. Victor, Thank you. I was starting to get some kind of complex<G> Glenn

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (103968)	5/25/2000 9:55:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Victor, yesterday I BTC my Pcln short shares. I'm glad I did. > NEW YORK (AP) - Priceline.com is expanding its ``name-your-price'' sales pitch to long-distance phone calls with the launch of another ad campaign featuring the bizarre musical stylings of ``Star Trek'' legend William Shatner. The Internet retailer also announced Wednesday a joint marketing alliance with American Express for a new Web portal Priceline is developing to sell long distance and other business services to small companies. As part of the alliance, American Express will market the Priceline portal to its more than 2 million small business customers, offering them a 5 percent discount on purchases. In exchange, Priceline will feature American Express as the preferred method of payment on the portal. The new long-distance service, which Priceline has been testing on its Web site for about a month, operates in much the same way as Priceline sells airline tickets, hotel rooms and car rentals. Instead of requesting a flight destination or a hotel class, customers specify an amount of long-distance minutes they'd like to buy, whether they'd like to call within the United States or abroad, and what they're willing to pay. Participating phone companies can then accept or reject the ``bid,'' which can't be withdrawn by the customer. An accepted bid is automatically billed to a customer's credit card. But while Priceline's travel partners include brand-name airlines and hotel chains, the long-distance providers offering service through Priceline are Web-based upstarts named Net2Phone, deltathree.com and ZeroPlus.com. Priceline chose to go with those companies because they can provide users with a savings of up to 40 percent over most competitive calling plans from major carriers, said Dan Schulman, the new chief executive of Priceline. Net2Phone, which is now part-owned by AT&T, and the other two companies offer steep discounts by routing phone calls over the Internet, avoiding many of the access fees charged by the local Bells and other telephone carriers to use their networks. So although long-distance leaders such as AT&T and MCI now offer rates as low as 5 cents a minute, Net2Phone now offers calls for about 4 cents a minute. One drawback, however, is that instead of dialing directly, customers will need to dial an access number from their home phones to connect a call through one of the Priceline partners. Priceline is betting the extra savings will make it worth their while. About 10,000 bids for long-distance, or about 50 percent of those submitted, were accepted during the one month trial, with purchases averaging four hours of calling time, Schulman said. ``Consumers in our trial would have saved a couple hundred dollars on an annualized basis,'' said Schulman, a former AT&T executive and a member of Net2Phone's board of directors. ``When you think of the millions of consumers who change phone companies every month for a $25 bonus check, this gives them substantial savings capabilities without switching.'' To push the new service, Priceline is launching a new ad campaign with 15 commercials featuring Shatner, the actor who played Captain James T. Kirk on the 1960s TV show ``Star Trek.'' While many viewers didn't quite see the humor in the first eight commercials, which featured Shatner passionately crooning Priceline's virtues with a grunge band as backup, the campaign clearly caught people's attention. ``Everyone that I meet has a comment about the Bill Shatner ads, so obviously these are commercials that break through the clutter of TV advertising. People look up because they are so very different from the commercials you usually see,'' said Schulman. ``Bill has been tremendously successful in driving traffic to our Web site,'' he added, noting that Priceline's customer base grew by 1.5 million people to more than 6 million in the first quarter. AP-NY-05-24-00 1851EDT