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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (784)	11/28/1997 7:58:00 AM
From: ERM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Very good article in the November 24 issue of Interactive Week titled "Cable Finally Gets Serious About Business Data--@Home leads Charge to link businesses to cable network, but not everyone's following suit" Two interesting quotes: "So far, only @Work itself, in a deal with competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) Teleport Communications Group (TCG), in which Comcast, Cox and TCI are major stakeholders, has gone into the office environment on a significant scale, although various companies, including Cox and TCI, have offered dedicated data services to companies on a limited basis." "Already, he [Don Hutchison, SVP & GM of the @Work unit of @Home] says, the deal with TCG has led to the signing of more than 300 accounts by @Work, now representing more than 30 percent of revenue generated by all @Home-branded services, which include high-speed data to about 26,000 residential users in more than a dozen markets." IMO, the deal with TCG is the first of many @Work/CLEC deals as there are such obvious and natural synergies. Also, the growth of @Work is the reason comparisons between the market value of ATHM customers vs. AOL customers is meaningless.

To: ahhaha who wrote (784)	11/28/1997 3:30:00 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

ahhaha - We may be thinking about two different things. Here is my point: Suppose Smith has a small business making widgets in Midville USA. Smith has heard about the web and is interested in putting up a web site providing it is not too much trouble and cost very little. The appealing idea is that your web site is a "24 hour salesman" collecting orders for you for all your products.. Smith calls a business like Microsoft and finds they have FrontPage which, with little effort, allows you to set up a web site and put it on some ISPs server. The web site has the ability to collect orders, comments, etc for you. You simply go to the site periodically and collect your orders (saved to disk as ASCII files). So Smith now need two things which are TOTALLY separate from each other: 1) A web hosting account. This is a contract between you and your ISP which allows you X amount of storage and X amount of transfer data per month for $X. 2) A dial up account so you can browse the web for whatever your browsing needs are. Smith first calls places like AT&T, UUNET, etc and finds the following services are offered: 1) Web browsing account, like "World Net" from AT&T, for $20/month and you get a free 2 megs of web page storage (static pages only please!). The dial up will be slow but that's ok with Smith because you really don't have that much browsing demand - most sales are made picking up the phone and calling somebody. 2) A "small business" package which, in the case of UUNET, consists of the following: ú Up to 100 megs of disk storage for your web site. ú Up to 1 gigabyte of transfer. Total cost: $500/month Smith says "I can't afford it! Isn't there some place I can go that is interested in starting with the little guy and building him up from a small charge per month. It would be in the ISP's interest if they would start with a small charge and have a sliding scale as the customer grows. This way you will keep a customer for life (it is a real pain to change hosting ISPs). Smith finds this service is available from small ISPs. An example, in northern California, is ccnet which just changed its name to Verio (http://www.ccnet.com). They will put you on a NT server which supports FrontPage for $50/month. I forgot the exact storage and transfer restrictions but you can easily have a 10 meg web site there with reasonable traffic for the $50/month charge (this includes 24 hour toll free hot line for problems). You can also get from them a $20/month dial up account for browsing. There are others just like Verio around. I have seen and talked to them. This is the way it has been for the last few years. The big guys start hosting you for hundreds per month ($500 is the standard favorite) and the little guys will do it for nothing. There really isn't that much difference in speed of access even though everybody claims they are super fast. Smith recognizes that he has to go with the small ISP. We are talking about a unknown (possibly $0) return with considerable employee "hand holding" time for a charge of $500/month. Forget it. But for $50/month Smith would be crazy not to take it. Then along comes @Home. @Home blows away the competition for dial up at only $35/month - sold. And now it is time for the other shoe to drop...how much for hosting? The only guy I talked to at @Home that was familiar with this stuff (some time ago) was thinking they might start at $100/month. I am hoping..no begging them to start at $50/month and have a sliding scale. Also, please allow hosting of people that can not get @Home yet. My opinion is that @Home can take the market by storm if they offer a entry level ($50/month) business web hosting package for anybody that wants it (@Home subscription not required). They can then scale the charges so that they make more money as Smith's business grows. Smith will never leave them if they do this correctly and economically. And they better get that office complex built soon because they will get more subscriptions than you can imagine. Cash flow would go up exponentially as well - the bad accounts would be $50/month and the good accounts...sky's the limit.