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To: Millionairess who wrote (4613)	2/6/1999 7:49:00 AM
From: Islander	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19700

''It's like setting up a furniture delivery business and getting rid of your trucks and using bicycles,' Saturday February 6 1:37 AM ET Prime-Time Woes Hit Internet By Dick Satran SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Is the Internet ready for prime time? After a series of high-profile blowouts this week, the industry might long for the obscurity of a late-night Veg-a-Matic infomercial. ''The Internet is growing faster than people expected, especially in the area of e-commerce, and traffic tends to come in big bursts,'' said Internet analyst John Robb of Gomez Advisors. ''Everyone on the Internet can end up on your server at the same moment -- and that's where the problems occur.'' One of those transcendent moments was a much-hyped lingerie show by retailer Victoria's Secret Wednesday night. It became the most-viewed Internet broadcast ever, but also one of the Internet's biggest blunders. As traffic hits new heights over the past week, there were a series of negative stories hitting various channels at the same time: -- The Victoria's Secret led to such a jam, only one in 50 potential viewers got there. Most saw busy signals. -- The biggest independent U.S.-based online broker, E+Trade Group, had two outages during the week when customers couldn't fill stock orders and stocks were extremely active. -- Leading online auctioneer eBay Inc. became the object on investigation by the New York Department of Consumer Affairs over alleged fraud involving third parties using its system. EBay had also been hit by system failures late last year. -- The New York state attorney general, responding to complaints of order delays and outages, launched a probe of Internet stock trading operations. The thread running through all is the flood of new traffic hitting the global network. The Internet backbone itself appears to be handling the traffic bulges, but at the sites themselves software glitches and customer service have been choked by traffic. ''We didn't see any problem on the Internet, even at the height of the Victoria's Secret show when everybody was trying to go there,'' said Gene Shklar of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Keynote Systems, which measures traffic flows on the Internet. ''The problems have been at the sites themselves.'' Victoria's Secret owner Intimate Brands said it had 1.5 million viewers for the event. ''The success of our marketing campaign ... exceeded our wildest dreams,'' said Intimate Brands president Ed Razek, and indeed Victoria's fashion show was hardly a secret. But for most who tried to watch, it was a game of peek-a-boo. Only 2 percent of page requests made it to the site, estimated Keynote Systems, and it took users an average of almost three minutes to get any kind of response -- even a signal telling viewers to forget about it. Traffic was pumped up by a well-placed ad on the Super Bowl, viewed by more than 100 million people. The same ''old media'' push was also used by E+Trade, which advertised in the Super Bowl, and then posted two outages due to software glitches during a systems upgrade. The big online brokers are in a huge marketing push to lock up their share of users before the current growth spurt ends. Gomez Advisors said online users have surged to 7.5 million, from just 1.5 million at the start of 1997. But Gomez, which measures the performance of the sites, has also registered ''a surge of service complaints about all of the sites.'' Most are on crash programs to improve customer service, after having stayed on top of the hypergrowth until a recent wave of Internet stock mania hit the market. ''In Internet stocks get volatile and everybody lands on your site at the same time -- and they can't handle that burst,'' said Robb. Traffic analyst Keynote gave high marks to the brokerage sites for managing to handle the massive volume gains of the past two years. The onlines now handle 25 percent of all over the counter trades, and have an estimated $400 billion in accounts. ''The online brokerage business is a very successful example of e-commerce,'' Keynote's Shklar said. ''They have taken a very complex system and put it online, and it's worked amazingly well. It's too bad they gotten so much publicity for this very small negative part of the picture.'' But he had a less favorable view of the effort by Intimate Brands to create a one-to-one fashion show for the masses. ''The Internet wasn't designed for this kind of streaming video to the masses. I don't think it will ever be ready for prime time,'' said Shklar. The system is built to retrieve multimedia files from individual servers and back them onto another computer for viewing. That worked well with the Clinton testimony last fall that was released simultaneously to scores of Internet services, and then retrieved throughout the day -- using the distributed computing model that makes the network perform its magic. But the Victoria's Secret show was a bust because it sent so many viewers to the same site at the same time. ''It's like setting up a furniture delivery business and getting rid of your trucks and using bicycles,'' said Schler. ''You can cut up the furniture and carry it on bikes and reassemble it at the other end. But it's not the best way to do it. It's like broadcasting live over the Internet. Television works much better.'' --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: Millionairess who wrote (4613)	2/6/1999 1:03:00 PM
From: Millionairess	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19700

exerpt of article from the thestreet.com (worth the subscription!) about critical path: Critical Path, DoubleClick, 3Com and Conexant Systems By Laure Edwards Special to TheStreet.com 2/6/99 12:15 AM ET A selection of some of the most intriguing tech stock ideas on the Web. The items presented do not represent the views of TheStreet.com; rather, the collection is offered as a service to our members who may be scanning the Web for stock-related information. Critical Path Steve Harmon (Feb. 2) Companies don't keep technicians on staff to make sure telephones keep going, and one of these days, the same will be true for email services, says Internet analyst Steve Harmon. That's why he likes the prospects of San Francisco-based startup Critical Path, which provides outsourced email services to corporations. The company recently filed its intention to raise $51.8 million in an initial public offering. Founded in 1997, Critical Path was generating $897,000 in revenues by 1998. It also posted a $11.46 million net loss. But like other Internet-related companies, the story is the promise of the future. Although 62% of Critical Path's revenues come from the Web financial site E*trade (EGRP:Nasdaq) and 30% from the Internet service provider Verio (VRIO:Nasdaq), the company has been busy inking more deals. More than 100 companies use its services, including US West (USW:NYSE) and Network Solutions (NSOL:Nasdaq). USA.NET and iName are two challengers that have strong footholds with portals and companies. Another big question is just how the Year 2000 problem will affect email. But this mission-critical (only telephone service is more critical to corporate communications) service has the potential to do extremely well as an industry. "If you consider the 10 million small- to medium-sized businesses in the U.S., the Fortune 500, the global companies, the increasingly sophisticated email offerings to come," says Harmon, "then the market for Critical Path seems ahead in many ways." More information can be found at: www.internetnews.com