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To: jach who wrote (38502)	2/7/1999 12:03:00 AM
From: Impristine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

jach, buddy, nice try, i think there will be a market for electronic readers.. but it will be limited to specific populations, i bought shares in this private placement.. so i am biased... but be serious, no threat whatsoever to the amazing one... everybk.com

To: jach who wrote (38502)	2/7/1999 11:09:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

7 addition of contextually-appropriate content. Increasingly, commerce sites like Amazon.com and E*Trade have been focusing on lifetime value per user as the key metric to watch for measuring the value of their business. The way they are accomplishing this is through adding features, services, and functionality to their sites that drive usage; more often than not, deep, unique content is what drives usage and transactions. The limitations of these commerce sites' skill sets and the economics of content creation are such that they are incented to partner with content providers to achieve that competitive advantage, rather than build it themselves. Financial Content: Turning Ideas Into Dollars In perhaps no other e-commerce segment does our “content is king” thesis seem more relevant than in the personal finance space, where the demand for third party financial news and analysis content is about to explode. We believe demand for unique and differentiated finance content will start to become clear in 1999, thanks to a few important factors: (1) it works: the online brokers readily acknowledge the power of timely and thoughtful information to generate trades online, since the medium is highly tuned to impulse; (2) competitive advantage: unique third party financial content has replaced simple account access and transaction services as the competitive differentiator of choice for both online and off line brokers; (3) bias: third party financial editorial and advice are perceived as unbiased; who does the typical on-line brokerage customer trust more, Barron's or a firm's investment banking reports?; (4) online brokers as partners: the online financial services vendors have staked out expertise mostly on the transaction processing, customer service, and customer interface (web front end) side of the online brokerage business, we're hard pressed to see the rationale for them to invest heavily in building personal finance content of their own (5) precedent: Reuters, S&P, and Morningstar all appreciated in value as traditional brokerages looked to concentrate on core competencies over the last decade. Disseminate Or Populate? If you accept our thesis that financial content will increase its value markedly in 1999, thanks to the above factors, the more relevant long term question for financial content providers generally is whether they should they keep or cede control of their content. Would the value of their content be greater if it were widely disseminated? Would scarcity value, generated by limited, exclusive partnership-type arrangements, create greater dollar returns? Those are tough questions, though good ones to be asking, since they strike directly at the heart of determining the long term value of Internet content. After all, the more widely content is syndicated on the Web, the greater page views, visits and advertising revenue to its creator. But the more syndicated his material becomes, the lower the scarcity value of the information and thus the smaller the incentive for users to pay subscription-type fees to view it. This type of balance is not impossible to achieve, but it will be an ongoing struggle for all content providers as they weave their way through 1999. After all, it's not unimaginable that some deep pockets (Merrill? Smith Barney?) may come to understand the valuable (and incremental) role of third party financial content, and they may pay up big for an exclusive right to it. So just what is the content worth? That depends on its ability to influence customer action (e-commerce) in the near term, and, long term, how important a competitive differentiator it will become in the future to the financial service firms that want it. After all, comparative advantage is the only advantage that really matters. Today, the online brokers and financial services players are competing mostly along infrastructural lines (on the back end) but eventually, we posit, the technology