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Microcap & Penny Stocks : ProNetLink...PNLK...Click here to enter -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dutchman who wrote (11016)	3/8/1999 3:45:00 PM
From: Warren A. Wilbur, Jr.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 40688

Just another way one can use PNLK, bidding for goods, worldwide... Investors bid on B2B auction technology By Georgie Raik-Allen Red Herring Online March 5, 1999 Business-to-business sellers are adopting online auctions. To serve this market, a rash of new startups are building the technology that will enable the trend. TradingDynamics, the latest startup in the online auction technology space, this week announced a first-round funding of $4.2 million from Atlas Venture and New Enterprise Associates. Like San Francisco-based Moai Technologies, TradingDynamics builds business-to-business auction technology for the Web. Although CEO Kirk Cruikshank claims TradingDynamics takes a different approach to its rival -- which has an 18-month lead in the market -- he prefers not to elaborate before the technology is released. Mr. Cruikshank did say TradingDynamics had one major customer and would initially be providing online auction technology in the narrow vertical of energy transmission rights. The system will ship in the second half of this year. UPPING THE BID Internet technology is creating a new relationship between buyers and sellers and permitting dynamic ways to price goods and services. The trend leads to pricing based on market demand, and a new standard of openness and fairness that is encouraging Internet businesses to incorporate auctions and market pricing into their transactions. According to Vernon Keenan, Internet analyst at Keenan Vision, about $3.8 billion in transactions, or 10 percent of all Internet commerce, was conducted through online auction. He expects those figures will climb to $129 billion, 29 percent of all Internet economy transactions, by 2002. Online auctions have been particularly appealing to businesses with unused inventory or time-sensitive services such as advertising space, or those wanting to gauge the market price for various goods. "It is remarkable how quickly [selling through online auctions] is being adopted by business," he says. He believes the trend offers "one of those rare opportunities for entrepreneurs to participate in a revolution that will create new intermediaries, leaving the old middleman as road kill." AUCTION HOUSES Forrester Research has found that 95 percent of e-commerce sites with auction capabilities built the technology themselves. With the recent emergence of auction technology developers like TradingDynamics, those sites will now have the option to buy instead of build. Moai Technologies is not TradingDynamics' only competitor in this space. Other auction tools startups include Trade'ex, which also offers enterprise-class technology, and OpenSite Technologies, which offers a shrink-wrapped solution for stand-alone applications. Moai has raised close to $6 million from the Walden Group, Redleaf Venture Management, and Tredegar Investments. OpenSite's investors include Noro-Moseley Partners, Intersouth Partners, Southeast Interactive Technology Funds, and the Wakefield Group. Trade'ex has raised funding from United Parcel Service (UPS), Apex Investment Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Microsoft (MSFT) has also recently jumped into the e-commerce auction space, with the release of an auction toolkit for its Site Server Commerce Edition. The technology is available free to any e-commerce site wanting to incorporate auction capabilities. Mr. Keenan sees Microsoft's move as validation of the business-to-business auction trend and believes it will cause an increasing number of Web site developers to consider auction technology as part of their e-commerce solutions