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To: GrokSoup who wrote (46912)	3/23/1999 2:48:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

14 Banc One Payment Services and First Data Merchant Services. Launched in June 1998, Yahoo! Store provides data and tools to merchants looking to create their own commerce-enabled store (for as little as $100 per month, depending on inventory size). Currently, over 4,000 merchants participate - consumers can access these stores via Yahoo! shopping. The new agreements will make it even more convenient and cost-effective to establish a merchant account and start accepting credit card payments over the Internet. Approved merchants can now be credit-card payment enabled within 48 hours. This type of turn-key solution will encourage even more merchants to enter into the world of e-commerce through Yahoo! - providing yet another revenue opportunity and way to monetize its customer base. Yahoo! Germany's New Developments Yahoo! entered into an agreement with the 2 nd largest German telecommunications provider, Mannesmann Arcor. The two companies will launch a new service Yahoo! Online in May. Yahoo! Online already has launched in the UK and US through relationships with British Telecom and AT&T. Yahoo! Online will be a pay-as-you go service, designed to make Internet access easier for Germans. Like Mannesmann Arcor's current internet access product offering (“Internet By Call”) - customers will be charged for internet usage on a per call basis, with the charges appearing on the monthly phone bill. There is no monthly service fee. As the international growth of the Internet continues on its rapid rise, it is important for YHOO and others to help to provide ways to lower the barriers for getting online anywhere in the world. Observations The Broadband Recipe As we cited in our Online Alchemists piece above, we would encourage investors to recognize that success in the broadband world by any access provider, media company, or cable concern is not simply an infrastructure issue: the guys with the most pipe don't necessarily win. The broadband online market place will be governed (mostly) just like the narrowband marketplace: by three important ingredients that need to be present before any material subscriber growth over the broadband pipe. These three ingredients, infrastructure, customers, and customers service/marketing assets, are essential parts of the online mix, narrowband or broadband. To view the shareholder value opportunity without all three is to misunderstand the consumer market. We posit that customer service, that is, everyday hand-holding for mass market consumers, is extremely important to this game. Not one of the vendors who are going after this opportunity (the cable companies, the telephone companies, and the new online players like @Home/XCIT) comes anywhere close to matching AOL on this front. With thousands of customer service personnel taking millions of AOL customers through the intricacies of a narrowband Internet, we wonder what kind of demand for consumer hand holding and problem solving will be with a broadband Internet . The second ingredient, existing narrowband customers, is also largely under appreciated by the Street in understanding which vendors will benefit the most from the broadband explosion. From where we sit, we think it will be far more difficult to create an online service customer base from scratch (or worse to pull them from an existing provider) than it would be to upgrade existing online service customers to a broadband