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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (56401)	5/11/1999 10:57:00 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Hi Glenn -- just home to do laundry and change planes -- market still holding up ok. AMZN looks more like its in a trading range. Going to give a series of talks to 250 companies in 4 cities in China. Leaving in the morning -- should be interesting as an 'offcial' US representative. Later

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (56401)	5/11/1999 11:44:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Remember Amazon's purchase of PlanetAll last year for about $200 million in stock and options? Of course, that valuation has doubled since then to over $400 million. Not chump change for a company that still has not likely made any money and has meager revenues. Now it appears that similar on-line Personal Information Managers or Web PIMS have cropped up all over, some of them offering more advanced features than I have seen at Planetall. These include being able to sychronize PIM data with a Palmcorder or laptop PC. A recent Infoworld article reports: infoworld.com <<A crowded field Simply put, online calendaring has exploded since the beginning of this year. Because it's a relatively simple application to code in HTML, CGI, and other Web languages, dozens of companies large and small have put together free calendar sites (often providing address book and to-do functions as well), hoping to sell ads against the page views. >> Hmmm . . . it seems Amazon might have paid just a bit too much (like about $180 million) for a questionable capability and one that has quickly become a commodity. It's only investor's Amazongonenutty.com bucks so it really doesn't matter anyway.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (56401)	5/12/1999 1:14:00 AM
From: Chung Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Click-thru rates may not be good yardstick for banner ad effectiveness NEW YORK. 04:45PM EST—Click-through rates for banner advertisements on the Internet continue to decline, but analysts say advertisers shouldn't lose any sleep over the trend. "We've seen this trend go on for awhile, but it's not something advertisers should be terribly worried about," says Meadows. "Click-throughs are a convenient metric to track, but it's not the best one." Meadows says there are several reasons why web surfers are less likely to click on banner ads. One is that the novelty of banner ads is wearing off as people get more used to surfing the web. Another is that, with the growth of online advertising, there are more banners competing for web surfers' attention. Furthermore, Meadows says the increasing use of third-party advertising networks that serve ads to web sites may also have slowed down the loading of banner ads. If banners load more slowly than the web site's content, the audience is less likely to click through the ad. Among some of the companies that aggregate advertisements and serve them to various content providers are Doubleclick (nasdaq: DCLK), Adforce (nasdaq: ADFC) and Flycast (nasdaq: FCST). Still, the decline in click-throughs doesn't necessarily mean the ads are any less effective, Meadows says. "It depends on your objectives as an advertiser. If you want to sell your products, click-throughs may be somewhat relevant. But if you want to increase brand awareness, it's less significant." He also says that the ads that get the highest rates of click-throughs aren't necessarily the ones that generate the most sales. The conversion rate--industry jargon for the rate at which advertisers convert web surfers into shoppers--varies greatly from ad to ad. forbes.com