Tuesday, September 21

Two modem manufacturers are missing and presumed dead: Harmony USA and Computer Peripherals International (CPI). Check Windrivers.com for available software.

The (Lebanon) Daily Star looks at microwave modems.

Denver-based US West has dropped the price of its MegaBit Select DSL service to $19.95 per month. An Internet access account is required to use the service.

Australia telco Telstra will offer DSL service to most of its residential customers by the end of next year. The company is conducting field trials, but the price for the service has not been determined.

Cell phun

Bandai plans to develop games for cell phones.

NeoPoint has officially released the NeoPoint 1000 cell phone and PDA, which features PC synchronization, alarms, voice commands, and keypad-based text entry with intelligent word prediction.

East coast Bell Atlantic and west coast Vodophone AirTouch announced they will join forces for a national wireless phone service. The combined mobile phone service will be the largest in the nation, with 20 million customers.

Apple news

Shortages of the new G4 processor prompted Apple to release an earnings warning, causing their stock to fall sharply. The 7.6 earthquake in Taiwan - site of iBook production - could also affect Apple sales. Less likely to affect stock prices: the fact that G4s smell funny.

A Japanese court has issued an injunction against distribution of the eMachines eOne, an Apple iMac clone, in Japan. Apple has a pending case in US court. The injunction is one of the problems plaguing eMachines and its stock.

Misc.

Advertising industry mag The Standard looks at the problem of Internet companies not paying their advertising bills.

Over the weekend, Network Solutions changed their domain name registration procedure: most registrants will have to pay for domain names in advance. Previously, you could register a domain and pay for it later, which led to thousands of domain name squatters.

Neva Chonin of the San Francisco Chronicle reviews the Sega Dreamcast, which sold a record US$97 million in consoles and related products in just 24 hours.

A security flaw at email hosting service Critical Path exposed customer email. Critical Path provides email services to 250 customers, including E*Trade, Verio, and Network Solutions.

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Friday, September 24

EarthLink and MindSpring are merging to create the second-largest Internet service provider, with a subscriber base of 3 million and annual revenues of US$650 million. The new company will fly the EarthLink banner.

Bucking the free Internet trend, MSN announced it will raise monthly fees by US$2 to $21.95 for new members. Existing members will continue to pay their current rate. A few months ago, MSN was considering going to a free or discount ISP model.

Free ISP NetZero is planning an IPO to raise US$160 million. The service has built a subscriber base of roughly a million customers in the span of a year.

Dell and Excite@Home are joining forces to offer Dell modems equipped with a cable modem, and sign up for Excite@Home cable modem service in a single phone call.

Attention webmasters

Do you think it would be nice to make money from your web site? It sure is, but don't believe it will happen with affiliate programs, such as Amazon.com. Chip Rowe of Salon tells you the truth about affiliate programs:

The reality of the situation is that for the vast majority of affiliates, making a profit (defined by many as earning more than they're paying out in online fees) is a pipe dream. They just don't have the traffic. A survey by Refer-it found that the median annual affiliate earnings was $50. And of the 120,000 CDNow affiliates in late 1998, only 100 made more than about $30 a month.

My experience is similar to Rowe's: affiliate programs pay poorly. The best ad revenues come from direct sales to advertisers on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis. For unsold ad inventory, use banner network programs, such as Burst, Websponsors, Teknosurf and ValueClick. To even play in the advertising game you need at least 100,000 page views a month, and even that number is too small to allow for direct ad sales.

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