"Whether
you sell stock or sell suits, the Internet has changed the world," says Richard
A. Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and he couldn’t be more on the
money.
Today there’s scarcely an aspect of our
national life that isn’t being upended by the torrent of information available on the
hundreds of millions of sites crowding the Internet, not to mention its ability to keep us
in constant touch with each other via electronic mail. "If the automobile and
aerospace technology had exploded at the same pace as computer and information
technology," says Microsoft, "a new car would cost about $2 and go 600 miles on
a thimble of gas. And you could buy a Boeing 747 for the cost of a pizza."
Probably the biggest payoff, however, is the
billions of dollars it’s saving companies in producing goods and serving the needs of
their customers. Nothing like it has been seen since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution, when power-driven machines began producing more in a day than men could turn
out in nearly a year. "We view the growth of the Internet and e-commerce as a global
megatrend," says Merrill Lynch, "along the lines of the printing press, the
telephone, the computer and electricity."
You would be hard pressed to name something that
isn’t available on the Internet. Consider: books, health care, movie tickets,
construction materials, baby clothes, stocks, cattle feed, music, electronics, antiques,
tools, real estate, toys, autographs of famous people, wine, pornography, and airline
tickets. And even after you’ve moved on to your final resting-place there’s no
reason those you love can’t keep in touch. A company called www.FinalThoughts.com
offers a place for you to store "after-life e-mails" you can send upstairs with
the help of a "guardian angel."
Kids today are so computer savvy that it
virtually insures the U.S. will remain the unchallenged leader in cyber space for the
foreseeable future. Nearly all children in families with incomes of more than $75,00 a
year have home computers, according to a study by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Youngsters from 2 to 17 at all income levels have computers with 52% of those connected to
the Internet. Most kids use computers to play games (some for 30 hours or more a week),
with many teenage girls thinking nothing of rushing home from school to have e-mail chats
with friends they had just left.
"Deep Magic"
Before setting out to wander the deep canyons of cyberspace it’s useful to get a grip
on its new words and phrases which are de rigueur in our constantly changing technological
world. The railroads gave us "getting sidetracked and "full steam ahead,"
automobiles added "pedal to the metal" and "firing on all cylinders,"
and the airplane "on a wing and a prayer" and "flying high."
Cyberspace slang, however, is rarely tied to the
familiar, with occasional exceptions such as "virus" for destructive programs
capable of replicating themselves in computers throughout the land almost instantly or in
"real time." There’s "deep magic" meaning a mind-bogglingly
complex technology key to a program or system, "plug-and-play" for new employees
who are undoubtedly fluent in "geek speak" and ready to earn their keep without
any additional training. Then there’re PONAs for "persons of no account"
who aren’t online, while printed magazines and newspapers that have been upgraded
into "treeware."
As the late Jimmy Durante used to say
"Everybody wants to get into da act," and today’s cyber explosion backs him
up. "We use a computer-controlled laser," proclaims a company’s ad in Men’s
Journal, and we’ve "developed our own digitally enhanced process that uses
liquid laser prototypes to maintain the precision that our standards require. And then we
left nothing to chance. We used lasers where human hands were too inconsistent. We
generated 3D computer models until every last contour was meticulously refined" etc.
etc. The product? Sneakers.
What’s clear is that whether we like it or
not, the Internet is upending our lives and there is no turning back. "The Internet
is just 20% invented," says cyber pioneer Jake Winebaum. "The last 80% is
happening now."
It’s not uncommon in cyber hotspots such as
Silicon Valley or Seattle to see a half dozen post-teenagers working off wooden doors
stretched across two sawhorses in a loft somewhere in the low-rent district. Then deep
into the night when their brains start slowing down, they curl up on an old sofa next to a
makeshift kitchen to grab a little shut-eye before beginning again. They’re driven by
the conviction that writing computer programs is the way to fabulous riches, often dubbed
"the young man’s Viagra." So much so that Forbes magazine ran a
cover story headlined "Getting Rich at the Speed of Light." It’s all such
fun. And is it any wonder that when the management consulting firm KPMG International
polled college seniors, 74% of them said they expect to become millionaires. And why not?
They’ve seen the way America’s new super-rich live and they want in.
The transformative power of really big money
descended on 41-year-old Mark Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com which he co-founded to the
mega-portal Yahoo for $5.7 billion. Cuban had been scrapping along selling garbage bags,
newspapers, stamps, and milk before the arrival of Broadcast.com growing out of his idea
to showcase everything from ball games to business meetings over the Internet.
As soon as the windfall arrived it was party time
for Mark Cuban. He started out by paying $15 million for a 25,000-square-feet Dallas
chateau on seven acres with fountains, pool, tennis court and playground. He then plunked
down $40 million for a jet, topped off by $280 million for the lackluster Dallas Mavericks
basketball team and half the new coliseum where they play. He also bought his girlfriend a
$90,000 Mercedes 560 SL for her 28th birthday.
But Cuban’s spending pales in comparison
with Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen who bought basketball’s Portland Trailblazers,
football’s Seattle Seahawks, a Boeing 757 jet, a yacht, and estates all over the
planet. He then laid out $240 million to build a new museum called the Experience Music
Project celebrating music in the Northeast where he got his start and is something of a
musician himself having recently recorded a rock album with his band Grown Men.
Oracle Chairman Lawrence J. Ellison is also
enjoying his megabucks by purchasing a passel of goodies including an Italian Marchetti
fighter jet and starting construction on a $40 million estate modeled on a medieval
Japanese palace.
There are those newly big rich who are so busy
making money they simply do not have the time to furnish their digs. But not to worry, a
new "turnkey mansion" service has emerged to help them out. Whereas Cornelius
Vanderbilt had his magnificent Newport mansion designed to his instructions by the same
firm that did the façade of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, today’s big
rich can have them both built and elegantly furnished.
One firm’s Aspen model, for example, has
"the master bed layered with Pratesi sheets and a custom-made silk and Ultrasuede
comforter. The children’s beds are done up in red-white-and-blue Ralph Lauren. The
kids also get color-coordinated iMacs and computer desks filled with an assortment of
video games. Mom and Dad’s media room comes with an RCA Digital Satellite System, a
Sharp Data Grade video projector, and a Mitsubishi 40-inch stereo television/VCR.
Town & Country magazine, which chronicles the
goings-on of the super rich, devoted the cover story in a recent issue to "The New
Age of Affluence" and its "cyberstars," including a pictorial visit to
those happily whiling away their days in the new "Valley of the Dollars."
Getting to "Yes Please"
But as with everything else in life, there’s no such thing as a free lunch,
which countless young Silicon Valley Lotharios at the peak of their sexual desire are
learning to their sorrow. The U.S. free enterprise system, which reaches a frenzy in the
Valley, has recognized that the local love boat is taking on water and is rushing in to
save the day. Dating services are approaching overload. Seminars and love doctors are
teaching gents with stock options worth millions how to find and capture their
heart’s desire in this romantic wasteland. And dot-com facilitators such as www.Matchmaker.com are struggling to
bring the sexes together online with some wall-climbing nerds offering $10,000 for finding
them a girl who will say "Yes, please." Cyberspace, adds Hollywood Madam Heidi
Fleiss, is hot since even "Call girls don’t need madams any more, just
modems."
One reality losers in this love bazaar must face
is that they weren’t picked because they were out of shape. But not to worry since
the cyber age has the answer to this one too. Computerized fitness programs with audio,
visual and cyber personal trainers are ready to turn your home and treadmill into your own
personal health club. Turn on www.iFit.com’s
"One-On-One Training" audio workouts and you can bend and stretch to everything
from Classic Rock to Country Favorites." Its "Adventure" series video
workouts will automatically adjust the speed and incline of your iFit-compatible treadmill
as you gaze into your TV screen and experience the "beautiful rock formations of
Utah’s Red Rock" or "the tropical paradise of Hawaii."
If you’re eager to cash in on the e-commerce
revolution, but haven’t a clue as to what it’s all about, you can still make
your fortune by spending a few dollars to register the generic name of something millions
of people are looking to buy over the Internet and then wait for the offers to roll in.
The domain name Drugs.com fetched $823,000, Loans.com went for $1.25 million, and
Business.com brought in an astonishing $7.5 million. www.DomainStats.com estimates that some eight million domain names
have been registered so far with thousands more warming up in the bullpen. The very first
domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.
People who lock up valuable names in the hopes of
selling them later at a turbocharged profit have been dubbed "cybersquatters."
One squatter registered the name Warrensapp.com, the name of a Tampa Bay Buccaneer lineman
for $5,000. "Only in America could you steal someone’s identity and sell it back
to them," Sapp told ESPN. Interesting thing is that Warren Sapp doesn’t have the
undisputed right to his name as a dot-com since there are others out there with the same
name. So instead of paying the $5,000 ransom, Sapp dreamed up the name www.Big99.com using his football jersey
number which gets the ID job done just fine.
"Fireflies before the storm"
IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner Jr. calls the thousands of Internet startups that disappeared
soon after their initial capital infusions ran out "fireflies before the storm."
Their names are legion, and more have been rushing to join without letup. Garden.com
(gardening supplies), Living.com (home furnishings), Toysmart.com (educational
playthings), Eve.com (beauty products), Homewarehouse.com (household products), Cyberhomes
(where prospective home buyers could access listings of properties for sale), Red
Gorilla.com (online billing), Craftshop.com (arts and crafts store), and Babygear.com
(discount baby products) are all illustrative of what Gerstner dubs "dot-toast."
If you’re interested in what an estimated 125,000 surfers a week think are the next
dot-com failures you can log on to "Fu"edCompany.com and compete for points in
the site’s dead pool.
These have taken place as the number of online
customers has been exploding. It’s believed the Internet was born in 1969 when two
computers at the University of California, Los Angeles, were connected by a 15-foot cable
with bits of meaningless data flowing between them. Since then the Net has taken off with
some 137 million computers online plus another 152 million outside the US, according to
the United States Internet Council in Washington, D.C. And while the number of
Internet-linked computers is surging, the volume of traffic they’re carrying is
increasing even faster. Some projections have it doubling every 100 days.
This is not surprising since a hallmark of the
Cyber Age is connectivity and the sharing of that most valuable of resources in
today’s economy - information. The assertion that "Information is meant to be
free" is an increasing reality since it can be moved from those who have it to those
who need it not only in the twinkling of an eye, but unlike other media at virtually no
cost. This computer-driven contribution to the vitality of the U.S. economy is
immeasurable.
Gov. Angus King of Maine has announced the
nation’s first initiative to offer every one of the state’s seventh graders a
free laptop computer to use at school or at home. Some 14,000 students a year would
receive them with access to the Internet beginning in the fall of 2002. Within six years,
every youngster in Maine from the seventh grade on up would be given laptops to keep for
their very own. Gov. King says his plan would bridge the "digital divide"
between students who already have computers and those who do not at a cost to the state of
at least $50 million.
The governor’s plan obviously has a long way
to go before it’s approved by state legislators besieged by other claims on
Maine’s treasury. But as King puts it, "Eight years ago, I might have wanted to
give every kid a chain saw. But now there’s no doubt the people with the highest
level of digital competence win."
Auction Mania
Auction sites have been springing up all over the Internet, but the undisputed Big Kahuna
is eBay operating out of its sparkling headquarters in San Jose, California, whose close
to 13 million registered users on any given day place 1,000 bids a minute on some four
million items put up for sale from antiques to sports memorabilia.
You simply go to eBay’s Web site <www.ebay.com>, register, post a
description of what you have to sell along with photos and a minimum price if you like.
Bids from interested buyers appear on your computer screen, which is instantly updated as
better bids come in. Once the auction ends, the highest bidder is obliged to pay for the
item, usually with a money order or cashier’s check, before it’s delivered.
While most auction sites follow eBay’s lead by starting off with the lowest bid,
others such as www.Basement.com and www.OutletZoo.com start prices high and drop them
little by little until the item is sold.
There are some things eBay won’t sell, such
as guns, ammunition, stock, alcohol and tobacco, and it continually expands the list with
new no-no’s such as fake ID’s, police badges, dynamite, bazookas and soiled
underwear. One young man sought to auction off his virginity with the top bid coming in at
one cent before eBay nixed the sale. It also pulled the plug on someone who placed his
kidney up for sale with the bidding hitting $5.7 million before eBay realized that selling
human organs is a felony. eBay has also been troubled by would-be sellers who abscond with
the dough after receiving, say, $1,000 for rare Beanie Babies, so it now requires them to
provide a credit card number before putting their item up for sale.
But most things sellers want to dangle before
bidders’ eyes are welcomed on Internet auction sites from George Washington
memorabilia, to a video designed just for cats, the world’s only handwritten and
postmarked letter mailed from the Titanic, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence
printed in 1776. A 65 million-year old dinosaur was recently added to the list along with
the necklace worn by Princess Diana at her last public appearance made up of 178 diamonds
measuring in excess of 50 carats with five matching cultured pearls. Occasionally bidders
get carried away as one high roller did when his winning bid for the first BMW X5 sport
utility vehicle to roll off the assembly line totaled $159,100, or three times its sticker
price.
The rest of the world is moving into cyberspace
more slowly than the US and among the developing nations it’s hardly noticeable at
all. UN Secretary Kofi Annan is determined to change this through the United Nations
Information Technology Service by training large numbers of people to tap into the
income-enhancing power of the Internet. He’s also proposing an Internet health
network for 10,000 locations in poor lands to give their clinics and hospitals access to
the latest state-of-the-art medical knowledge in the advanced countries of the world.
Americans spend more on entertainment than on
clothing or health care, and the convergence of computers and telecommunications is
generating new ways to amuse ourselves undreamed of until now.
Bring up the Web site of Computer Gaming World
magazine and you suddenly become a stranger in a strange land. Cyber versions of golden
oldies such as tiddlywinks are nowhere to be found, and in their place are PC-powered
Planescape: Torment; Tomb Raider: The Last Revolution; Final Fantasy VIII; and
Abomination.
The editors who run Computer Gaming World,
CGW for short, carefully select the best games of the year and are upfront about who they
are and how they do it. "Through a process more shrouded in secrecy than a Masonic
ritual," they proclaim, "the cabal of misfits and gentle psychopaths that are
the CGW editors engaged in their annual orgy of self-important opinions, personal insult,
and ritualistic ‘Amok Time’ combat to determine…" the best games.
One way that working stiffs amuse themselves is
by using the e-mail feature on their computers to send and receive personal messages. It
has reached the point where the American Management Association believes 30% of major US
companies regularly snoop on their employees’ messages. The privately owned MicroData
Group in Topsfield, Massachusetts, offers to help out with its Cameo monitoring program
which allows corporations to scan their employees’ e-mail messages searching for
inappropriate activity. Cameo can sift through up to 50,000 emails an hour looking for
specific tip-off words which when found are passed along to a designated manager for
action. The list includes "resume," "job offer," "signing
bonus," "pipe bombs," "anarchy," "reefer" and
"fondle."
An Unexpected Gift from the Gods
Every now and then an industry will get an unexpected gift from the gods, which
in the case of the convenience business has been the surge of women out of the home and
into the paid labor force. This puts a premium on anything that can save working women
time from ready-to-serve meals to dry cleaning delivered directly to their front doors.
Women now work in nearly three-quarters of the 35
million US households containing married couples aged 25 to 54. They also hold more than
55% of both bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded by US colleges and are
rapidly closing the gender gap between recipients of PhDs. Any woman looking for a role
model in the executive ranks of business doesn’t have to look far.
Nearly one out of three working wives today is
paid more than her husband, up from fewer than one in five in 1980, and according to the
IRS, about 41% of the 3.3 million Americans reporting incomes of $500,000 or more are
women They are also moving into positions of power in corporate America such as Carleton
Fiorina, president and CEO of the high-tech wunderkind Hewlett-Packard, the 11th largest
corporation in America; Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay; Charlotte Beers, chairman of the huge J.
Walter Thompson advertising agency, or Susan Bostrom, the hard-driving senior vice
president of the Silicon Valley darling, Cisco.
During the past decade, women have been launching
their own businesses at nearly twice the national average and now own 38% of all U.S.
firms. Since 1987, the number of female-owned ventures has doubled from 4.5 million to 9.1
million, according to the National Foundation for Women Business Owners. This may help
explain why today there are more than 90 cash-rich women’s foundations, up from about
five 20 years ago.
Is it any wonder then that today’s
hard-working women’s interest in homemaking, according to Takeout Business
magazine, "is transitioning to a point where preparing food in this country will have
the same status as building our own furniture or sewing our own clothes. It won’t be
too many more generations before this happens. People are already beginning to look at
preparing food as an avocation or a hobby, like woodworking."
From time to time we all reach the point where we
can’t deal with a situation and need expert advice. In the old days authorities were
near at hand. The village seamstress on how to make a button hole, the blacksmith on how
to take care of a horse’s hooves, or the apothecary on what to do about warts. But
with the coming of the Internet, expert advice has suddenly gone 3-D, with sites popping
up all over the place with self-proclaimed experts at the ready.
Exp.com <www.exp.com> claims to have
"tens of thousands of experts who can help you," while the more restrained
www.abuzz.com owned by the New York Times limits itself to "Ask Anything! Real
People. Real Answers." It’s said expert sites or knowledge networks represent
the latest stage in the Internet’s evolution, a "democratization of
expertise" if you will. More likely, however, if the question is about something
other than "Who invented the light bulb?" the answers are likely to be a wild
potpourri of personal opinions. But it can be fun.
In the Land of the Free
Cyberspace is a veritable heaven for those looking for something for nothing - or
nearly nothing. Log on to www.Free-Stuff-Net.com and you’ll be introduced to sites
eagerly visited by a gaggle of surfers entranced by the idea of grabbing handouts.
There’s "Just Free Stuff," " Freebie Land," "It’s Free
4U," "Planet Freebie," "Free Love," "Free Samples" and
www.Free.com, which alone offers 8,000-plus "links and growing" to sites from
"money and prizes" to "software" and "almost free," all
designed to get your name and address.
Bring up "Free.com’s
"Merchandise/Apparel & Accessories" site and you’ll be regaled with a
chance to get free goodies, including:
- "Register monthly to be entered in this
drawing for sterling silver jewelry."
- "Sign up for ("Asimba’s")
Active Lifestyle newsletters. Sign up ten friends to do the same and receive a free
vest."
- "Seventy-percent of women wear the wrong size
bra. Get your correct size by entering your measurements here."
Magazine lovers might think they’ve stumbled
into paradise after logging on to www.Find-articles.com, where they can roam through the
latest from more than 300 magazines. There’s Oil Daily, Internet World,
Seventeen and Golf Digest not to mention insider magazines from Repair
Shop Product News to the World Logistics Distribution Report.
PC World magazine publishes an
"Annual Best Free Stuff Online" report, but cautions its readers that "to
find giveaways, you often have to waste time rummaging through hours of ill-conceived,
poorly executed, and just plain useless stuff." The magazine notes that
"advertising supports most of these services," but then goes on to highlight
some it feels are worth a visit, e.g.:
- AllHealth: "will store your medical
history online for retrieval from anywhere in the world.
- Legaldocs: "offers free forms, indexed
by category, to help you with such tasks as creating a living will, renting property, or
authorizing child care." Other documents such as real estate deeds and partnership
agreements are available for a fee.
- FastWeb: provides college applicants with
"notices about scholarships and discounts tailored to their geographic location,
interests, and background."
- Productopia: "offers a plethora of
straight talk from consumers who have road-tested the electronics, software, and
appliances you’re thinking about buying."
All of these sites support themselves through
advertising from the ShopPlusBoutique for "the fuller figured woman" to St.
Johns Wort, "the herbal antidepressant without side-effects."
It would be downright unfair to leave the
wonderful world of free stuff without mentioning Blue Mountain Arts Publishing started by
two former hippies to be a "spiritual and emotional center for the Web." Their
stroke of genius was to give billions of online greeting cards in nine different languages
away absolutely free year in and year out. This concept was so exciting to owners of the
Excite@Home Website <www.Excite@Home.com> that they agreed to pay about $1 billion
for the company if it met certain sales targets during the holidays when most greeting
cards are sold.
Which raises the question of why anyone, let
alone a hard-nosed outfit like Excite@Home would agree to give the time of day to a
business that gives its product away at no charge to all comers. The answer is that the
www.bluemountain.com site gets some one million hits a day from people ordering free cards
for dozens of occasions with most of them calling for flowers, candy and gifts which is
where Excite@Home sees a potential gold mine. It’s even introduced a new high tech
card that can be used to send loved ones Electronic Flowers.
Let’s say someone’s upset you and you
want to get even. Happens every day. But you’re a God-fearing person and don’t
want to get physical. What to do? Send the doofus who’s bothering you a virtual
www.PinStuck.com voodoo doll riddled with pins and no return address. You’ll have
your choice of 19 voodoo insults, and can read the barrage of replies that are sure to
follow with complete anonymity including the ever popular "Shove your voodoo message
up you ass."
"How to get kissable TOES!"
The Internet is a land of endless amusements and among the wildest is the Sims, which is
about creating, managing, and controlling the lives of tiny computerized people. If you
leave the Sims alone they might settle down in front of the TV in their miniature homes,
dance to radio music, laugh out loud, tell jokes, insult each other, you name it all
against a background of easy-listening music.
The Sims have five personality attributes (neat,
outgoing, active, playful, and nice), and six learnable skills (cooking, mechanical,
charisma, body, logic, and creativity), leading to ten available career paths. It’s
important for your Sims to get a job so they’ll have money to buy things to enhance
one of their six skills. A new stove will help them cook more appetizing meals, a new
mirror their charisma, with fresh products constantly being added to enrich their lives.
And as a Sims family’s first house becomes filled from floor to ceiling with stuff
you can build a bigger one for them online so they can buy more. This is obviously a game
for our times where the winner is the one who accumulates the most stuff. Imelda Marcos
would be proud.
The surge of women into the labor force has not
been lost on the doll-making industry, which is suddenly celebrating a whole new genre of
playthings for girls. Mattel’s Barbie was an astronaut in 1964 and an airline pilot
in 1999, but now the gloves are off and Barbie and her sisters can be whatever they want
to be. Mattel has formed a partnership with Working Woman magazine and brought out
Working Woman Barbie. Her exact job is unclear, yet she comes equipped with a miniature
computer, cell phone and CD-ROHM loaded with information on how to understand high
finance.
Los Angeles-based Smartees Inc., a newcomer to
the industry, has introduced "Destiny the Doctor" plus a storybook in which she
has to draw blood with a syringe, along with "Alexis The Artist," "Ashley
the Attorney," "Taylor the Teacher" and its top-selling "Vicky the
Veterinarian." The company launched "Sarah the Senator," but girls said
fugedaboutit. Smartees provides its professional dolls with evening gowns so they, in the
words of their creator, can attend charity balls and raise money for worthy causes. Mattel
was obviously not scared off by the failure of Smartees’ "Sarah the
Senator" and introduced "Barbie for President" packaged with a
"Girls’ Bill of Rights." "Emily the Entrepreneur" who runs a
teddy bear company has not sold well and is targeted for retirement while "Ashley the
Attorney" is on her last legs.
Girls are hot, and nobody knows it better than
the publishers of Girl, Teen, Jump, Girltalk, Twist, Seventeen,
YM (Young & Modern) and CosmoGirl among others. The "Big
Three" subjects gracing the pages of these magazines are appearance, romance and
"bfs" which is girl talk for boyfriends. A typical Girltalk cover is
ablaze with come-ons such as "Freddie Prinze Jr. has a crush on YOU,"
"Fabulous Flirty FINGERNAILS,’ "How to get kissable TOES," "Quiz:
Is your hottie your soulmate?" and "Navel Ins & Outs: Beautify your
bellybutton!"
Teens are also being courted by Web sites such as
www.agirllikeu.com and www.bolt.com, which says it understands their language and
what’s important in their lives. "Howdy," says a smiling girl,
"I’m coming to you straight from Ohio. My fave things to do are play tennis,
snowboard, read horoscopes and hang out with friends." A "Sex & Dating
Feature" is headlined "Ever been busted while you’re getting it on?,"
and one on "Jobs and Money" asks "Would you get naked for money?" Then
there’s "Bolt Boards Quote of the Day" which reads "In November, Kid
Rock, the sexiest piece of white trash, came to Austin. I was working and won backstage
passes and tickets. I was so excited to meet him! He was bad-ass and so hot! I got him to
sign my ticket!"
Paddles, Slappers, Gags and Hoods
Today’s near runaway fascination with sex, mirrored in the more than 40,000 lurid
sites competing for business on the Internet, has thrown a spotlight on something that
until recently was confined to the shadows. In the early to mid-1990s, up to 80% of all
Internet traffic was adult-related, and even today the adult entertainment industry still
drives the Internet with profit margins of 30% or more even though they have no off-line
revenue stream generated by magazines, books, video cassettes etc. But in the past couple
of years something interesting has happened. Cybersex has moved uptown.
What Cosmopolitan gloried in with articles
such as "Sex Tricks Only Cosmo Would Know: 20 Earth-Quaking Moves That Will Make Him
Plead for Mercy - and Beg for More," can now be found in the buttoned-up Ladies
Home Journal. It has added articles promising "Grown-Up Sexxx: He Needs It,
You’ll Love It’ to its usual fare of recipes, child rearing and home decoration.
Among the Four-Star sex sites is www.Blowfish.com
that pretty much has it all. There’re toys, books, videos, supplies, comix, magazines
and "Objects d’Art" designed for "your erotic enjoyment" with the
best qualifying for its "Coveted Blowfish Recommends Label," such as its
"teeny, tiny, fits-over-your-fingertip, watch-battery-powered Fukuoku 9000
vibrator."
Blowfish toys include "Hellcats Rabbit Fur
Flogger, Metal Painstick and Texas TwoStrap Harness" along with "Paddles and
Slappers, Gags, Hoods, Blindfolds, Muzzles, Handcuffs and Collars. It also offers a wide
array of "Shiny, freakish, gloriously gorgeous videos," and among its
"Objects d’Art" is a Devilfish Condom Holder made of red velour with black
vinyl horns guaranteed to add "class and humor to the finest ensemble, in the bedroom
or out."
While it’s possible for parents to control
what their children watch on the Web, it’s far more difficult to keep them from
glomming onto today’s abundance of raunchy television shows. The venerable New
York Times recently ran a story on the new prime-time hit "Boston Public"
about high school life where "a girl is shown getting up from her knees after
administering oral sex to a boy" on camera. The girl, it seems, was running in a
school election and "was simply campaigning for his vote."
Three Cheers for the "Napster"
One of the Internet’s truly great features is that anybody can be a player who has an
idea for a Website and a few dollars to get it up and running. Possibly the most notorious
site of all is the one dreamed up by an 18-year-old dropout from Northeastern University
in Boston, Shawn Fanning, nicknamed the "Napster" for his unruly red hair. What
he did was create the world’s biggest online free-music community that allows 38
million popular music lovers to swap hundreds of recordings, from Metallica to Hootie
& the Blowfish, using the Napster system as a search engine to find exactly what they
want.
This, needless to say, outraged everyone
connected with the record business, from artists whose creative work was being hijacked to
the Recording Industry Association of America which brought a law suit seeking an
injunction aimed at ending Napster’s brief, if notorious life. It now appears,
incredible as it seems, that this deadlock may actually be resolved to almost
everyone’s satisfaction. Napster users may pay a modest monthly fee which will be
divided up among those creating, producing and delivering the music, with financial
backing from the German media giant Bertelsmann which is getting a piece of Napster in
return. There is a sticking point, however, since it’s now unclear how to put a user
name and price on every digital music file being downloaded. It’s also unclear if
Napster users will pay even a few bucks a month for the service.
Online Education
The US is blessed with a higher educational system second to none, with the great names
from Harvard and MIT in the East to Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley
in the West merely the tip of the iceberg. Today the nation’s top colleges and
universities are rushing into online education, but the big news is the proliferation of a
new breed of for-profit online institutions bringing Internet education to the masses.
"The Internet will probably be the single most democratizing force in
education," says Columbia Business School Dean Meyer Feldberg, who sees its being
routed through the Net "to hundreds of millions of people."
The largest online institution is the University
of Phoenix with some 6,000 students today that hopes to have 200,000 in ten years. The
University offers bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in Business Management,
Technology, Education and Nursing and prides itself on the fact that if you’re a
student "you can earn your degree via the Internet whenever and wherever you want -
at home in the evenings, at work during lunch, or while traveling on business. No
commuting. No lines. No wasted effort. You just click into class and start learning. While
the cost of attending a private college today is over $20,000 a year at many
schools," it says, "the cost of attending the University of Phoenix Online is
less than half that. Best of all, most of our students complete their degrees in just two
or three years."
Having said that, it’s worth noting that a Business
Week survey of 247 companies found that only a handful would consider hiring
applicants who earned their Master of Business Administration degrees online. Whether that
will change in view of today’s boiling economy, and the rise of for-profit online
universities on the learning curve, is anyone’s guess.
Newspapers Embrace the Cyber Age
Newspapers make money from the readers who buy them and the sellers who advertise in them.
It’s been that way for centuries. But in the last few years an important new income
stream has opened up for newspapers and among its pioneers is The Gazette Co. in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa, which since 1993 has been providing information to its readers delivered by
both paper and increasingly via the Internet’s World Wide Web. "If a newspaper
views itself as ink on paper," says its new Vice President of Information Technology
Steve Hannah, "I don’t think it will survive."
Hannah realizes its foray into online journalism
rests on the continued success of the newspaper whose readership held steady at 85,000
subscribers throughout the ‘90s while others have seen their circulations decimated
by the one/two punch of television and the Internet. Online newspapers are a look into the
future, and just pondering it raises the question of whether it isn’t nicer getting
your daily news curled up in your favorite chair with your ballpoint pen handy to circle
items of interest, or scissors ready to snip out articles you want to save? The Gazette
Co. is betting its subscribers want both and so far it seems to be right.
Hannah’s mission is to make The Gazette
newspaper "a cross-media information provider" according to an analysis in CIO
which describes itself as "The Magazine for Information Providers" and is fat
with ads for the likes of Sun Microsystems, Xerox, Microsoft, Hitachi, Dell and IBM. The
Gazette’s Web site contains a more in-depth analysis of much of the information
readers can find in the newspaper. But it also has Web-only features which are
illustrative of the way this new income stream is moving. Technology VP Hannah plans to
structure the Web "site so that registered users can enter their preferences and
choose which kinds of stories they’ll see every time they log on."
Hannah is also working on linking The Gazette’s
Web site to a database of all the audio, video and text clips The Gazette Co. has in its
files. Visitors to its site will be able to purchase stories in any of the three formats
by using their credit or debit cars, and researchers will be able to buy blocks of time in
which to search the paper’s archives. Hannah even sees the day when the paper’s
newsroom staff will be able to incorporate breaking news on its online service such as
suggesting alternative routes following a traffic jam. The Gazette’s new
page-insertion machines also allow it to call up information from its Market/Info database
and arrange the advertising inserts into subscribers’ papers according to their
buying histories. Subscribers with young children might see ads for Toys "R" Us,
while for seniors they’ll be cruise vacations.
GE’s Top Gun Speaks Up
Corporations have suddenly awakened to the fact that the Internet can save them billions
in conducting their everyday affairs, with some of it showing up in lower prices for the
consumer. And it’s only the beginning. "Where do you think we are as an economy
as far as e-business goes?" Fortune magazine recently asked General
Electric’s legendary CEO Jack Welch who immediately replied "First inning."
How right he is can be seen in a two-story brick
building on Chicago’s industrial south Side, home to the Corrugated Supplies
Corporation that turns out corrugated sheets used in making boxes and other products.
Nothing to get excited about here, until you realize that Rick Van Horne who owns the
place may have moved e-business into a second inning and then some.
What he’s done is built a computerized
production system by hand at a cost of $5 million that can fill customers’ orders in
record time. Over 50% of the orders it receives originate through its Web site with an
equal number or more produced to customers’ exact specifications and delivered to
their box-making factories in less than 24 hours while cutting waste by 35%. This resulted
in Van Horne being voted one of 1990’s 10 top innovators by InfoWorld
magazine, along with being named the Grand Winner of the Inc./Cisco Growing with
Technology in the Customer Service award.
This success hiked Corrugated Supplies’
sales from $40 million in 1997 to $100 million in 2000. Not bad for a company that makes
the innards of boxes, but it’s not the end. Rick Van Horne is now offering to teach
other companies everything he knows about building high-tech factories, and he’s
certainly not doing it because he needs the money. In 1998 he sold 11 paper plants he
owned with Georgia-Pacific for $285 million.
The billions a year American companies are saving
thanks to the Internet’s ability to slash their cost of doing business is making them
even more successful competitors on world markets. This is reflected in better prices for
their customers and increased profits for themselves with much of it coming from greatly
improved ways of cutting costs.
Ford, General Motors and Daimler-Chrysler among
others have created Covisint, a $300 billion megamarket for buying auto parts in order to
squeeze the last dime out of vendors’ prices on everything from engines to windshield
wipers. It’s a new world out there with companies both large and small banding
together to force suppliers to trim their prices or lose the business. Still others are
doing this on their own such as the big air-conditioner parts manufacturer Trane Company
which was aggressively wooed by numerous construction industry buying groups all of which
it turned down. Trane set up its own private online exchange forcing its 5,000 dealers to
continually bid against each other for its business.
Questions for Our Time
The on-rushing Cyber Age has given newfound power to us all as seen in Jody Williams’
one-woman organization of a global ban on land mines using e-mail. Yet this is but a
glimpse of what’s ahead in the minds of those immersed in this great transformation
which, if anything, is inexorably gathering speed.
Bill Gates over at Microsoft predicts that by
2018 major newspapers will "publish their last paper editions and move solely to
electronic distribution," and that two years later in 2020 Webster will alter its
"definition of the word ‘book’ to refer to eBook titles read on
screen."
The workaday world of materials technology is
developing totally new structures growing out of tearing down the walls between organic
and inorganic chemistry to create what one researcher calls "boutique
materials." Substances that, like living things, can adapt to changing conditions
such as metal-composite car-body panels that actually pop back into shape following minor
fender benders.
At the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory they’re working to build robots
with social skills and humanlike expressions that we can relate to. One named Cog
resembles a human infant, and another called Kismet is designed to interact with us
through its body posture and facial expressions. This raises some interesting questions
which Dr. Anne Foerst, director of MIT’s God and Computers project, has courage
enough to raise. She wonders, for example, if a robot with human attributes should be
treated with dignity even though it’s just "a mechanistic thing?"
Silicon Valley’s Dr. Larry Smarr is one of
the world’s top computer technologists, having contributed to the development of the
Internet and then going on to invent the graphical browser which makes it riches
accessible to millions. His latest, and possibly greatest move, has been to convince
California governor Gray Davis to put him in charge of the new $300 million California
Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, being built with the help of
funding from, among others, IBM, Microsoft, Boeing, Broadcom, and Sun Microsystems. The
new project’s goal, Smarr says, is to speed the emergence of the information grid he
believes will have a far greater impact on our daily lives than the all-pervasive electric
power grid does today.
Smarr sees the emergence of "an enchanted
world" of networked microprocessors during the coming decade that will see the power
of individual computer processors grow at an exponential rate as the number of
interconnected computers and computing devices explodes. This kind of turbocharged
computing power might allow California to build a grid to more effectively control its
massively complex traffic system, says Smarr, since it will know where the fast-rising
number of cars with onboard computers are planning to go.
Computers have metamorphosed from the University
of Pennsylvania’s 1946 Eniac with its 18,000 vacuum tubes that had less
number-crunching power than today’s laptop, into thumbnail-size computer chips
containing 42 million transistors. Yet even this is only a stopover on the road to devices
the size of a single atom packed with data on their orbiting electrons whose negligible
cost virtually turns information, and accessibility to it, into what economists call a
"free good." Ready to do whatever work there is to be done in a world where
"cyberspace will merge with physical space and disappear," according to Michael
Dertouzos, director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
In a provocative article in Wired
magazine, Bill Joy, chief scientist at the high-tech juggernaut Sun Microsystems, asserts
that "Eventually, a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the
system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them
intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. And we won’t
be able to turn them off because," he concludes, "we will be so dependent upon
them that turning them off would amount to suicide. With the prospect of human-level
computing power in about 30 years," Joy concludes, we may be "working to create
tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our
species."
While William Van Dusen Wishard, President of
World Trends Research is not quite so dispirited, he is nevertheless concerned. In a
speech to the Issue Management Council in Washington, D.C., he noted that
"Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cite a two-year study showing depression
and loneliness appearing at greater levels in people using the Internet than in others not
using it, or not using it as much. Extensive exposure to the wider world via the Net
appears to make people less satisfied with their personal lives.
"Talk of an emerging issue," Wishard
continues. "In my view, this is the most basic issue America faces today. Computer
scientists are making ever-faster computers, which accelerate the tempo of life beyond
what the human metabolism is designed by nature to take. Faster technology is de-linking
humans from nature’s normal rhythm. Increasingly, the question corporations will face
is not only how to deal with stress, but how to maintain the structural psychological
integrity of the individual."
As we are confronted with questions of this
magnitude, it is worth remembering what pre-World War One social critic Randolph Bourne
had to say about it all. "He who rides the wild elephant, goes where the wild
elephant goes."
About the Author
Carter Henderson is completing a book on the impact
of the cyber revolution on our daily lives. His address is 260 Crane's Lake Drive, Ponte
Vedra Beach, Florida 32082. E-mail Chauthor@aol.com.
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