Chris Nerney

A month ago I wrote that online “middlemen” such as Autoweb.com and Autobytel.com would not be able to compete with car manufacturers, “all of whom one day will sell cars directly through the Internet at factory prices.” That day got closer Monday when Ford Motor Co. (F) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) announced a joint venture […]

You can offer all the due diligence you want, but if you’re an investor there’s absolutely no way to anticipate the kind of public relations nightmare that now burdens Disney and its high-profile Web operations. Over the weekend it was reported that Patrick Naughton, an Infoseek executive vice president who headed the entertainment giant’s Go […]

You may be able to buy shares of eBay at discount prices for the next few days. Thanks to premature panicking on the part of some investors in the wake of news that a group of nearly 100 Web sites — led by Microsoft (MSFT), Dell Computer (DELL), Lycos (LCOS), Excite@Home (ATHM) — are joining […]

The more information I see, the more convinced I am that this holiday season will be crucial to the future of many e-tailers. While we may still be in the early stages of the e-tail revolution — Forrester Research projects online retail sales will go from $7.8 billion this year to $108 billion in 2003 […]

Sometimes enough just isn’t enough. After announcing on Monday that it expected to meet analysts’ expectations for quarterly profits and subscriber growth, America Online Inc. saw its shares tumble, ending the day at $90.13, a 6.4 percent drop from Friday. AOL was down further early Tuesday afternoon, trading at $89.44. You would think the market […]

Its Aug. 20 IPO was fairly pedestrian, but less than four weeks later the stock of Web search portal LookSmart is behaving like a Wall Street star. Shares of LOOK (LOOK) closed on the first day of trading at $17.31, only 44% above the $12 offer price for 9 million shares. That performance was slightly […]

Along with infrastructure companies, they are the latest darlings of Wall Street analysts, online pundits and chat room cognoscenti. They are the e-commerce enablers, the companies providing the software and services that promise to transform the Internet into the greatest money-making machine of all time. The ones drawing the most attention are the companies working […]

It didn’t take long for investors to pick out the big winner in the alliance between Digital Island, Inktomi and RealNetworks to launch a global network for broadcasting video and audio. It’s international Internet services provider Digital Island (ISLD), whose shares rose 32% to close at $25 Tuesday after the three-way agreement was announced on […]

The Internet IPO market may be on a late-summer hiatus, but any resemblance to last year’s prolonged drought is merely coincidental. In the months of September and October last year, only one Internet company — online auction leader eBay Inc. (EBAY) — went public during an early fall market downturn. That was on Sept. 24. […]

Many other Internet stocks may have dropped more in value since April, but few have lost as much buzz or cachet in the investor community as women’s Web site network iVillage. ivillage (IVIL) went public on March 19, offering 3.65 million shares at $24, the top of its pricing range. The stock opened trading at […]

Shares of Juniper Networks’ gravity-defying stock have begun heading back toward Earth in recent days, a decline that has been overdue. (JNPR) stock was selling at $186.63 early Thursday afternoon, down 22% from its Aug. 23 close of $227. The stock also was off 10% from Tuesday’s closing price of $205, as investors began profit-taking […]

It’s not surprising that the IPO market cooled off in August — it’s a seasonal thing, and you can expect September also to be relatively quiet. The slowdown is more jarring this year, however, because we’ve become accustomed to each succeeding month setting new records for Internet IPOs. With 26 Internet IPOs in the month, […]