Lewis Perdue

Online shoppers are like the optimistic little boy who got a truckload of manure for his birthday: Everybody knows the pony’s out there in cyberspace but finding it requires shoveling through all the e-hype and i-dreck and even when the pony finally emerges, there’s no easy way to determine if the price is right. Frictionless […]

Microsoft’s recent Hotmail melt-down and the earlier flap over Amazon.Com’s release of purchasing circles information have propelled Net privacy — and especially its glaring lack — into the headlines yet again. But what’s bad news for Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon.com (AMZN) is good news for companies such as San Jose-based Privada, which offers anonymous Web […]

Online banner advertising has been taking it on the chin of late, what with click-through rates falling below half a percent and the increasing use of browser plug-ins that block ads from appearing on surfers’ screens at all. And despite prognostications from Jupiter Communications that online advertising will hit $11.5 billion by 2003, the sad […]

Los Angeles has often been described as 79 suburbs looking for a city, sprawling as it does over a huge geographic region with police precincts larger than the state of Rhode Island. This vastness dilutes everything including businesses and technology expertise, making it harder for start-ups to find both the talent and the funding necessary […]

So you think your kids, dog, garden or home are the cutest, most photogenic, beautiful or spectacular on the planet? Then Zing is the place to put up or shut up. Billing itself as the Internet’s first “photography portal community,” Zing has raised more than $17 million — $14 million of that just last week […]

People are pretty much accustomed to gifts arriving on the roof, what with Santa’s near-100 percent mind-share of the goodies market. And now, the fat old guy in the red suit could be getting some e-competition, especially for bandwidth-starved Net users. The new e-Claus is Rooftop Communications which promises to deliver always-on, wireless broadband at […]

While Eve may have been the world’s first woman, the biblical book of Genesis indicates that she fumbled her first-to-market advantage in a one-sided strategic relationship with the serpent (who, rumor has it, was really a lawyer working for Microsoft). But a new Eve — eve.com founded in November 1998 — intends to avoid those […]

Creating a Web e-commerce category killer has gotten harder and harder as all the easy cherries get picked by those first to market. One of Amazon.Com’s advantages lies in the extreme consolidation of the middle tier of the distribution system where it has to deal mostly with just two big players, Ingram and Baker & […]

It’s been said that pollution is just a misplaced resource. The same can be said of spam which seems to have become an inevitably corrosive e-frustration filled with credit card offers and promotions for Bambi and her online cheerleader friends. BoldFish thinks its “opt-in” aka “permission-based” e-mail software and services can help prune back spam […]

When those 10- or 20-year high school reunions come around, it’s always interesting to look at how well the “In Crowd” has done. While most of the ruling clique have not ended up dining out of a dumpster, the test of time proves that being popular is not necessarily a guarantee of success. Such also […]

While Network Solutions, The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers and the rest of the domain name registries feud publicly among themselves and with the federal government, RealNames Corp. has quietly launched a $70 million end-run that just might relegate URLs to the technology attic alongside WordStar, DOS and other still-functional but mostly irrelevant […]

Trying to squash a standard Web page into a palmtop display’s footprint, uh, handprint, is a lot like trying to shoehorn a domed stadium into the average suburban back yard. The real estate just isn’t there and the big decisions are all about what to leave out. So, some of the Web’s biggest players — […]