Internet Market Close Report for 1998.09.18

































 

18-Sep-98

point change

% change

ISDEX

97.95

1.15

1.19%

ISDEX price weighted

1,302.75

19.70

1.54%

NASDAQ

1,663.77

17.52

1.06%

DJIA

7,895.66

21.89

0.28%

  • IDT Corp (NASDAQ:IDTC) gets an “outperform” rating from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. We would like to draw your attention to a Mecklermedia Boardwatch survey taken by Keynote Systems that shows IDT fastest in median download times. UUNET, MCI, CompuServe and IDT are the top four in speed downloading a 50KB page. Speed talks.

  • Network Solutions (NASDAQ:NSOL), whose monopoly on domain name registering for the popular .com domain ends soon, agrees with The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to create a non-profit group to take over the government’s role in the process. It’s still unclear where Network Solutions fits in a world where domain registering is done by others and itself.

    We suspect that NSOL’s leadership position may help keep it ahead of any rivals. But we also think Network Solutions must shift to more ecommerce services to businesses and those registering domains.

    That database is 2 million strong already, those who’ve registered a .com domain.

    Is Network Solutions another Netscape, missing a key business opportunity while thinking its natural “default” monopoly status is perpetual? Netscape has come back but the search engines–all of them–have a combined market value that dwarfs Netscape’s, which Netscape helped build by making them the search on Netscape.com. Each of them paid about $5 million cash over a 24 month period to create companies with several hundred million dollar market caps, more than a billion for some.

    Network Solutions, in a similar way, doesn’t seem to get the larger picture: it could be in the Web-marketing and business book space, networking consulting, Web directory, access, content space as a natural offshoot of those who sign up for domains. That’s just the beginning. We think to hedge against the domain name commoditization that’s coming it needs to consider alternatives to being a registration-only operation. Leverage the database.





    The superbowl of Internet investment conferences! Internet Investment Symposium ’98 @ Fall Internet World!

    New York City, Oct. 8-9 as Steve Harmon, Upside, CNNfn, PriceWaterhouseCooper, and more talk investments with some of the top names in the industry…top execs of GeoCities, CMG Info, DoubleClick, venture capitalists doing the $ billion deals, debuts hot startups at Startup Live! Sign up now



    LaunchPad Pavilion, part of Fall Internet World ’98, the world’s largest Internet industry trade show held Oct 5 – 9, offers exhibit space for startups ONLY at a reduced price in order to meet their often limited capital available at the startup stage. It is Mecklermedia’s way of letting the newbies get their voice heard. If you or a friend is at a Internet startup and want to exhibit at Fall Internet World (expected attendance is more than 50,000) in New York City’s Javits Center then contact Reed Bocchino 203-341-2826 or email: mailto:rbocchino@mecklermedia.com

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