Articles by Dana Blankenhorn

Those of us in the Internet industries are accustomed to finding common cause in times of controversy. On issues of liberty or taxation your interests and those of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) are usually the same interest But now ISPs are on the warpath against AT&T and I have to ask whether it's in the interests of e-commerce houses to st...

Your server logs are sprouting some new entries. In the last week Microsoft released the beta version of its Internet Explorer 5.0 browser, while Netscape (an AOL shop) is expected to respond soon with Version 5.0 of its Communicator....

People ask me all the time, what's the one thing I can do now to grow my Internet business? My answer is simple and direct. Answer your e-mail! Answer it now and answer it well. Everyone who e-mails you is looking for an excuse to buy from you, or looking for a reason to trust you. If you give them answers, they'll give you money....

America Online does not have a good record when buying Web software companies. (Remember Navisoft?) So now that its acquisition of Netscape Communications Inc. is complete, there may be reason for those of us in e-commerce to be nervous For better or worse, Netscape remains the chief competitive threat to Microsoft when it comes to the software you...

After seeming to drop in, then lipping-out like a 3-foot putt on a Saturday's golf at Nassau, the Dow Jones Industrial Average powered through the 10,000 level March 19 like it wasn't even there. What does the new record mean for electronic commerce? For one thing, it means the trends that made billions of dollars for shareholders in eBay, Amazon, ...

Your success has politicians salivating. Politicians sniff out contributors the way French hunting dogs sniff out truffles. Juicy controversies demanding action are the bait for their hook. You, sir or madam, are the fish, the big game in the Great Game, and for the year 2000 the game is already afoot....

No one likes paying taxes. But no one likes bumpy roads or getting mugged either. The fact is that (for good or ill) much of America's state and local government spending is funded by sales taxes. But most Internet transactions are free of sales tax. Web stores are treated the same way direct mail catalogs are. Local sales taxes aren't imposed unl...

In putting $750 million into Go2Net this week, Paul Allen has stuck a fork in one of the hoariest Internet myths, namely that in this market you're either number one or nowhere While market leadership is good, and America Online, Yahoo and Amazon have earned their places in investors' hearts, there is nothing carved in stone about any company's lea...

A spokesman for Rep. Billy Tauzin told the E-Commerce Times that the Louisiana Republican was serious last week when he warned Web merchants that states and localities will win the right to impose sales taxes on their transactions Tauzin, who heads the House subcommittee on telecommunications, personally advocates eliminating the income tax entirel...

Search leader Yahoo! enhanced its own e-commerce efforts by delivering transaction capabilities to its small merchants and signing CyberShop as a new anchor tenant in its growing mall Agreements with Bank One Payment Services and First Data Merchant Services will give Yahoo! Store merchants a more convenient, cost-effective route toward setting up ...

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) announced today that it will build an e-commerce portal for small independent bookstores, that will be located at Booksense.com The ABA tapped Atlanta, Georgia based iXL Inc., to handle the basic design, and said it will license the book preview database of Muze Inc., which already provides book, video and...

Video Pipeline Inc., of Haddonfield, New Jersey, a long-time provider of in-store video promotions, is now offering the service to Internet based storefronts Company president Jed Horovitz says, "For as little as $100 (US$) your small online video store can offer online Java-based video clips from a 7,500 movie database to help drive sales." ...

If you're involved in music, or any technology that must be streamed, the present battle over the MP3 format deserves a close look MP3 is the compression algorithm under which most of the Web's music is compressed. Since it doesn't carry copy protection, the music industry wants it replaced with work IBM is doing under the name of the Secure Digita...

The Coca-Cola Co. announced recently it had bought, and will re-develop, a vast stretch of land opposite my kids' small private school in downtown Atlanta. On the next block an Embassy Suites Hotel is going up, and across from there, Turner Broadcasting is renovating its giant CNN Center. In this environment the school goes unnoticed but I believe it will survive (even thrive) because it's small, flexible, and it teaches kids well...

Microsoft wants the government's help in breaking a vicious monopoly, and the case could set a powerful precedent for electronic commerce You read that first sentence right. Microsoft is reportedly joining a complaint by online travel agents against the nation's airlines, which have cut commissions and are trying to move customers to buy tickets on...

On March 8, Intel announced it has reached a settlement on anti-trust charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission. Before the terms were even public, reports surfaced that Microsoft is discussing a settlement of its problems with the U.S. Department of Justice Settlements in both cases would be welcome. It's much better for business to be done ...

Barry Diller was the headline maker at last week's Jupiter Consumer Online conference in New York. The headline was he won't sweeten his deal to acquire Lycos, whose shareholders will take a 30% interest in a new outfit that includes Diller's Home Shopping Channel. Beneath the headline was a lecture in which Diller basically said most of the equit...

"When the man dances, certainly boys what else. The piper pays him." So concludes the musical introduction to Prof. Harold Hill, "The Music Man" of the 1958 Meredith Wilson musical, a role made famous by the late great Robert Preston The Web has lots of Music Men. Steve Case is, of course, the best among them. Not only does he get stores to pay ren...

What's the key to becoming a successful Internet reseller? First, learn to go direct Dell's Gigabuys store looks like a winner. Its home page has a product search button and several product menus, without requiring users to scroll down. This means all the goods are within a few clicks. The prices seem competitive, and Dell has already built the bac...

My 11 year-old daughter played in a YMCA basketball tournament last weekend, and was shocked to learn that when she held the ball for more than five seconds, without passing it, the referee would give it to the other team. It turns out that's a good rule for Internet advertising as well....