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Online wine retailer Wine.com has eliminated 160 positions--roughly two-thirds of its 245-person workforce. The jobs were cut from the company's Napa and San Francisco offices. The wine e-tailer, which was founded in 1994, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and the layoffs represent a last-ditch effort to restructure. This marks the company's second round of mass firings this year. Wine.com laid off 75 employees in January, ostensibly because it had merged with WineShopper.com and was ridding itself of redundant positions. According to industry observers, online wine sales are increasing, but probably not quickly enough to sustain sites like Wine.com in the current economic climate. Also, laws in some states, such as Texas, still ban the shipment of alcohol from out of state directly to consumers.
AdZone to start measuring web traffic
Internet advertising research company AdZone will begin ranking web sites in terms of user activity and traffic. According to AdZone, its ratings system includes 5 million respondents--a number the company claims will produce more accurate traffic figures than those from either Jupiter Media Metrix or Nielsen//NetRatings, the leading measurement firms. AdZone plans to begin releasing its web site ratings as soon as June of this year. Currently, AdZone tracks about 250,000 web sites. AdZone also announced yesterday that it has finalized its merger with Executive Help Services. Additionally, AdZone has changed its name from AdZone Interactive to AdZone Media Research. Executive Help Services bought AdZone in exchange for 18 million shares of EHS stock.
David Bowie launches internet radio service
Internet-savvy rock star David Bowie is initiating a web radio service on his web site and internet community, BowieNet. BowieRadio, which launches Thursday, will webcast Bowie’s collected recordings. But it won’t be all Bowie, all the time. BowieRadio will also feature channels or stations that will stream songs by artists other than Bowie. The singer himself will be the disc jockey on one such station. Bowie has been something of an internet pioneer among recording artists--he launched a subscription-based site three years ago, and other musicians have followed his lead. Bowie says that artists whose music is played on his radio stations will receive royalties. In that vein, listeners won’t be able to download or copy songs they hear on BowieRadio--meaning that they won’t be able to put the songs into file-swapping services such as Napster.
Study: Virtually nobody rejects cookies
Cookies, the data files that web sites plant on the hard drives of web surfers to track their online activities, have long drawn fire from lawmakers and privacy advocates. But a recent study by internet research company WebSideStory appears to indicate that consumers don't mind cookies at all. The leading internet browsers offer users the ability to reject cookies--yet people opt to do this only 0.68 percent of the time. WebSideStory says this low a figure can't be the result of people simply being unaware that they can reject cookies. The company therefore concludes that cookies must not be that big a concern for most users. But this may be a leap of logic, since disabling cookies in the browser then requires users to accept or reject them on a case-by-case basis, which can get seriously tedious. And without cookies, users must log in afresh each time they revisit a web site--a trying task for those who have registered on a lot of different web sites with different logins and passwords. And then there's the fact that many web sites cannot function properly without cookies. Certainly companies that serve ads online would like to believe that people actually like cookies, since so far they have been pilloried by consumer groups for using cookies to target specific ads to specific consumers.
Distributed computing project to tackle cancer
Three million web users farm out their computers to SETI@Home--a project that harnesses the processing power of idle computers to crunch numbers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A similar project will assign 6 million personal computers to a more pressing problem: finding cancer drugs. Under the technique, known as virtual supercomputing or distributed computing, PC users download a piece of software that doubles as a screen saver, kicking on when computers are idle. The project will analyze 250 molecules for their cancer-fighting ability. Distributed computing has the potential to more than halve the time it takes to develop new cancer drugs, a process that typically takes as long as 12 years. The new project's sponsors include the National Foundation for Cancer Research, Intel and United Devices, which also powers the SETI@Home project. In this case, however, prizes will not be awarded to the participants who process the most data.
MIT will put all classes on the web
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to post materials for its 2,000-plus courses on the internet. Site visitors will not be able to earn credit for the courses, but they will be able to see lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, tests and videotaped lectures. All professors will have to post course web pages. An early version of the program will commence over the course of the next two years. The free-course project is called OpenCourseWare, a nod to how the university has embraced the "open source" movement, which advocates the sharing of what would otherwise be proprietary code. OpenCourseWare will cost the prestigious school up to $100 million. While the project echoes tech executive Michael Saylor’s ambitious--and failed--plan to create a free online university, M.I.T. officials say their program is different because it will actually happen.
April 4, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
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