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Suffering its worst outage in months, auction site eBay became inaccessible twice on Wednesday. First, the site went down for three hours, starting at 2:35 EST. Then at 6:22 p.m. EST, eBay went down again until 1 a.m. EST. In both outages users could not access individual auctions, list goods for sale or place bids, although the home page and category listings were accessible. EBay blames the first blackout on a hardware failure in its backup system. The second, longer outage came about while eBay was restarting and updating its auction database after the first outage, the company says. EBay says that part of the reason for the hardware failure was that it wasn’t replaced earlier, because doing so would have disrupted the site during the holiday shopping season. EBay will extend by one day all the auctions that were supposed to end during or one hour after the outages, and credit fees for those auctions. EBay is no stranger to minor outages but Wednesday’s appears to be the first to last more than two hours since the widely publicized denial-of-service hacker attacks of Feb. 2000.
Starbucks and Microsoft
pair in internet café deal
Starbucks and software giant Microsoft have teamed up to offer web access
from Starbucks stores. According to Starbucks, the country’s biggest
coffee chain, the service will be introduced in roughly 70 percent of its
4,000 coffeehouses within two years. Starbucks customers will be able to
go online from their own computers or wireless web access devices, rather
than from in-store kiosks. The service will charge a fee. Additionally,
the Microsoft Network will offer content and services geared toward
Starbucks customers. Potentially, customers will be able to place orders
over the web and pick them up at their preferred Starbucks outlet.
Fourteen million people visit Starbucks each day, according to company
chairman Howard Schultz, and many of them are toting their laptops.
More than 200 dot.coms folded in 2000
As many as 210 internet companies failed last year, according to a study
by Webmergers.com. The pace of company collapses sped up in the last
quarter of the year--that’s when 60 percent of the companies that
failed actually shut down. About 110 of the dot.coms that died were
e-commerce ventures. Content sites comprised 30 percent of the internet
companies that failed, and infrastructure and service companies made up
the rest. The company failures cost investors about $1.5 billion. Up to
15,000 people lost their jobs as a result of the closings; this does not include workers who were laid off in mass firings in companies
that are still around. Some of the high-profile dot.com failures of 2000
include pet goods e-tailer Pets.com, music site Riffage.com and Gen Y
portal Kibu.com.
EToys shutters European
operations
Internet toy vendor eToys is shuttering its London-based European
operations as of Jan. 19. Etoys.co.uk was one of the largest online toy
retailers in the United Kingdom. All items on the site will be priced for
liquidation, and the 74 eToys employees in Europe will likely lose their
jobs. The shutdown of eToys’ European outpost is but the latest
symptom of the company’s troubles. EToys issued a profit warning last
month in the wake of weaker than expected sales. In the profit warning,
eToys mentioned that it is exploring a merger, asset sale or other
restructuring. During the holiday season, the Amazon.com-Toys R Us partnership beat eToys in terms of
traffic although it's hard to tell by how much because Toys R Us now
merely gets lumped into Amazon. EToys
attracted 21.1 million visitors over the week ended Dec. 24, according to
Nielsen//NetRatings, compared to the 123 million that visited Amazon.com,
of which Toys R Us is a part.
DotComGuy ends with a
whimper
DotComGuy, the 27-year-old who secluded himself in his apartment for a
year and subsisted only off products ordered online, emerged from his
publicity stunt at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1. DotComGuy’s gambit was
meant to promote e-commerce. But he did not emerge a rich man. Although he
had arranged for 10 sponsors to pay him a $98,000 salary, four of them
bailed. That meant DotComGuy had to apply the remaining salary toward
personal and business expenses. Still, he gets to keep the items he bought
online. The web site, DotComGuy.com, broadcast his image 24 hours a day
from everywhere in his apartment but his bathroom. The site attracted less
traffic than expected--less than 200,000 unique visitors each month.
While DotComGuy.com is still up and running, its future is in doubt due to
insufficient funding. DotComGuy, meanwhile, has moved into a new
apartment. He plans to legally change his name back to Mitch Maddox and
marry a woman he met last year on the internet.
Napster: Don’t violate
our copyright
Music-swapping site Napster has filed suit against Napsterstore.com, an
online vendor of unauthorized, Napster-themed clothing. Napsterstore.com
claims that its wares are official but Napster says they aren't. The copyright suit
is ironic, given that Napster itself has garnered the wrath of recording
artists and record companies for making copyrighted songs accessible to
its users for free. Napster was almost shut down as a result of a lawsuit
from the music industry, and it still faces litigation from all major
record labels except its new partner, Bertelsmann Music Group.
Napsterstore, meanwhile, stands to benefit from the free publicity,
especially since its being sued should appeal to the
antiauthoritarian spirit of Napster users. Napsterstore’s T-shirts and
baseball caps bear slogans such as "Download this!" and
"Banned by some of the finest universities in America."
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