Founder of LifeMinders steps down as CEO
The man who founded the targeted emailer LifeMinders is resigning as its chairman and CEO, as the company continues to struggle to produce revenue. Founder Stephen Chapin has been replaced by board member Jonathan Bulkeley, the former CEO of Barnesandnoble.com. At the same time, LifeMinders has officially announced layoffs that were actually made back on Jan. 5--19 percent of its workforce were let go, which was 31 people. As another cost-cutting move, LifeMinders has announced it will close down its wireless division. LifeMinders announced a net loss of $70.5 million for the fourth quarter. The bulk of LifeMinders’ income comes from the direct-marketing advertising it includes in the "reminder" emails it sends to its members. LifeMinders says its bottom line was hurt by slow ad sales and stricter credit policies. Currently, LifeMinders has 21 million members. Industry observers had hailed LifeMinder’s technique of inserting ads into personalized emails as a way to profit off the internet, but the belt-tightening at LifeMinders suggests the company’s model is no magic bullet to make it more successful than any other ad-supported dot.com.

Sports retailer MVP.com is shutting down
Sporting goods e-tailer MVP.com has announced that it is shutting down. The news comes shortly after the company sold many of its assets, including its trademarks and several URLs, to former partner SportsLine.com. The year-old company was best known for its backers, three prominent athletes. One-time Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway led the venture, and basketball player Michael Jordan and hockey player Wayne Gretzky held large stakes in it. The web site is still up and running and accepting orders, and SportsLine has indicated it will keep the site up at least during the transfer of its assets. SportsLine broke off its partnership with MVP last fall after the company failed to make a multimillion-dollar quarterly payment on time. Chicago-based MVP closed its offices in Boulder, Colo., and Austin, Texas, last month, laying off 166 employees in the process. MVP’s remaining 43 employees will be phased out over the next couple of months.

Study: High-speed access is the rule at work
By 2005, 87 percent of all workers who have at-work internet access will have high-speed connections, according to a new Jupiter Communications report. Currently, about 57 percent of people with internet access at work have a high-speed connection. In numbers that means that the at-work broadband market will grow from 24 million to 55 million people.  The at-home population of broadband users is about 36 percent of the size of the at-work broadband audience -- some 4.8 million households had broadband access as of the end of 2000, translating into about 8.6 million people. But most people who have broadband access at work have dial-up internet connections at home. Even as the high-speed market expands significantly in the workplace, Jupiter warned companies not to see it as any sort of panacea for reaching workers through broadband-enhanced advertising. People at work have too many distractions to be expected to tune into ad messages, the report says.

New Yorker to publish e-books
The New Yorker has teamed up with Microsoft to publish a series of e-books, which will be readable only in the Microsoft Reader format. The first of the e-books will debut this Tuesday. They will retail for $7.95 on BarnesandNoble.com--and on the New Yorker’s web site, which is slated to launch in the middle of next month. All of the e-books will contain material, both fiction and nonfiction, that already has been published in the New Yorker. In that vein, the first two e-books are anthologies. One, called, "The Price of Everything," contains business writings; the other, called "In Sickness and In Health," contains articles on medicine and health. Henry Finder edited both of the upcoming releases. New Yorker editors will compile all of the e-books.

Study: Smart sites seem to download faster
Everyone grumbles about web pages that take too long to load, but quick downloads might not matter as much as ease of use, according to research firm User Interface Engineering. UIE studied 10 popular web sites’ speeds via 56 kbps modem and had its testers perform tasks on the site, such as purchases and research. The subjects declared Amazon.com, REI.com and L.L. Bean.com to be the fastest and About.com the slowest. But the researchers determined that there was actually no correlation between actual download speeds and perceived download speeds. About.com, for example, was rated the slowest, but was actually the fastest site, with a load time of 8 seconds. High-rated Amazon proved to be one of the slowest sites; it took 36 seconds. Users tend to rate the sites on whether or not they have time to complete the task they set out to perform on the site. The finding contradicts conventional wisdom, which holds that users give up on sites that take longer than 10 seconds to load

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