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In what may be the harbinger of a new round of dot.com consolidation to come, internet brokerage ETrade is buying Web Street, a rival online brokerage. The $45 million deal gives ETrade an additional 34,000 active customers. Additionally, Web Street’s San Francisco, Boston, Denver and Beverly Hills, Calif., offices will be transformed into bricks-and-mortar ETrade Centers. Web Street was a much smaller brokerage than ETrade, which prior to this deal had roughly three million customers across its brokerage, banking and other branches. Web Street was based in Chicago. Like ETrade, it is publicly traded, but its shares had been hovering around the $1 mark, about a tenth of the price at which ETrade has been trading of late. The deal is expected to bring ETrade about $25 million in incremental annual revenues.
Harvard Biz Review will sell digitized version online
Harvard Business Review, the magazine of the Harvard Business School, has signed a three-year deal with NewsStand, a company that makes digitized versions of publications’ print editions. The Harvard Business Review-NewsStand product will be available starting next month. Penelope Muse Abernathy, the magazine’s publisher, says she regards the move as supplying an alternative distribution channel. "We feel this preserves the look and feel of HBR while providing the magazine in a form that may be more convenient for business travelers and those who prefer electronic delivery," Abernathy told Media Life. Content from the magazine has been available online for six years—some of it free, but most of it for a fee. The NewsStand edition will not supplant the web site. Rather, the NewsStand electronic version will contain the same layout, articles, ads and graphics as the print edition, which comes out 10 times a year. The Audit Bureau of Circulations includes sales of subscriptions through NewsStand as part of publications’ overall rate bases.
Web hackings swamp site that tracks them
With a hack-hack here and a hack-hack there, Attrition.org, a company that tracks online vandalism, has been overwhelmed. It has announced that it no longer will archive vandalized web sites. Attrition has been operating "mirrors" of defaced sites, which preserve the damage for the benefit of security professionals, reporters and other interested parties long after companies have repaired their hacked home pages. But online vandalism has been mounting lately, and Attrition’s staff has been unable to keep up. In the past month alone, the company has been faced with mirroring as many as 100 graffiti-splashed web sites a day--more than three times the total web vandalism in 1996 and 1995 combined. Attrition has been something of a labor of love, run by a small group of volunteers--lately at the expense of some Attrition members’ day jobs. The Attrition.org web site will remain online, and its other sections, such as its statistical analyses of web vandalism, will still be maintained.
DoubleClick and iBEAM will stream ads
Internet ad-serving company DoubleClick and streaming media company iBEAM Broadcasting have signed a deal that will allow them to furnish streaming ads together to online radio stations and high-speed music and news sites. The new partnership will integrate iBEAM's streaming technology with DoubleClick’s DART system, which automatically delivers ads tailored to specific consumers. The financial terms of the transaction were not revealed. This is not DoubleClick’s first foray into streaming media. Two months ago, the company made a deal with Radical Communications, an interactive messaging company, which gives DoubleClick access to Radical’s interactive email technology for streaming audio and video within emails.
Software piracy jumped in 2000
While the record companies were busy suing the Napsters of the world, the illegal duplication of business software increased--marking the first time in several years that software piracy has risen instead of falling. Last year, 37 percent of the software used in businesses all over the world was pirated, according to the Business Software Alliance. The pirated software capital of the world appears to be Vietnam, where fully 97 percent of the business software used is said to be pirated. Another hotbed of software piracy is Eastern Europe, where 63 percent of business software is pirated. In the U.S., pirated software comprises 24 percent of all business software used. Such piracy goes beyond merely borrowing a copy of Microsoft Office from one’s neighbor. Sophisticated software piracy rings are able to copy software en masse with widely available technology and sell it cheaply. Rampant piracy has led some companies, like Microsoft, to make their software quit working without an official authentication code. Overall, the Business Software Alliance claims that illegal duplication of business software cost software companies some $11.75 billion last year. Despite the increase in piracy, the dollar cost actually fell slightly over the previous year because of overall lower software prices and rising demand for software.
Supreme Court agrees to revisit porn law
The Supreme Court has decided to grant a request by the Justice Department to review a court decision that blocked enforcement of a 1998 congressional effort to limit children's access to online pornography. The law, which would have made it a crime to expose children to adult material, punishable by a maximum of six months in jail and $50,000 in fines, has been in limbo ever since lower federal courts in Pennsylvania prevented implementation. The law was a follow-up to the failed 1996 Communications Decency Act that was struck down by the Supreme Court for attempting to restrict adult access to indecent but not obscene content. The new law was supposed to address those concerns by requiring commercial web sites--not email, chat rooms or newsgroups--to collect a credit card number or an access code as proof of age. It also attempted to define indecency much more specifically. The ACLU and other groups still opposed the law on constitutional grounds and have come out in opposition to a review of the decision. The court will most likely hear the case and issue a decision in the term that begins next October.
May 22, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
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