Looking Back

In the ensuing 6 years, I’ve been going over and over what went wrong and discovered more lessons along the way: the market conditions were wrong, we were young and arrogant, and, for the most part, we didn’t really understand the magnitude of what we were trying to accomplish: to remind people, our goal was to launch a website in 16 countries (15 EU countries + the US) on day one, localizing our site for each of them. At the time (1999), no one had accomplished that broad a coverage (nor had anyone even tried to).

So it seemed a little crazy but, then again, crazy people had built Netscape, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon in the previous few years. So crazy seemed not only possible but it seemed to be the key to success on the Internet. The problems we encountered fell in a number of areas: currency exchanges, tax issues, language localization, integration with many fulfillment partners and a front-end experience that called for broadband connections. We basically wanted to build eCommerce 2.0 long before there was a web 2.0.

Looking Forward

So fast-forward to now. Broadband uptake is nearing 50% in many of the target countries and the number of users has grown tremendously, governments have learned about internet ecommerce and now have specific rules relating to it. And integration across many system is what web services and mash-ups are all about. Do I smell progress? So let’s revisit my old post (which later was published in Business 2.0) points and look at them through the 2006 lens.

The Currency Problem

Back then, the 16 countries we targeted meant 16 different currencies.

Today, with the rise of the Euro as a unifying currency, the same 16 countries only have 4 different currencies (the UK still being stuck on the pound sterling and Denmark keeping its currency a national one pegged to the Euro. The US and the Euro are the other two currencies covered.) This greatly reduces the complexity of pricing models across Europe and makes the overall cost of managing the catalog much lower.

Back then, we actually had to build our own currency tracker, with people inputing the exchange rates daily into the system to keep everything aligned.

Today, you can get access to currency exchanges via web services (just off the top of my head, I can think of Reuters and CBS Marketwatch providing this type of data), therefore automating what was once a manual task and, once again, reducing administration costs for the catalog.

Tax Issues

Back then, there was no consistency in the way taxes were assessed on goods sold online. The financial people at Boo.com version 1 spent a lot of time with a big 5 accountant group and a lot of local government to lobby for normalization of rules around taxes on cross-border business.

Today, because all of those governments understand the value of internet commerce and because many have worked in conjunctions with each other (through the G8 and the EU) to normalize rules surrounding taxation of goods sold on the Internet the problem is easier to solve.

Back then, we had to build our own systems to track all the vagaries of the different tax systems. It wasn’t a build vs. buy decision because there were no packages offered on the market to deal with this.

Today, you can buy software packages that has all the taxation rules built in so that problem is no longer one you need to build for. You can just buy the technology and let the vendor worry about the changes in taxation laws.

Language Localization

When we set out to build Boo.com, a strong component was the idea of offering the online store in the local language of the user. Boo.com was actually the first store to offer as high a level of customization by market and we had to make a number of changes to the e-commerce software package to make it into a globalized platform. Remember that, at the time, e-commerce was primarily the domain of US and UK companies so selling in a language other than English was rare. E-commerce sites which sold goods in non-English markets were generally customized on a one off basis but no one, prior to Boo.com, had attempted to have a single back-end system run multiple countries.

Today, more vendors are selling solutions which can be customized across a variety of western languages. The solutions are not yet perfect but, for the most part, they work (there are still a number of issues when it comes to localization across 2-byte languages, especially when it comes to site with mixed languages.) Back then, we also had to develop a content management system that could handle translation workflows and management of content in multiple languages. It wasn’t pretty but it worked and it required a lot of internal translation to happen. Each product had description, sizes, etc… available in multiple languages. That part was actually a fairly large management of content nightmare. Today, modern content management system can handle more complex workflows (allowing to track when translations are completed) and even can provide hooks to farm-out translation of the content to external parties. This substantially reduces the cost of a multi-country offering.

Integration with fulfillment partners

Back then, a fair number of people at Boo.com were experts in EDI (or electronic data infrastructure) because EDI bridges were the only way to integrate into our fulfillment partners. Web services didn’t exist so we had batch jobs triggering every hour to the warehouses at DeutchePost and UPS so they could pick, pack and ship the orders. This was expensive and probably the area where we lost the most money on a single transaction.

Today, services like fulfillment by Amazon provide the same service at a substantially lower cost and with less integration headaches as web services are making it easy to integrate their services into an e-commerce operation. That saving alone could justify the existence of Boo.com 2.0 (actually, it would be 3.0 as FashionMall tried to resurrect Boo.com once already).

Front-end

No discussion of Boo.com can be full unless we talk about its front-end.

The Broadband Penetration Problem 

Many people laughed at the attempt we made at creating a more user friendly interface to e-commerce. Back then, a more interactive experience meant using Flash. It was the only way to get a lot of parts moving together. Things like Zoom-In/Zoom-out or Rotate type of effects were hard to accomplish with DHTML and much easier to do so with Flash. Since XML didn’t exist, we didn’t have AJAX. Since we didn’t have AJAX, we went with Flash. Since we went with Flash, the assets were large. Since the assets were large and the average user was connecting via a 56k modem, the site looked slow.

The idea was that every click should feel snappy, a model now common with AJAX-based applications but we failed in one assumption, which is that broadband penetration would move at a faster rate. Our expectation were that 1Megabit lines (much slower than what one now gets via cable or DSL) would be readily available within a year. That was a very flawed assumption and we had not planned any contingency for any slower a deployment.

Selling clothes requires details

Another interesting challenge was that we were trying to sell clothes online. Evaluating a DVD, CD, or book online is easy. However, clothing is different: when people shop for clothes, they like to feel the fabric, look at the details in the fabric. That experience was hard to reproduce online. Back then, what we set out to do, in order to help mimic some of the experience was to have highly detailed pictures of the goods. 

Every product was shot multiple times at a stunning 5 megapixels per picture (the highest possible resolution at the time). This meant picture files that were about 1–2 Mb per file, something that seems small in the era of Flickr and YouTube but was massive in the era of 56k modems. The advantage of such detailed pictures was that you could zoom in to a level higher than what you could do in a store (part of our attempt to compensate for the fact that you couldn’t touch the merchandise). Today, such level of detail is standard among most of the online clothing manufacturers and with more broadband lines, it’s no big deal.

Another innovation we introduced was the presentation of products in 3D. You could basically rotate every product in our inventory any way you wanted. This, at a time when QuickTimeVR was not on the marketplace. This meant getting our photography partners to come up with completely new approaches to taking product shots, sometimes requiring as many as 15–20 shots per product in order to get everything right. Those pictures were then taken into Flash and adjusted so that you could rotate the product and zoom in and out of it, a feat that now seems pretty standard, using QuickTimeVR.

All that photography work didn’t come cheap, especially when you consider that this was done across 5,000 products and that all the assets were then stored on our servers (Hard Drive space was nowhere near as cheap as it is now). 

Modeling

Another innovation was the introduction of virtual models you could use to try the clothes on. Today, Sears offers a lower quality version of what we were offering back then (their model still requires a reload of the full page to turn it.) Because all the products had 3D equivalent, modeling them was relatively easy and we decided to throw it in as an extra feature that helped enhance the user experience. Once again, because of the processing and bandwidth required to make that happen, the idea was ahead of its time. 

Miss Boo

So we now all know that chatty avatars on web sites are not a good idea. The concept behind Miss Boo was to help make the experience similar to that of a store, with a sales assistant (Miss Boo), helping you out. Our long term goal was to have Miss Boo attached on the back-end to a real person so we could have integrated IM while you were shopping (that plan never came to fruition as the company had other concerns after launch). In the process, though, we’ve learned that avatars are generally despised and probably helped many sites avoid them.

Tagging

Because we wanted the experience to be a more communal one, we had a way for users to tag clothing (well, we didn’t call them tags, we called them “LaBOOls” (labels, with a Boo in the middle, get it?) in the great tradition of badly named things on our site). However, because there was no AJAX or other way to quickly get the data back and forth, it required a reload of the whole page after each tag was applied. The feature was quickly killed in order to gain speed but I can’t think of any other site that had tagging on products at the time (if I’m wrong, please rectify me in the comments).

Chatty Tone

The BooZine (Boo Magazine) was our attempt to create a more friendly, open tone when dealing with users. We didn’t want to be just a store, we wanted to engage the users. When our forums (remember, this is before blogs were popular) started filling up with vitriolic comments, we were forced to shut them down, closing a channel of communication for users to us. It was a real shame but I think our attempt can be mirrored in the way most web 2.0 companies now have a blog that they use to receive feedback from users.

A more mature market

Back then, few people were buying stuff online. Even fewer were buying clothes online and an even smaller number than that was buying hip clothing. Considering all the challenges Boo.com was trying to address, its target market was just too small to make it a successful business.

Today, blogs like CoolHunting, HypeBeast or MocoLoco show that there is a market for the types of goods Boo was trying to sell. That, in itself, could be a good reason for Boo.com to come back: The market they were addressing is finally there. However, it may also be a reason for it to not comeback: the market they were addressing now has competitors in it.

Was Boo.com the first Web 2.0 company?

I have to admit that I’ve been feeling a certain level of uneasiness about Web 2.0: to me, there didn’t seem to be much there that I had not seen before: web services (yup, done since 2000), user generated content (tried it in a limited fashion with with the “labools” and forums), more transparency (tried that with forums in the past), chatty tone (attempted at Boo). What I failed to realize is that where we failed was in the way we implemented things. But looking back now, the reason it didn’t feel new was that much of that experimentation was on our site only, not part of a more widespread phenomenon.

Another thing that got me thinking along the way of Boo.com as a Web 2.0 company was the excellent post on Pixel Acres about the visual design of web 2.0. Let me explain, picking points from the article:

Integral to Web 2.0 is harnessing the input of website visitors. Users can generate content for a web service, promote it in a “viral” peer-to-peer fashion, and improve it’s data quality through their opinions and preferences.

Users of Boo could create their model, share it with friends (following the UGC model, I guess). So the input component was there, as was the sharing one.

Most Web 2.0 sites come across as friendly, approachable and small-scale, using subtle design decisions to gain our trust.

Every decision about the front end was to make it appear friendly, chatty and hide as much of the complexity as possible (that’s why so many people thought what we were doing was easy but badly implemented).

Bright, cheerful colors dominate Web 2.0 sites… Bold primary colors suggest a playful, fun attitude and also help to draw attention to important page elements.

One word: orange. The boo.com site had cheerful colors all over the place (sometimes so cheerful that I worried it would be seen as a toy)

Rounded Everything: The friendliness of rounded corners is in keeping with the comfortable, informal tone of many web 2.0 sites… In a great FontShop article analysing the logos of Web 2.0, it was clear that rounded typefaces are all the rage. This smooth approach to type lends a modern playfulness to a company’s visual identity.

Yup, Boo.com was round, very round, even the logo and the fonts. From a visual standpoint, it was much closer to today’s web 2.0 site than the ones it lived among.

Most Web 2.0 sites devote prime real estate to the message that they offer a free service.

Well, we kept pushing our “Free” boozine (Boo Magazine) and looked at it as a way to hook people into coming back again and again to the site.

You won’t find any stock photography of smiling support staff on a Web 2.0 site — that’s a tactic favored by small companies trying to mimic large corporations. Simple icons and screenshots are the order of the day when it comes to imagery on Web 2.0 sites. 3D and beveled icons can lend elegance and polish to a page design that is otherwise fairly stark.

Boo.com was 100% stock photography free. It was all icons and cartoons.

A good Web 2.0 app ought to be lightweight and easy for users to grasp, and clever visual design and copywriting can help remove barriers to entry. Smart use of layout, color, type and copy can go a long way towards easing the pain.

Well, we failed on the lightweight end of things but the design was to be as airy as possible.

As far as Web 2.0 is concerned, bigger is definitely better. Bigger text, that is. Large text is easy on the eye, and coupled with snappy copywriting makes information easy to absorb. And now that accessibility is cool, it’s possible to be a hotshot web designer and use enormous type.

… and back then, people said we didn’t make good use of the real estate because the fonts on our screens were too big. However, note that accessibility was inexistant at Boo.com

The layout of Web 2.0 sites might be described as minimal. With a focus on legibility and ease of use, good use is made of white space. White space allows important information to stand apart, provides rest for the eye, and imparts a sense of calm and order. Generous leading also makes text copy easier for the eye to follow. Some Web 2.0 layouts are so minimal that they verge on boring, but designed well, an uncluttered page can be incredibly tasteful.

Yes, we had a lot of whitespace.

Friendly, informal copywriting allows a more personal relationship with website visitors.

People complained that our content was too informal, actually. I guess taste has changed in the following years.

So, from a visual standpoint, we may have established some of the rules that are now considered good visual rules for Web 2.0 companies. Of course, feature wise, we didn’t have RSS (it had not achieved the level of popularity it now has) and worked largely as a walled garden (all interaction happened on our site) but Boo.com was probably sitting closer to a Web 2.0 sensibility than most companies that existed at the time.

Conclusion

Based on past history, the complexity that existed back then has largely disappeared, making it possible for Boo.com to exist in the web 2.0 world. The market has also evolved to the point where many of the innovations first introduced by Boo.com are now considered mainstream and where many of its barriers to entry seem to have disappeared. This means that Boo.com could have a chance at surviving this round. However, one would have to be careful about overspending on advertising (a crime that Boo.com was responsible of, with its massive multi-country ad budget). A question that remains on the viability of the brand is whether the errors of the past have damaged the brand to a point where it would not be able to come back. It is probably the most dangerous factor in the rebirth of Boo.com and, if the negative press of the past overshadows the re-emergence of this company, it could be a fatal flaw that could ultimately make this a bad idea.

I wish much luck to the parties involved in the relaunch. Hopefully, they won’t suffer from the same arrogance we suffered from in the first iteration of the company and will be able to build a strong business around this brand.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Why the Boo.comeback makes sense. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Making the Decision

The first, and probably toughest, part of this migration was to actually make the jump. This site, and every bit on it, is something I’ve carefully crafted over the years. Up to recently, I could proudly say that every piece of code on the site was something I had written myself. It was a point of pride and, while blog software was still new, it was also a way to experiment and go deep into the code. Over the years, though, software platforms have gotten more and more complex and my own code failed to keep up.

The second part of the decision in making the jump was also due to my focus on spending more time writing. However, this was balanced by my need to tinker with the code. As time went on, it became more and more difficult to figure out where I wanted to experiment.

Last but not least in that decision was the fact that everything I was building was my own but not something I could really share with anyone. Time and time again, people asked me how I implemented a particular feature on my blog and I had no way to deal with this than to pass the whole code, ugly commenting and all, to them.

Last month, the main drive on TNL.net crashed, something that appeared like a disaster at the time but was really a blessing in disguise. Having to rebuild the box, I decided that it was time for a massive upgrade. First, I would upgrade the operating system (TNL.net had been languishing on an old version of Redhat Linux 7.3 for so many years due to some bad system design decisions I made when I moved to Linux a few years ago). Having done so, I also decided to upgrade the web server (to Apache 2.0), the database (to MYSQL 5) and the programming language (to PHP 5). It was a major upgrade and, as is the case with every major upgrade, things started to break. I spent a considerable amount of time bringing things back up and reintroducing tweaks that had built up over several years. It was then that I realized that maybe a different approach was needed.

Who are the contenders?

Having decided that I would upgrade the blog to someone else’s software, I had to establish what factors I would consider when building the new site. From there, I built a quick list:

• The software I would take had to be something I could tweak: While I’m leaving my existing code base behind, I still want to have some level of control over what goes on under the covers.
• The software I would use had to be open source. My reasoning for this is that open source not only means free but it also means that I am not worried about control issues further down the road. So any changes that I make and then redistribute doesn’t fall under some kind of corporate legal entity and therefore (fingers crossed) I won’t have to worry about legal issues relating to my amendments.
• The software would have to be extensible through some type of plug-ins or module infrastructure.
• The software would have to be written in PHP and use MYSQL because those are technologies I’m familiar with and I didn’t feel like learning something new.
• The software would have to match the features I had running in my existing blog.

Having those requirements made the choice considerably easier, as it left only two major contenders: Drupal and WordPress. In the end, I decided on WordPress for purely visual reason: the admin interface just struck me as much more polished so I went with it. Drupal had a geekier feel to it but WordPress felt like a more finished product (and here, I may show some bias for interface).

Starting the migration

The first step in migrating things to move over was to figure out what I needed to migrate. One of things I wanted to ensure was that any upgrade would have little or no impact on the overall feel of the site. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time tweaking TNL.net so it did not necessarily feel like a blog and so that the user experience was always as optimized as possible, allowing people to get to any content within only a few clicks.

First Challenge: Look & Feel

This presented some challenges: the first challenges was in keeping the interface consistent. Most blog packages come with a set of skins or themes that are used by beginning users. I, however, set out on a path to change the whole look and feel to mirror exactly (pixel perfect) the previous look of the site. This sent me down the path of theme development for WordPress and I spent many hours learning about the internals of the system in order to make it do what I wanted it to.

The other look and feel challenge was in the URL structure of the site. For years, the URL structure on TNL.net has not changed however, I’ve always been bugged by some of the limitations I had created for myself. For example, entries could not have the same title because I had created a system that prevented me from being able to do so. It seemed clever at the time but turned out to be a major design flaw. As a result, the URLs for every entry sat at roughly the root of the site. I wanted to make sure that any Google juice or other types of linkage would not break so I had to write my own routine to redirect pages correctly. This ensured that the URL structure of old could still remain.

Second Challenge: Data structure

In the process of writing my own blog, I defined my own data structure. I wanted to ensure that it would be followed in WP but it took some tweaking to get everything to map correctly. However, thanks to the RSS importing feature, I was able to import most of the old entries without problems. This, once again, was to ensure that continuity would remain unbroken and that the site would still function as it always did.

However, a second challenge was in importing comments. I’m still trying to figure that one out as I’m working on importing all the comments back into the new system. They’re temporarily offline but they will come back.

Third Challenge: RSS feeds

A substantial amount of TNL.net reader never visit the site: they get it via RSS. This presented a new challenge as I wanted to ensure that they would remain mostly undisturbed through this transition. In the process, though, I decided to move to a new model that would ensure they never have to worry about such URL changes. I redirected all the feeds to new URLs (http://feeds.tristanlouis.com/TNLnet for the excerpts feed and http://feeds.tristanlouis.com/TNLFull for the full entry feed) which are now powered by FeedBurner, allowing me to get a better understanding of who my readers are while helping migrate them from one platform to another. In a sense, FeedBurner is now serving as a migration tool while at the same time providing me with a new URL schema that I could take anywhere I want.

Conclusion: A pretty seamless transition

All and all, while it was some work to get most everything working, the transition has been pretty good so far. I’ve gained a fair number of new features and am still exploring how the system works. It seems to be much more feature rich than any code base I developed so that’s another great relief. On the downside, I feel a little sad to let go of a large chunk of code powering the site (the TNL.net blog was powered by a 90k PHP file which will soon be cleaned up). I’m still considering adapting the old code to deal with the front end of TNL.net but, all and all, it looks like WordPress will be my blogging tool of choice… until I decide to switch again.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title On the WordPress move. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Much will be made about the pricing of the mini iPod, with people debating whether it is too expensive or priced well enough so I’m not going to go over that ground here. My view is that anyone who thinks they can get the 15Gb iPod for only 50 dollars more that the mini-iPod has made the kind of mental leap that Apple expects consumers to make.

The decision to introduce a 4 Gb iPod was an interesting one only in the fact that there were no similar announcements about a 2Gb and/or 1Gb device. The question here is why did Apple decide not to introduce products of this kind in the marketplace. I suspect that the reasoning here is that 4Gb is rare enough (In my searches, I could only find one competing device, which has since been discontinued) that it makes it difficult to do side by side comparisons between the new mini-ipods and other products.

The other surprise was the disappearance of the 10Gb iPod. What was the issue with it that forced to obsolete it instead of dropping its price to $250?

On the software end, the fact that no one mentioned anything about the upgrades to iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD being “available for download” to quote the often repeated words of last year’s keynote address, was interesting. The omission was so glaring that I doubted the application had actually been downloadable in the past but, thanks to Google cache, was able to double check my assumption (See the Google cache for iMovie iPhoto, and iDVD)

I guess the iLife suite did not do so well in terms of retailing in the past year. This could have to do with the fact that most of the applications in the suite were available for free (once again, we turn to Google cache for more data). Maybe iDVD and GarageBand were just not enough to even justify the $49 price tag.

All and all, though, it was a very disappointing event, with very little to offer. I guess we’ll have to wait until the developer’s conference in order to feel any kind of excitement for some apple releases this year.

Update:

Jim Heid, from MaciLife points out that only updates were available for iDVD. The whole application was only available either by buying an Apple DVD player or by buying iLife. The reason for this is that the application was too big for download.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title MacWorld 2004: What was NOT said. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

IM

: One of the conditions for the AOL/Time Warner merger was that AOL open its instant messaging platform to other parties. By agreeing to interoperability between the AOL IM client and MSN messenger one, AOL will now be able to point to its “openness” while maintaining a relatively tight control over the progress of that tool. I am sure the two companies are interested in working together and somehow doubt that they will be very interested in opening the world to other competitors.

At the current time, IM has taken the consumer world by storm and is starting to make headway in the enterprise. Because of its presence concept (you can see whether the people on your buddy list are online right now or not), it will eventually become a critical tool in the enterprise, moving some data traffic from the phone and email to this new platform. Already today, enterprises that have implemented IM solutions are seeing large amounts of traffic on those networks as employees send the shorter requests via this tool. Enhancements in the collaboration aspect of those tools make them perfect to be used for setting up online discussions and document sharing. I suspect that, because AOL is forbidden from adding new features to its IM platform until it has shown to be more open, we will see the company point to Microsoft and get a free pass in terms of adding new features. This will be good for AOL because it will allow to enhance its enterprise offerings. It will also be good for Microsoft, as it will probably be able to increase its footprint into that space.

Long term, I would expect most of the development of this eventually ending on Microsoft’s lap, with AOL doing an asset transfer of its software division to Microsoft.

Digital Media

: Part of the deal includes a non-exclusive agreement for AOL to use the Microsoft Windows Media 9 software suite. Once again, this is good for both companies and bad for every single one of their competitors.

AOL will benefit from the lower cost of software acquisition moving forward. As it looks to move more into fee-based digital media services (with words that it could offer TV shows, music, movies, etc… from its vast assets collection) the company will make more substantial investments into those kinds of technologies. Since this is a partnership, I suspect the products will be heavily discounted.

Microsoft wins in that, if AOL, with its fairly large customer base, start offering more services running on Windows Media 9, it will make it easier for Microsoft to go after other media player and present its installed player footprint as a competitive advantage. The story will go as follows: use Windows Media 9 server and you will not have to worry about your customers having to download extra software. Of course, Windows Media servers will continue to run on the Windows operating system, which should increase sales in that market and protect Microsoft to some extent from the Linux onslaught.

Another important part of this portion of the agreement is that it will allow the two companies to set standards for digital rights management. DRM is basically covering how to ensure that copyrights and purchase rights are assessed on digital media. What this means is that a DRM system basically encodes a piece of digital media (whether it is a movie, music track or piece of software) to include information about what you purchased and how you are allowed to use it. For example, the Apple Music store currently sells music tracks that you are allowed to use on only three computers. Because AOL is one of the largest producer in the world of such media, and Microsoft regards this software area as a very lucrative market in the future, the partnership will give both players a substantial amount of power in shaping the future of digital media.

AOL wins in that it gets someone to do the heavy lifting on the software side to tighten up control of digital media. Microsoft wins in that it gets a better understanding of what large media companies will want and builds a solution it can then resell to other companies. Once again, this is also a good argument for furthering the number of implementations of windows servers as I suspect that Microsoft will strongly recommend media companies use their platform to handle this.

Browsers

: By now, the browser wars are, at best, a distant memory. While a few holdouts do not use Internet Explorer and considerable development and innovation is still happening by makers of non-IE browsers, the market for alternative browsers is relatively small. At last count, IE was controlling over 85% of the global market. The only bright spot in that market was a browser named Mozilla, an open source project for which Netscape, a subsidiary of AOL, was the largest contributor. Because of the bad blood between America Online and Microsoft, there were a lot of rumors about AOL implementing Mozilla as the core browser in its flagship client (it has already done so on the Macintosh computer). With the announcement that AOL will get a seven year royalties free license for Internet Explorer, it seems pretty apparent that support for Mozilla from the AOL camp will probably wane. The long term outlook for the Netscape unit does not look very bright, even if the AOL chairman said that they were not closing the unit for now.

Politics

: This announcement also shows some interesting development in internal politics within the two companies.

In the mid-90s, Microsoft was starting to move more into the general media space. With this agreement, Microsoft signals the completion of a shift back to its software roots. It is probably a realization that there is still a lot of growth in that arena and that it doesn’t make sense from their standpoint to try to get into the media world by acquiring and/or building media assets.

On the AOL/Time-Warner front, this announcement shows a clear power shift in who controls the company. The power is now in Time-Warner hands, with any concept of competing with Microsoft on the software end now a distant memory. Time-Warner understands media and figures that it is better to rely on an outside party to deal with the software side of the business than to try to develop things themselves.

I am sure I’m missing a few things but I expect this story to continue unfolding and having repercussions across the whole Internet space.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title AOL-Microsoft Settlement: The Future. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At $30/month, Wi-Fi service can currently be seen as an expensive toy for the mobile worker. But if you consider the possibility to make phone calls for the same price, the price seems low. Compared to most cellular phone programs that offer a few hundred or thousand minutes every month for roughly the same price, the idea of unmetered service could represent a huge growth opportunity for anyone offering a hotspot. However, the issue will then become one of available bandwidth. As more and more hotspots are added, the pervasiveness of Wi-Fi makes the possibility to bypass the phone network more real.

The next step in that evolution would be for the Wi-Fi protocol to include some kind of mechanism to check the strength of signal. If you think of the cellular phone system, you will realize that your cell phone conversation moves from station to station as you are moving. Every second, the cell phone checks where the nearest antenna is and changes access accordingly. This ensures that you get the highest signal possible and allows for the phone to stay connected even as you get further away from the original antenna you used. Wi-Fi does not currently have that checking capability in place but when it does, Wi-Fi phones could become more common.

It is interesting to see this happen as cellular phone companies might find themselves displaced in much the same way they are starting to displace land lines. New technologies keep cropping up that disrupt the way business is done and put more pressure on revenues (because they are, invariably, introduced to users at a cut-rate price in order to gain market shares).

However, the economics of wireless networks rely on a limited use of equipment (for example, as more people sign up for a mobile phone service, the quality of the service drops because more people are trying to use the same equipment). With the rise of Wi-Fi and the introduction of small operators (coffee shops, etc…) it will be interesting to see what will happen. My guess is that we will eventually see all the large mobile phone operators introducing Wi-Fi plans over the next 12–24 months. We will then see the rise of one or two new companies that will hook up smaller operators into a different set of networks. As the cost of providing the service increases (because more bandwidth will be required), the smaller players will shake out of the market. Once that has happened, the winners in that fight will start to increase prices again.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Disruptive Technology. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The AIM client allows any users on the Internet to create a “buddy list” and carry on text-based chat with other people on their buddy list. With 27 million AOL users and 21 million registered AIM users, America Online has become the leading provider of instant messaging software, dwarfing its competitors in terms of user base. According to MediaMetrix, Yahoo Messenger is the second most popular instant messaging client, with 10.6 million users, followed by Microsoft’ MSN Messenger, with 10.3 million registered users.

AOL has aggressively promoted its AIM messaging platform as a corporate tool, cutting deals with Novell and Lotus to incorporate it in their offerings. However, its focus on security issues has not been as strong as its marketing. In the past AOL has covered up security breaches instead of being forthcoming about them, said Dave Cassel, editor of the AOL Watch Newsletter, an email mailing list sent out to 50,000 subscribers.

Two areas in which AIM security has already been compromised are password theft and buffer overflow, a way for hackers to remotely crash a computer system by sending a certain set of characters to an AIM client. Furthering the problem is the fact that the client does not need to be running at the time in order to be exploited. Simply installing it on a machine is enough to expose it to the buffer overflow problem.

In January 2000, hackers were coming to the press with that problem because they wanted the buffer overflow security hole closed, said Cassel. But AOL didn’t respond so the hackers thought that negative press would spur AOL into action. After I wrote an article about it, AOL said they would close the hole but in December 2000, the hole could still be exploited.

In December, @Stake, an Internet security consulting firm, issued a security advisory about the buffer overflow problem. In it, the company described how a hacker could use the AIM client to shutdown a computer or execute local commands on the victim’s desktop.

The issue was fixed, said Nicholas Graham, a spokesperson for AOL. We encourage our users to upgrade but it’s not an issue at this point.

Weld Pond, manager of research and development for @Stake, added that while the December issue was not exactly the same one as the January one, it did fall into the same class of problems. What that illuminates is the fact that they are not using secure policies, he said. It’s sort of like finding out that one of your windows has no lock and not going around to check the other windows.

We answer instances of security on a case by case basis, defends Graham. Our latest client is the most secure one to date and we intend to continue providing a more robust and more secure client as time goes on.

Buffer overflow and the hijacking of AIM screen names have been problems since AIM was introduced a few years back, said an active AOL hacker who preferred to remain anonymous. Product integrity and security has never been a specialty of AOL and this is very obvious from the numerous exploits I and others have found in the service in the past three years.

While AOL has issued a new version of its client correcting the problem, the security risks posed by the AIM client should remain a concern among system administrators. The funny thing is that upgrading to the most recent version of AIM solves nothing, said the hacker. Most of the exploits are what we call server side hacks, which means the software client has nothing to do with the hack at all. The buffer overflow hack was the only major hack so that involved the actual client software.

Some of my buddies used the hijacked AIM accounts to carry on fake conversations with the friends of the person who originally owned it. The conversations resulted in my buddies tricking the real owner’s friends into providing personal information and even credit card information. People have no reason to believe that accounts have been hacked unless the real owner notifies them.

This was the problem that Habeeb Dihu, a senior principal at Diamond Cluster, an ebusiness consulting firm., encountered when a hacker kidnapped his instant messenger ID. I was working on the Covisint deal, he said, referring to the B2B exchange developed by General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Oracle, and Commerce One.

Because we have consultants working at several clients, the way we keep in touch with each others is through instant messaging. Somewhere in the middle of the Covisint deal, my AIM screen ID got hacked. Someone masqueraded as me and started to talk to my coworkers. I took care of it by alerting all my co-workers but AOL was very unresponsive in terms of tech support. I was completely ignored by the support people there and was finally contacted by the head of press relations for AOL after I talked to the press. Relative to how much AIM is used in the corporate world, the security behind this thing is abysmal.

Following the incident, the company instituted a review of different instant messaging solutions and standardized on Yahoo’s Instant Messenger. Despite the fact that you could have some ID theft issue behind Yahoo, no one has managed to hack into the yahoo user database to the extent of the problems with MSN and AOL, he added. We looked at Yahoo’s corporate solution but the cost of corporate yahoo was prohibitive compared to the free products available out there, he said, adding that his company has been involved in the development of Jabber, another IM client. Our hope is that jabber will increase security and we’ll be able to migrate there but it’s not quite there yet in terms of robust user interface for non technical people.

Instant Messaging is used as much if not more than email these days in the corporate world. The lack of security and lack of completeness in the solution is pretty alarming from my perspective. The only messaging solution that hasn’t been hacked is Yahoo’s and it’s only a matter of time before it happens.

If you just want to talk to people in your company, you’re better off using some other piece of software that wouldn’t be under as much scrutiny from hackers, said Cassel.

Using a third party to do your corporate communication that has no legal standing is a dangerous thing, said Pond. Unlike the phone, it’s unregulated and insecure. When you are using AOL IM, you’re sending your communication in the clear over the Internet to AOL’s server and back, whether you are talking to someone in a remote location or in the office next door. People think of it as the phone but they shouldn’t. AOL has full control of communication for corporations who use AIM for communication.

We’re moving to a world were there are more and more clients that people are running on their machines, out of the control of the IT department. Companies should set security policies set up at corporate level and work on an approval process for those clients.

However, there’s no one size fits all solution. Different environments can put the expense out there to create more secure environments. Thinking you can sort of read about a security problem and know what the best solution is without taking the environment into consideration is not possible.

There are far better products out there such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, said the hacker. But these products haven’t taken off in popularity due to AOL’s huge market share. These other products are far more secure and reliable than the AIM service. Any hacker will tell you this.

Network managers can solve the issue by either blocking out connection to the AOL IM servers or install different clients on their users’ desktops. Groove is doing a similar kind of tool but it’s an encrypted chat in a peer to peer environment, which ends up being more secure, said Pond.

If you have to use it, spend as little time as possible on it, adds Cassel. When I’m through with my messaging conversation, I close it out the software in both my window and my tray. Yes, I can’t be messaged but I also can’t be hacked. I just keep my email window open and then people can reach me that way. Your email client is definitely more secure than IM.”

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title AIM Not Secure. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Hybrid World Lives!

Many of you may remember the February 10th issue about Hybrid Computing. While talking with Birger Steen, CEO of Scandinavia Online, I discovered that the concept is not that far off the market. It is his contention that WAP-enabled phones are largely a pain in the back when it comes to interface. Having to key in every letter on the small phone keyboard is far from the easiest thing in the world. As a result, Scandinavia Online has developed a set of services that allows users of their portal jump on their site and configure their WAP view on the web. From his point of view, this is the best service he can offer now to wireless users.

The point was reiterated by a few people around the conference that told me that going to the web to configure a cell phone was the best way to deal with the small screen interface problem encountered by most WAP phones. Anne Rasmussen, of WAPportal.net demonstrated how their company plans to offer a similar service in a hosted fashion for corporate sites and others. The word around Scandinavia is that if you want to find the best way to configure a WAP phone, you have to go to the web via a computer to do so.

M-Commerce Huge … but not for Etailers

Another significant trend is the rise of M-commerce. In Finland, and to a lesser extent Denmark, Norway and Sweden, people can already use their WAP phones to buy from vending machines. The vending machine has a telephone number on it. You dial that number and a credit is added to the machine, to be billed on your phone bill. With the introduction of security in the new WAP standards, a few people were talking about how in the future the question “will it be cash, check, credit card, or phone?” may not sound silly.

What they envision is that WAP phones could become the new credit card.

A recent survey found that in Scandinavian countries, 82% of the people would go back to get their cell phone if they forgot it before leaving home, while only 64% would do the same thing if they forgot their wallet. The basic concept is one that may be foreign to those of us who live in the United States and revolves largely around the fact that GSM phones are equipped with a small identification chip called a SIM card. You can take the chip out of one phone and put it in another and you don’t have to worry about changing phone number or contact info.

Because of the emergence of such a way to do billing, some of the speakers at the conference predicted that the long run path for mobile phone operators would be to merge with financial institutions as their services will increasingly resemble those of credit card companies.

However, few people were optimistic about the prospects of etailers when it comes to mobile phones. “When I’m in a store buying something, I’m not going to go up on the web to check if it’s available at a web store,” told me one attendant. “I want to get it now and not wait a few days for it to show up in the mail.”

As a result, the promise of m-commerce is good for software vendors (who will sell packages that allow operators to set themselves up as currency clearinghouse) and mobile phone operators (who could become the next big financial force) but unfortunately, current etailers will not fare as well.

Content is King… in a Wireless Republic

The promise of advertising supported content on wireless phone has been hailed by some as a new way to support content sites. Unfortunately, few content providers will survive in the wireless space as demand for those services does not seem to meet expectations. Talking with people from the Scandinavian arm of large American companies who have tried to go the wireless route as a distribution channel, I discovered that there was not much demand for those services. “Sure, people do check the price of their stock on the phones but they still call our voice line to place their order,” said one executive from an online trading company.

As a general rule, the demand for content seems to be limited to a few areas: entertainment (bars, clubs, and restaurants locators), financial (stock prices) and sport-related (latest scores). However, many of the people involved in those areas told me that they were still looking for a proper business model. The locators are looking at a coupon-like scheme, whereas bars can offer a special coupon and people can go to a bar and show the phone coupon to get a rebate on drinks (“It appears that beer is the hot wireless app” quipped one panelist). Financial services and sports services are currently looking at possible subscription based models or at deals with operators whereas they would share a portion of the revenue they are generating for the operators.

CN U RD THS

On the other hand, communication in the hot wireless app. SMS has clearly become the hot app when it comes to wireless service across Scandinavia and across Europe. Because operators are charging lower rates for data services than they are for voice traffic, short messaging has become the quickest way for people to get in touch. A new lingo is starting to pop up around SMS as people are trying to economize the number of keystroke they type (SMS messages are limited to 160 characters). As a result, the headline for this section would translate from CN U RD THS to Can you read this?

Convergence in the Making

I also talked to a bartender who told me that the previous night a woman was in the bar looking for some of her friends and asked him if he could change the TV channel to a particular teletext page (in a lot of European countries, TV channel use the extra bandwidth to carry data. As a result, while watching the BBCyou could switch to the BBC teletext channel and read the latest news, etc… on there). The channel this woman was using allowed her to converse with several of her friends in a TV-based chat room by using her phone and an SMS gateway. True convergence in my book but the problem here is where revenues for an online operator are. Unfortunately, the only operators who will make money on this will be the phone operators who are racking up extra data minutes of usages.

Smaller, Faster, Cheaper

The good news, from a user’s point of view, though, is that those services are coming in a smaller package. A lot of the phones I saw over there would put our American phones to shame. On average, European phones are now weighing about 2.78 ounces (79 g.), a form factor of 3.9 X 1.75 X .6 inches (101.5 X 44.5 X 17 mm.), and a battery life that allows for either 150 hours of standby time or 4 hours of talk time. Of course, they come equipped with voice recognition (so you can have the number dial based on a name you give to it), predictive text input (a new set of tools for SMS which allows the phone to predict what word you’re going to type based on your input), and are WAP ready. The most interesting thing is that they usually are priced under $200 which makes me feel that we’re overpaying in the US.

The future is now?

The new thing around that space, though, is not a smaller phone or a better way to do e-commerce but a new set of services around higher speeds of access. The first step in that direction is GPRS, which offers about 20kb per second and has been rolled out around Europe. This is seen as a way to distribute such services as music and better news on the phones. However, the real discussion is centering on UMTS which promises wireless throughputs of 2Mb per second or more. Portions of the UMTS spectrum have already been allocated in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Finland, with the rest of Europe moving quickly on allocating this space. UMTS proponents envision the use of wireless video conferencing and a better Internet experience to result from this new development.

Euro Fighting

One of the big challenge in terms of doing business in Europe is location. Because most of the European countries are too small to create an actual market for digital services, European operators usually have to provides sites in multiple languages, and support multiple currencies. As a result, European etailers tend to be in favor of the Euro, which would make their lives a little easier. However, as the currency is slowly deflating in the currency market, opposition to the Euro is growing across Europe. On September 26, Denmark is holding a vote on whether to join the Eurozone or not and this election is seen across Europe as a big test for the Euro’s power.

The reason it the Danish election is so important in Europe is that if the Danish vote fails, England’s upcoming vote will probably do so too. As a result, there is a lot of concern across Europe about this election. Many etailers I met in Copenhagen told me that they were trying to organize themselves to push for adoption and work across borders when it comes to those election. Danes I talked to told me that British conservative politicians (who are opposed to joining the Eurozone) had been lobbying in Denmark. This is a race that etailers both in Europe and the United States should pay attention to as it will most probably dictate the viability of the Euro as a currency and, if the Euro succeeds, could mean less headaches to all of us.

Going beyond Economic matters, support or lack thereof could mean either an acceleration or a slowdown for eEurope, a new initiative by the European Union to become a force in the information age by normalizing rules related to e-commerce across the difference members of the EU and offering incentives to companies that want to bring net services to the EU marketplace. Among the initiative supported under eEurope are net access in public schools and public centers, lower access costs for businesses and individuals, agreement on common specifications for a smart card infrastructure, financial support for emerging tech companies and a number of social support and government services becoming available to all via the Internet.

All and all, what eEurope would mean is that countries would work in the EU government to set up rules about the Internet. I do not need to tell anyone reading this that it would be better for those of us in the industry as we would not have to lobby several governments in order to get the proper support for our industry.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title From Scandinavia With Love. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What I came to realize is that what works for a computer does not necessarily work in a wireless environment. The main issue is input and output. A wireless Palm is great to get information but somewhat difficult to use to send out email (typing in graffiti being the biggest challenge so far) and WAP works well to get little bits and pieces of information but is limited to a set number of characters (depending on which version of WAP you’re using, you will get an allocation of between 1500 and 2000 characters). As a result, sending out something like this newsletter over WAP does not seem to make sense.

However, a new breed of services is now popping up and it could be the next big thing: connecting to the Internet by just dialing into a phone number. In order to test this out, I checked out several services: Tellme Networks, which launched last month to a barrage of publicity, and Quack, which has been quieter but is also launched. Other contender for the space (and all of those are launching “soon”) are Internet Speech, BeVocal, and 888TelSurf.

Tellme Networks

Mike McCue is no stranger to bleeding edge technology. I met Mike back in 1995, when he was running a company called Paper Software. Paper did VRML browser, at a time when VRML was not only cool but also seen as the potential future of the net. Netscape acquired his company and Mike ended up as VP of technology there. While there, he looked at the future of the Internet.

However, as many other Netscapees, Mike ended up leaving Netscape and founded a new company: Tellme Networks.

Their goal: to make the web as easily accessible as using a phone. Pulling talent from both sides of the browser war (Netscape and Microsoft), Tellme was a very secretive operations until a couple of months ago, when it announced its offering: a phone service that gives you access to news, weather, sports, stocks, movies and restaurant info.

An interesting concept but how well did it hold up? Would I be stuck in one of those horrible menus (press 1 to access news, press 2 to access stocks…) or would it be better, I wondered as I registered for the service. To my surprise, it worked very well.

There are a number of interesting features in this service. First of all is the text to speech engine, which is one of the best ones I’ve heard so far. It takes bits of information and relays them in a clear and understandable way, which I found quite amazing. The voice recognition algorithm also held up very well, clearly understanding what I was saying (for those of you who’ve heard me speak, you know I have a fairly strong French accent, which makes this all the more amazing).

But what about the selection? Well it is, in one word, adequate. Not great but not bad either. I was able to get stock quotes (an interesting feature allows you to use the touchpad to spell out a stock symbol if the service does not recognize the name of the company you gave it), grab the latest news from CNN (the only general news provider tellme offers), pick up the weather in New York, check out a movie schedule, get some restaurant info and be connected to the restaurant for reservations. Also interesting was the phonebooth, a feature that allows you to make 2 minutes phone calls anywhere in the US for free (brought to you by AT&T). All and all, I was impressed enough to save the number into my cell phone memory.

Quack

Quack offers basically the same things as tellme (with the exception of the phone booth) but requires you to set up personalization largely through the web. As a result, the service may seem a little kludgier. On the plus side, however, the voice recognition algorithm gets some points. For example, I requested stock price on Internet.com on both services. Tellme was unable to find Internet.com and asked me to enter in the stock symbol using the keypad. Quack immediately recognized the stock, gave me its symbol and, while playing ads, went on to retrieve the information. What was disappointing, however, was that their text to speech engine is not as advanced as tellme’s. The voice on the other end of the line was unmistakingly a computer when it came to particular bits of information (weather reports, stock quotes) compared to the syntax used by tellme.

Another plus for Quack is their caller-ID system: The service also recognized that my call was coming from New York and immediately gave me the weather report for that city (I had to request New York on tellme’s service).

All and all, I found very little difference between the two services, with the possible exception of Quack carrying traffic reports (which tellme did not offer when I tried it). However, since I am one of those New Yorkers without a car, traffic reports held little value for me. If I were outside of New York, I am sure that this service could be a godsend.

Looking at the future: the other contenders

Internetspeech and bevocal seem to be aimed at the same market. They both plan to offer similar services. InternetSpeech seems to go a step farther by trying to capture an audience that will be able to say a URL and get what’s on that page read to them. This could be interesting but can get kludgey as the example on their site shows. Going to Yahoo means that their service will read the links but also shows that it doesn’t know how to stop on a particular link.

However, a somewhat more promising concept is that of 888Telsurf, which plans to not only offer information but also access to an online calendar and address book as well as over the phone reading of emails. Advertising revenues will finance their service, like the others. Unfortunately, none of those services are available now nor do they have announced launch dates.

Where is it all going?

Obviously, those services do not plan to stand still. Each of them is trying to establish a beachfront as the new “portal” to the Internet. I personally believe that a lot of those will end up either being acquired or striking significant relationships with the current group of already existing portals. Ultimately, all of them will have to follow the lead of 888telsurf by offering email, address book and calendars as part of their standard package.

While they are all squarely aimed at the consumer market, I think that at least one of them will break away and start offering the technology as a software offering, allowing corporations to set up private intranets with dial in interfaces. For example, one could be able to call into the main office to get part numbers on something they are selling, or check the latest sales statistics for a particular region.

Another potential use for the technology developed here is in the Ecommerce arena. Why not use that technology to offer a call-in service for ordering. Wanna get that new book from Amazon.com? Why not call 1–800-AMAZON (or whatever their number will be) and order it via phone. This could go over the scare hurdle that some people still have about online commerce.Or at least, it will give it a new dimension.

The other thing that could help those offerings become more popular would be the integration of comparative shopping features. I can see myself in a store, looking at prices on a particular item I want to buy, then pulling out my phone to check if someone will offer the same item for less.

Either way they play it, I think that this group of companies will present the first serious challenge to WAP, unless more content providers start offering WAP-enabled content (at current time, the selection is fairly weak).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Challenging WAP?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I’ve been looking at the press coverage and it seems that some of the coverage does not work out. For starters, Boo.com’s failure is not an example of why B2C E-commerce will fail, it’s an example of why Boo failed itself. Nor is it a failure of E-commerce in Europe.

Now that the company is buried, I’d like to take a look at what went right and what went wrong with the company and go into more details as to what we should learn from that failure. I will try to summarize what I learned over the 6 months I spent there but I may be off a little here and there since it’s been a while since I’ve left the company.

Boo was the first company to launch from the ground up in multiple countries from day one. This represented a set of challenges that were previously unadressed, ranging from technology challenges to more traditional issues in generating a global brand. While I was working for Boo, I was in charge of developing the back-end fulfillment system, a platform that allowed us to handle multiple currencies, multiple languages, on the fly tax calculation, and integration with multiple fulfillment partners. Let me go into more details on what this means.

Multiple currencies

If you want to trade globally, you can’t only offer US dollars. As a result, you need to figure out a way to handle multiple currencies ranging from dollars to pounds to liras to francs, to deutshmarks, to kroners, etc… If you are planning on doing this well, you have to peg your prices to a particular value. However, you have to realize that prices are not the same in every country and what may seem expensive in the US can be seen as cheap in other countries. This is where you have to make a decision as to whether you want to set a fixed price in the local currency or set a more dynamic price that is affected by currency exchanges and other fluctuations. It’s a fascinating problem in and of itself but it’s one that we discovered to be a big pain to deal with.

In the end, Boo built a system which allowed us to set a different price for each country or set a single price for all countries and have that price be translated in the proper currency based on a set exchange rate. It was a bit of a kludge but it worked and, to this day, I haven’t seen an Ecommerce shop with a similar system.

LESSON:

When dealing across multiple countries, decide early on how you want to set up your pricing scheme, it will save you headaches down the road.

Multiple languages

First of all, forget translation software packages. They are still relatively immature and there is (at this point anyway) little hope that they will mature much beyond their current point in the near future. If you’ve taken any linguistics course, you know that grammatical rules can hardly be standardized for several languages. For example, something as simple as a verb can become a whole new set of problems. In English, there is a relatively small set of basic rules. The verb “to want” breaks down into “I want, you want, he wants, we want, you want, they want”. Notice that there are only two basic variations here. In French, the same verb “vouloir” breaks down as follows: “Je veux, tu veux, il veut, nous voulons, vous voulez, ils veulent.” In this case, there are 5 different variations. In spanish, it’s six… and so on. Take that problem and try to automate it and you are building a system that is bound to fail. The way we worked around it at Boo was to create a system where the copy was translated by hand by people who were fluent in the language.

Unfortunately, another problem cropped up: British English and American English are EXTREMELY different. Considering that the assumption was that one version of each language was sufficient, problems cropped up and some of the perfectly normal British english stuff ended up being very offensive in the US. THAT was a major problem.

LESSON:

One language per country can be a dangerous road, check with the locals before making anything available to the general public.

On the fly tax calculation

This one almost killed me. In the US, it’s relatively easy to deal with taxation. For the most part, the only taxes you have to pay are for states in which you have a physical presence. Where it gets tricky is when your servers are located in one area and your offices are in another. Technically, that is two locations.

In the case of Boo, it got worse. For example, a sale to France was taxed three ways. Why? Quite simply because the company had offices in Paris, its servers were located in London, UK and its distribution center was in Cologne, Germany. However, the interesting part of the problem was that we were making a sale but not delivering a good in the UK, delivering a good but not making a sale in Germany, and making a sale and delivering a good in France. This was just one example. Multiply that by the number of countries the company was doing business in and it soon got VERY complicated. Add to that the fact that certain goods were coming from China or Taiwan and the picture got so clouded that we had to bring in tax attorneys to help us on the details.

LESSON:

Hard to believe, but accountants and tax attorneys should be part of your development cycle if you are developing global Ecommerce apps.

Integration with multiple fulfillment partners

The main issue here was dealing with different file formats for DeutschePost (the European fulfillment company) and UPS (the company that did fulfillment for the US). What we ended up doing was create an EDI link to those guys (DeutschePost was not web-enabled yet) and create a set of filters for each of them. A simple answer to a simple problem but this little answer cost about 150 man months of work as the content had to be migrated from the old (untagged) setup to the new one. Because the original database was originally set up wrong, we had to totally reorganize the schema and refit the content into it.

LESSON:

Plan early, think of all that can go wrong, and then plan it again. Usually, spending more time on specs saves you from many headaches down the road.

Where’s the plan?

When I joined the company in August, the launch was behind schedule by three months and we had ten weeks to the Christmas season. The first thing I asked to see what the project plan. It didn’t exist. People were working on bits and pieces of the project without communicating with other people they were affecting. Within a week, we put together a MS-project chart and things started to move properly.

LESSON:

An e-commerce project without a development plan will always be “this close” to launch but will never launch.

Front end is technology

One of the biggest failures at Boo was to assume that the front end was not a technology issue. Up through launch and beyond, the front end team was first reporting to business development and then to marketing. This was a capital mistake that I kept fighting over. A web site front-end is interface design, it’s not a marketing exercise. It should include people who are versed in this and not just people who know about pretty colors. Ultimately, I think this was one of the big failure factor in the company.

LESSON:

No matter how good your backend systems are, the users will only remember your front end. Fail there and you will fail, period.

There are many other reasons for which Boo failed (I’d rather not go into them but I can say that the press is on the mark on a lot of their accusations) but ultimately, there were a lot of really smart and really good people there who worked very hard to put together what, to my mind, was an amazing back-end operation. Lack of communications to and from the top was definitely a problem as well as a lack of understanding of Internet time (the redesign of the site I heard about on the day after launch has not yet happened and probably never will now). In the end, though, Boo’s failure was not that unexpected to anyone who had worked for or with the company. Boo.com did not fail as an Ecommerce company, it failed as a company, period. The thing that took it down were not Ecommerce related as much as they were just plain business. Yes, I’m a bit saddened by the fact the company went downhill but I already knew this was going to be the outcome back in January when I left.

Ultimately, Boo is a typical example of a lesson that many VCs are pushing these days: Management makes or break a company.

Let’s hope we all take that lesson, remember it, and let Boo stand as old mistakes we will never make either again (for those of us who made them) or at all (for those who haven’t).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Boo.com Goes Bust. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t quickly enough and tens of thousands of people got their hands on the software and started redistributing it. While it will most certainly be used for stealing copyrighted material, this category of software interested me at first because of the indexing technology that was built in them. One of the great thing they do is index the files on your system and make them available to everybody else who’s connected to the same server as you are (in Napster’s case) or to the network in general. This could be significant if you were to build a search engine.

Imagine search engine software that would be installed on every web server out there. Not only would it index the pages for the server administrator, but it could also report back to a mainstream search engine. Many studies have now come out about most of the large search engines (Inktomi, alltheweb, Google, etc…) only managing to index a fraction of the web. With a service a la Gnutella, you could have every web site call back the search engine directory to post the changes they had. This could happen throughout the day and might work better than the spider technology currently being used by most search engines.

The other potential use for tools like Gnutella is as a mass corporate cooperation tools. Right now, when you fire off Gnutella, it connects to Gnutellanet, or pretty much anyone who’s using Gnutella at the time. As I just checked on it, there are 700 people connected. There is no central source or server, which means that a tool like Gnutella could be used to share files without having to worry about a central server go down.

For years Sun has been claiming that the network is the computer. With a tool like GNUtella my hard drive can be become a portion of a larger hard drive. I could have a marketing hard drive, a finance hard drive, a HR hard drive of which only a portion would be sitting on my computer. Compare this to current corporate client-server systems where you have to deliberately save a file to the corporate server as well as to your hard drive if you are traveling… forget to save it to one or the other, and you’ll be stuck without your work or somebody else’s later revision. With a GNUtella like system, YOU would continually have the most updated versions of the files YOU author, without having to remember to separately save them.

At the same time, however, it seems to be lacking in a couple of critical areas: first of all, Gnutella could do with some sort of an authentication mechanism. That way, I would be able to create profiles and give access to certain files to certain people. For example, I would be able to mark a spreadsheet as accessible to the finance department while I would have a powerpoint presentation accessible to the marketing folks. The potentials are endless.

While Gnutella is considered a major threat to the music and movie industry, it is those corporate uses that interest me. I believe that, in the long run, those tools will make their way in corporate America and not just because someone wants to download the latest version of Santana’s new album or Julia Roberts’ new movie.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title AOL’s dark little secret. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

AOL started moving further on its AOL Anywhere Strategy by announcing partnerships to deliver its Instant Messenger services on the Bell South and Sprint PCS network and to equip Neopoint, Nokia, and Motorola devices with the necessary software to do this too.

Microsoft announced partnerships with Nextel and Airtouch to deliver MSN to their networks. This follows recent announcements by Microsoft that its technology would be integrated in Sony and Quallcom wireless devices.

Meanwhile, Palm Computing announced a deal with Sun Microsystems to make Sun’s iPlanet service available to Palm VII users.

But with all the hype, one has to wonder whether wireless is truly here and what hurdles it has to overcome. From this issue on, I will take a quick look at some of the issues facing wireless web implementors these days, adding wireless as a new category of coverage. We will start with the formats.

WAP, WML, HDML, PQA???

It seems the wireless space in adept at developing a new set of standards. While this world is just burgeoning, a number of implementations have already surfaced.

WAP

: As defined by the WAP Forum, WAP is the Wireless Application Protocol. Think of it essentially as HTTP for the wireless crowd. Backed by the W3C, the IETF, and the ECMA, as well as most large wireless industry players, WAP has become the de facto standard for wireless delivery. However, some companies (NTT comes to mind) have tried presenting alternatives to WAP and have so far been relatively unsuccessful. However, I doubt that WAP will go very far as it limits the number of characters that can be sent to about 1600. For stock quotes or weather reports, it’s a great think but beyond that, I doubt that anyone will use it for Ecommerce or content.

WML

: WML stands for Wireless Markup Language and is an XML based subset of HTML. However, a war as broken out in that space, with phone.com (one of the early pioneers in the wireless space) striking out on its own and developing a competing standard called HDML.

HDML

: HDML, or Handheld Markup Device Language, phone.com proposal for a new markup language. At the current time, the W3C has worked with phone.com and other markup language partners in an attempt to resolve the incompatibilities between the two offerings. With the cachet of WML increasing over the past year, phone.com has started supporting both format but offers HDML has a language with new tags that allow it to extend WML applications. Because it was an early player in the field, phone.com has taken a lead and could be the Microsoft or Netscape of that space. As a result, the extensions they are providing can’t be ignored.

HTML 4.0 mobile

: Last year, with the introduction of HTML 4.0, the W3C made some recommendations in terms of supporting HTML for wireless devices. Throwing further confusing in the wireless space, the W3C decided that HTML 4.0 and its successors might be the way to go, throwing more oil on the wireless fire. While no recommendation has been made yet on an actual standard and in spite of the W3C’s claim that it is working to resolve disputes with the W3C, expect some serious in-fighting between the different groups as they try to position themselves in the next hot web application space.

PQA (Palm Web Clippings)

: A couple of years ago, I pointed out that the Palm OS could be a potential Java competitor in the non-PC devices space. As could be expected, Palm went out and introduced the Palm VII, a wireless device with connections to the web. What was surprising, however, is that instead of going out and supporting either WML, HDML, or even HTML, they decided to introduce their own format to distribute web content: PQA or the Palm Query Application language. PQA is a paired-down HTML version that allows you to distribute content on the wireless Palm platform. Since services like OmniSky plan to offer wireless access to Palm devices other than the Palm VII, and since Palm already has an established footprint in the PDA space, expect PQA applications to pop up left and right.

A lot of format but what do I implement for?

At the current time, it seems there are no clear winners in the space however it seems clear that WAP has a strong lead in the delivery space for small bits of data. But WAP will not be the way to do Ecommerce or content as a clear character limitation makes it fairly useless for this. On the markup front, I’d strongly recommend looking at WML as it has received support from some of the larger players (Microsoft and Sun, among others) and seems to be the basic level of functionality. However, you should also look very seriously at the PQA format because of Palm’s extremely large footprint in the PDA space.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Wireless: A confusing Landscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I had just moved to New York city the previous fall and was caught into the glory of Gotham. In the process, I had managed to start making friends in the online community there. This was the year Mosaic had been born and the first year of the modern net, as far as I see it. People outside of universities were starting to connect to BBSes that were connected to the Internet all the time (this was relatively new, as most BBSes used to be one or two modem systems, allowing only a couple of users to connect simultaneously) and a few enterprising souls had set out to create a global event: first night in cyberspace. Half international friendship fest, half educational effort, our goal was to teach the world about the Internet and meet some of the people we had exchanged flurries of emails with and chatted with online. In New York, ECHO (the East Coast Hangout) and the Dorsai Embassy had partnered to hook up Grand Central terminal with 5 computers. ECHO brought the in-crowd, a mix of artists, and online aficionados who created one of the top online communities in the world and Dorsai brought the geeks, people like myself who felt that spending a weekend installing in-house networks and debugging lines of a new OS called Linux was a worthy cause.

We were high on life and high on the possibilities of the Internet, eager to show the world that they too could join people from places as remote as London and San Francisco in the first global party. Stuck in a little corner, we had 5 computers (generally lent by ECHO users) and a mission: to change the world.

We did not know how much we would end up doing in the process. Meanwhile, in some dark recesses of Silicon Valley, the small group of programmers who had brought us Mosaic were working furiously on putting the finishing touch on a new version that would be even better. A few days before they had posted the first beta of the program.

The name of the company was Mosaic Communications. The new product was a faster web browser called Netscape. And everyone on the net could email marca@mcom.com, who probably didn’t expect he would be on the cover of Time magazine less than 24 months later.

As the event went on, tens of thousands of people logged on to celebrate together. At the time, the net was only a couple of million people worldwide.

Back then, I didn’t know that this night would change a lot of things for me. Back then, I was desperately trying to find a job that was somewhat related to the Internet but there just weren’t that many. That night, all that changed. I’ve been thinking back to the day when my career went into high speed and I got caught into the Internet wave. That night was the beginning as far as I am concerned.

I had made a reputation earlier that year by starting to get involved in a Usenet newsgroup called alt.internet.media-coverage. It was a place where anyone on the Internet could go and talk about coverage of the net in the media. In those days, that coverage was so scarce that we spent our time dissecting the few stories that were printed about the net.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a lot of people in that group were also working reporters. One of those reporters was my friend Angela Gunn, whom I first met face to face on December 31st, 1993. She was at the event and our meeting ended up not only getting me my first legitimate magazine writing gig (for Web Week) but also my second job in the Internet industry and the one that eventually ended up in my helming internet.com and kick started my career.

Angela and I talked through the night about how the net was going to change everything. I think it would be honest to say that even we underestimated how sweeping a change it would end up being.

Fast forward to today. It’s only 6 years later and over half of the American population is now online. Abroad, the net is starting to catch up and massive amounts of people are starting to join in. Email addresses are as common as phone numbers, and E-commerce (a word that didn’t even exist 6 years ago) is redefining the way people buy and sell everything. Every business has a website or is considering getting one, from multinational corporations (who now have entire departments tending to their Internet and Intranet sites) to the guy around the corner.

Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.com (two names that were unknown to most people only a few years ago), is 1999 Time magazine man of the Year, and every other ad on TV is for a .company. Millions of new jobs have been created and the next great Internet business plan and the next great Internet IPO have become the new American obsession.

Back in 1994, there was no such thing as Amazon.com or Ebay. If you wanted to check out commerce on the web, you could buy hot sauce from HotHotHot (the site is still around at its original URL). Short of that, you were just out of luck.

Back then, you were lucky if you had a high-speed 28.8k modem. 56k was far down the road, DSL or cable modems just didn’t exist. Back then, to connect to the net required a fair amount of technical savvy as one had to configure their computer and make a number of different software packages work together since there was no drop-in-the-CD-and-follow-a-simple-set-of-instructions to get on the net kit and the concept of having and Internet-ready computer was unheard of.

Back then, if you told someone at a party that you worked in the Internet industry, you would have met blank stares and proceeded to explain what the Internet was, how it worked, and generally boring people in the process.

Back then, my parents were suspicious of what I was doing especially when I was explaining to them that companies would put their content on the Internet for free for everyone to read and that somehow, we would find a way to make it work economically but we were really quite sure how.

Back then, when I suggested to people at CNN that they should enhance their broadcast with extra content online and post the full transcripts of their broadcast on the Internet for free, I was pretty much laughed out of the place.

Back then, the only threat to Microsoft was Macintosh and the Mac had a much easier to use interface since Windows 95 was more vaporware than reality, having been delayed for the better part of a year. Linux was known to only a few people who had dared download it from some obscure server in Finland and had installed it on their 386s or 486s. The big advantage over windows 3.1 was not that it had a better interface but that you could telnet into it, just like you would into any regular Internet server… and it was Unix… and it was free. I personally had gotten exposed to it because a Dorsai user named Bob Young was specializing in selling CDs that had stuff you could download off the Internet on them. The big advantage of those CDs was that you could get a CD with a complete archive instead of spending hours or days downloading the same software. The name of the company was Red Hat and they were based in Westport, CT. A morning in 1995, that fact became very important to me personally: one of the machines at Internet.com was running off Linux and we needed to rebuild the whole system. I called Bob up and we drove over to his office to get a copy of the latest version of Linux he had received. He burned it on the CD right in front of us and saved the day for us. At the time, none of us realized that Linux was going to become the new threat to Microsoft and that Bob was going to become a billionaire on paper in the process.

Back then you could surf the whole web in a few days since there were less than 10,000 web sites. Yahoo didn’t yet have its own domain name and was sitting on Jerry Yang’s personal workstation at http://akebono.stanford.edu.

Back then, domain names were free. It would take another year before InterNIC started to charge $50 per year to own a domain and most were worth about that much. It would take until 1995 for the first sale of a domain name from one party to another, when Cnet bought TV.com for $15,000.

Back then, the net was still relatively quiet. Streaming media was still a thing of the future (RealAudio would debut streaming audio in 1995 and a small Israeli company called VDOnet would launch streaming video a few months later), as were Java, JavaScript, Shockwave, Flash, VBScript, and XML.

Back then, the most traffic the Internet was seeing was FTP data, and the web was still in fourth place as the most used application on the net, behind FTP, Email and Usenet. Also, spam didn’t exist yet. It would take a few extra months for two Arizona lawyers (Canter & Siegel a.k.a. “The Green Card Lawyers”) to spam Usenet.

The top online service in the country was CompuServe, followed by Prodigy, Genie, and AOL. None of them were connected to the Internet and all of them were expected to die off. While this was the case, other services were not connected to the net: we didn’t have Internet banking (although online banking was possible by using proprietary software the bank would give you) nor was there any online trading going on.

All this in 6 years. Oh my, how far we’ve gone. So with this in mind, I’d like to thank all of you for a wonderful six years and take this time to remind you that we still have a lot to do. After all, together, we are still working on creating the building blocks and moving them around.

Let’s see if we can do as much in the next 6 years as we have in the past ones.

We may have made a lot of money in the process. We may have made a lot of changes in the process. We definitely changed the world in the process.

But let’s not forget what we set out to do: to build something new, something that we could leave behind and proudly look at when we’re older.

I would like to challenge everyone on this list to come up with a way to give back to the community that has given us so much. Whether it is by spending a little time teaching a net beginner how to move around this world we created, help a school or non-profit organization to get online, or help make more data accessible through the net, please take some time off your busy schedule and go out and make a difference. We did in the last 6 years: why should we stop now.

As the year 2000 approaches, please do make that pledge to yourself and together, we’ll help this grow a little further.

That’s about it for my little sermon. As a closing note on this year, I’d like to renew my thanks to everyone I’ve worked or exchanged ideas with in the past year and I hope we’ll do some more of that. So have a great New Year’s eve celebration and I’ll see you on the other side of the calendar, the one that starts with a 2.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 1994–2000: How Things Have Changed. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.