2009 will be marked as the year that those hopeful for change, those who believed in the natural order of things, learned a valuable lesson.  It is a year in which Americans admonished but ultimately supported millionaire auto executives who flew in private jets to Washington DC to beg for public funds to bail out their enterprises;  a year in which executives from wireless carriers whined that people were overusing their services;  a year in which the music industry continued to sue people who loved their product so much they wanted to share it with others;  a year in which we learned two equally unfortunate definitions for the term “teabagger“;  a year in which banks and insurers boldly awarded executives millions of dollars in performance bonuses after taking billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts;  a year in which a sitting US President running two foreign wars was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the eve of announcing another surge of troops, this time into Afghanistan;  a year in which the hax0rz of 4chan demonstrated the capacity for greater investigative depth than the declining ranks of real journalists;  a year in which 1,200 limousines and more than 140 private planes converged on the city of Copenhagen for discussions, but no conclusions, on mitigating climate change.  In short, in the immortal words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, it was a year in which the bastards won.

It is difficult to look back on 2009 and remain hopeful.  In fact, according to a recent Pew study it is difficult for many of us to look back on the first 10 years of our new millenium and find much cause for optimism at all:

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Much of this negativity must surely stem from the growing realization that in modernizing societies, wealth is being redistributed from the middle class to the rich in an increasingly open manner — and as a result, the hypocrises of the rich seem less and less offensive and uncommon. In China, where the UN recently warned that the gap between rich and poor is wider now than in the pre-Maoist era, resentment is growing according to a recent study published in the China Daily.  America and much of the rest of the West are not far behind this curve.

This level of wealth redistribution actually threatens long-term economic development, and democratists have long feared the rich as a corrupting force.  As he observed the growing influence of what was at that time the nation’s growing industrial-military complex at the close of the US Civil War, Abe Lincoln wrote:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
— U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

‘Money power’ is a Euphemism for the rich, specifically large corporations, which began to rise at the end of the Civil War and which flowered until their total collapse in the late 1920s, leading to the Great Depression.  Only a government willing to step in and underwrite the entire economy of the state was able to get the world economy back on its feet in the 1930s.  In the meantime, oil barons had fully hooked the Western world on their product in the form of cheap plastics, agribusiness, and transportation –an era which has lasted more than 100 years.  This legacy continues today, propped up by assertions like Peak Oil and maintained in constant crisis by wars and oppressive totalitarian regimes at home and abroad.

The point of which is to say that 2009 was more than just a lost opportunity for change.  “Change Theatre” events such as Copenhagen, Nobel Week, and countless Senate hearings and Royal Commissions nurture our growing apathy toward the decline of modern society instead of angering us — a condition one can only describe as a massive outbreak of “Stockholm Syndrome“.  In the meantime we seem to have ceded our will to power in favour of consumption.

From The Economist: 2010 could be a year that sparks unrest.

Yet still, like the shimmying flame of a candle in a hurricane, optimism lingers.  Much of this hope is embodied in the Internet, and its general ability to democratize speech.  Yet this, too, was under attack in 2009.  There are three mechanisms by which the Internet’s ability to sow disruption of the status quo are being challenged as the year turns:

1. Free Speech as Defamation
   In an obscure, tawdry case that none of us should have cared about, supposed model Liskula Cohen sued Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger, who turned out to be an acquaintance named Rosemary Port.  Ms. Port had set up a blog via Blogger.com to post some embarassing photos of Mrs. Cohen and accused her of being a “skank“.  Google attempted to defend the order to unmask Port, as did Port’s lawyer, however the judge ruled that the blog was worthy of a libel suit and ordered google to reveal her identity.  Fortunately for the rest of the internet, Cohen did not proceed with a defamation suit after unmasking her accuser, however this was the first parry in a long battle and has set a dangerous precedent for those who might otherwise speak the truth when shielded by anonymity.
2. Free Speech as Copyright Infringement
   In April 2009, Warner Music issued a DMCA Takedown notice to notable free speech activist, former Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, and founder of the Creative Commons Lawrence Lessig after he used one of their songs in a presentation.  This particular takedown challenges the concept of “Fair Use”, and for certain Larry will have a strong case; however not so for Britons accused of copyright infringement should that country’s “Digital Economy” bill pass into law.  The bill proposes, among other things, that alleged infringers not even be subjected to legal process from their accusers — instead they would just be disconnected from the internet after three “strikes”.  Similar proposals are being made by RIAA-backed lawmakers around the globe, including in France, the US, and Canada.  Just as the DMCA has been abused by Scientologists, among others, to squelch free speech, so too will laws such as Digital Economy.
3. Gaming Google
   As the algorithms which drive Google’s ranking of search results are better understood, they are increasingly gamed by those with commercial interests to advance or protect.  This makes it tougher for individuals to get attention amid a sea of MegaCorps, however this is one area where we made progress in 2009.  First, Microsoft and others have launched serious challenges to Google’s domination of Search — as these grow this means it’s no longer possible to dominate search rankings on all engines at once.  Second, Google this year redoubled its efforts to stay ahead of so-called SEO mavens and chose to even further favour content from blogs and from services like Twitter.

Finally, as the year drew to a close we were treated to our last piece of Security Theatre courtesy of would-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who, despite being on a list of more than 550,000 known or suspected terrorists, boarded a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam and tried to blow it up by lighting his underwear on fire.  The real terror came from the United States TSA, whose major acheievements for 2009 seem to have been the disposal of thousands of gallons of hair care products confiscated at airport terminals and, of course, the posting of its entire operations manual online in-the-clear.  In the wake of the underwear-bombing attempt, the TSA brought new restrictions into place which were cunningly concealed from passengers and deliberately inconsistent between flights, just to ensure that the only remaining people willing to put up with the heinous inconvenience of flying commercially will be the terrorists themselves.

Which leads us to contemplating the ultimate hypocrisy of all.  As Benjamin Franklin once said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

For the coming decade, let us fight vigorously against hypocrisy and oppression.  Let us hold accountable those who betray our wishes and their own words.  Let us be emboldened against scoundrels, pirates, and criminals of all kinds.  Let us balance the special interests with the will of the majority.  Let us embrace dissent as a form of patriotism and citizenhood of the world.  Most of all, let us reverse the damage that our perversions of democracy and ideology of all kinds have wrought on our nations by addressing critical shortfalls in education and social well-being.

Indeed it was a year in which we not only rewarded, but in fact we celebrated, hypocrisy.  Let us ensure that we neither celebrate, nor tolerate, hypocrisy in any form in 2010 and beyond.

Wireless and Web Buzz Again as Wifi Catches On Tue May 13, 4:09 PM

/By Christopher Noble/

PARIS (Reuters) – Landgrabbing and takeover frenzy are again dominating technology headlines as if the Internet bubble had never burst and giving old buzzwords a new lease of life.

At the center of it is WiFi, a technology that allows users of laptop computers and other gadgets to access the Internet without the usual struggle with wires and mismatched phone jacks.

France, late to the party, is now jumping aboard with a series of announcements in the last few days.

The race is on around the world to roll out WiFi access points known as “hotspots,” which for some entrepreneurs offer the prospect of turning mobile Internet access into revenue.

Each wireless (news <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news?p=%22wireless%22&c=&n &yn=c&c=news&cs=nw> – web sites <largest hotspot in France. A consortium of companies is now putting a WiFi network in the French capital’s subway stations and bus stops.

March 21, 2002 Robin Hoods of the Net By Charles C. Mann

Vigilantes or heroes? These guys target spam, pop-up ads, copyrights, and other ‘evils’ of the net establishment. From Yahoo! Internet Life

The Robin Hood of legend stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Today’s online Robin Hoods are after something less tangible. Using methods that range from the infuriating to the borderline illegal, they seek to deprive governments and corporations of control, and to give that control back to anyone with a modem. Some of these people are well known: Napster inventor Shawn Fanning was on the cover of countless magazines after setting off an explosion of file-sharing that has yet to end. Eric Corley, publisher of hacker journal 2600, made the front page for publishing the code that lets people break the encryption on DVDs. Phil Zimmerman gained notoriety for creating the Pretty Good Privacy software that allows senders to encrypt their e-mail‹and he faced years of legal harassment after releasing it.

But other Robin Hoods of the Net are less celebrated. Some are entrepreneurs seeking to make their fortune by selling Net users the means to fend off concentrated economic and political power. Some are simply seeking to make information available to the public, even if corporations or governments would rather not have it available. Some openly break what they regard as unjust laws. And others‹well, in this confusing new wired world it’s sometimes hard to tell what side of the law they fall on. Here, Y-Life uncovers some of the Net’s most wanted.

The Code Breaker

Jerome Rota

Why are millions of people able to freely exchange music files over the Internet? One reason is that the European inventors of the MP3 format did not keep its specifications private‹its technical underpinnings are available to anyone. As a result, hackers around the world could construct their own rippers and players, setting off an explosion of activity in the music world that has not stopped. The film industry vowed it was not going to make the same mistake. Net-video formats such as Microsoft Windows Media Video (.wmv files) and Apple QuickTime (.mov files) are decidedly not open to the public. Meet Jérôme Rota, a young French hacker known as Gej, his online sobriquet. Cleverly gluing MP3 audio to a cracked version of Windows Media‹which was then coupled with DeCSS (the software that breaks the encryption on DVDs)‹Rota and a few others assembled rip-and-play software for movies that is now called DivX. (The name is a joking reference to the original DivX, a failed format from Circuit City that permitted consumers to play DVDs only for specified lengths of time.) The result: an instant underground of illicitly ripped DVDs‹and a major headache for Hollywood. To avoid a legal onslaught, Gej and his buddies rewrote DivX without any proprietary code and began an L.A. startup to convince the movie industry that it should live with the Net. To date, film moguls have not changed their minds. But DivX threatens their power to dictate solutions.

The Ad Blocker

Horst Joepen

With almost touching modesty, Webwasher describes itself as “a small contribution on the road toward a responsible information and communication society.” Based in the central German city of Paderborn, the company began as an in-house effort of industrial giant Siemens to increase its workers’ productivity by speeding up their Internet connections. Siemens decided to put Horst Joepen in charge of the project. He discovered that a major time-waster was having to wait to download online advertising‹banners, inserts, and pop-ups. Siemens’ ad-blocking software proved so popular that it spun off Webwasher [webwasher.com] as a separate company in 1999. Joepen and two colleagues were its first employees. Today the company has 65 employees and, Joepen says, is “cash positive.” More than 5 million Net users have downloaded its free software, the company says, and some 4,000 organizations have employed the pay version. “What company can afford to tie up this valuable resource [the Net] with megabytes of deadbeat data every time an employee clicks on a Web site?” asks Webwasher. “Whose Internet is it, anyway?” Good question.

The Tattletale

John Young

A Manhattan architect who traces his political leanings to the 1960s, John Young developed a Web site that has been an irritant to the powers that be since 1996. His modus operandi is simplicity itself: He obtains documents that could embarrass or annoy the powerful and he posts these documents, usually without comment, on Cryptome [cryptome.org]. “Our goal is to be the most disreputable publisher on the Net,” he says, “just after the world’s governments and other highly reputable bullshitters.” Cryptome’s principal themes are “freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, and intelligence.” Most Cryptome files come from public but easily overlooked sources such as the Federal Register or court filings. But some Cryptome postings come from more suspect places. Last October, for instance, someone anonymously e-mailed a program that evaded the copyright protection scheme in Windows Media. Because many activists believe that industry heavyweights such as Microsoft are trying to control what people watch and listen to on their computers, Young posted the software on Cryptome, from which it was downloaded thousands of times. The prospect of becoming the next Eric Corley‹who is now in federal court for posting the code for software that broke the copyright protection on DVDs‹didn’t make Young blink. “No word from Microsoft or DoJ [Department of Justice],” he e-mailed recently about the Windows Media crack. “Do you think MS would ask its archenemy to prosecute a violator, or the two gang up on us with a civil-criminal combo? We can only hope so.”

The Spam Buster

Paul Vixie

Can anyone stop spam? Paul Vixie, for one, thinks so. A computing pioneer who worked on some of the software underlying the Net, Vixie decided to keep track of the Internet servers from which spammers operate; then he compiled a list. Friends heard about it and asked to borrow it. Vixie‹quietly joined by his friend Dave Rand, another Net pioneer‹ended up founding @MAPS: Mail Abuse Prevention System [mail-abuse.org]. When computer networks become havens for spammers, victims can ask MAPS to add the miscreants to its Realtime Blackhole List, a tally of known spam sources. Vixie left MAPS last year for another company, and Rand became executive director. But MAPS hasn’t changed. It still makes no threats and issues no commands. Network administrators around the world simply use the Blackhole List as a guide, refusing to accept any e-mail from the networks on it until they clean up their act. (If your ISP doesn’t use the list, you can pay MAPS $50 a year to filter your existing e-mail account.) Spammers loathe MAPS, maintaining, for instance, that blocking unwanted messages about increasing penis size is an attack on their First Amendment rights. Not surprisingly, the small company has been sued five times in the last two years. MAPS vows to fight on. Sure, you probably still get a lot of spam, but here’s a thought: There would be even more of the stuff if Vixie and Rand weren’t on the case.

The Privatizer

Lance Cottrell

In the early days of the Internet, The New Yorker ran a now-famous cartoon of a dog at a keyboard, with the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (which this magazine brought to life in March 1999 with a William Wegman cover). Wrong! Lance Cottrell realized that software tools such as cookies mean that not only can advertisers find out that you’re a dog, but they can also track the last 100 Web sites you stopped to sniff at. Cottrell had been concerned about privacy since the early 1990s, when he was an astrophysics graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. Cottrell agitated against a government proposal, eventually dropped, that would have allowed the FBI to eavesdrop on encrypted telephone and computer transmissions. By then he had become aware of the threat to privacy posed by digital technology. One of Cottrell’s first actions was to write Mixmaster, software that allows people to send e-mail anonymously, covering their tracks so thoroughly that even the National Security Agency is unlikely to be able to trace Mixmastered messages. It is now used by a floating group of “remailer operators,” privacy activists who believe that the right to speak anonymously is crucial to liberty. (Indeed, remailers have been essential to political dissidents from China, Kosovo, and elsewhere, but it is believed that terrorists also use them.) A self-described “hard-line privacy advocate,” Cottrell then went on to found Anonymizer.com, a company that provides software allowing people to surf the Web without leaving electronic tracks. Law enforcement is ambivalent about Anonymizer, Cottrell concedes, but there’s nothing illegal about his products. And it bears remembering that anonymity is not only for outlaws: A few days after September 11, Anonymizer created a special link to help people‹say, disaffected associates of al Qaeda‹send anonymous tips to the FBI.

The File-Sharer

Vincent Falco

As soon as Vincent Falco heard of Gnutella, he realized it was a technology that could at some point make the Internet uncontrollable. Gnutella is software that, in theory, allows individual computer users to hunt for and download files from one another without any supervision. It can’t be shut down, Falco says, because there’s no central facility, just hundreds of thousands of users individually connected throughout the infosphere. The first test version of Gnutella was released by two employees of an AOL subsidiary; AOL yanked the program off the Net that same day, but not before it had been downloaded thousands of times. Ever since, developers around the world‹including Falco‹have been devising newer, more robust versions of Gnutella. Falco’s brainchild, BearShare [bearshare.com], may be the latest but is surely not the last. “Ultimately,” Falco says, “these technologies will really be unstoppable. There will be battles and skirmishes, but it’s inevitable that we’ll see distributed systems that don’t have any accountability. For better or worse, the power really will be in the hands of the people.”

The Librarian

Brewster Kahle

This Robin Hood offers a model for all Robin Hoods‹a man who meant well, accidentally annoyed some powerful institutions, and ultimately worked out a solution that both pleased the annoyed and served the masses.

Brewster Kahle traffics in information. Working with the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Science Foundation, and Compaq, Kahle’s Internet Archive [archive.org] records all publicly accessible Web pages, whether brilliant, incriminating, or utterly embarrassing. This feat is made possible thanks to automated software bots that have been dispatched on the Web; the bots download the pages, index them, and keep them on their servers. A preliminary version of the archive‹called the Wayback Machine, after Mr. Peabody’s invention in The Bullwinkle Show‹opened in October, giving the world free access to a storehouse of information that was already five times larger than the Library of Congress. Why does this make Kahle a Robin Hood? Because this digital Library of Alexandria may be the world’s largest copyright violation. As one Net-speech lawyer pointed out soon after it opened, “Every Web site that ever did a takedown in response to a copyright owner is now magically resurrected.”

Kahle counters, “Complaints happen, but given that people can put a robot exclusion on their site and thereby have their content removed from the Wayback Machine, the issue dissipates.” But does it vanish? Controversy over the Wayback Machine may endure way into the future.

The Global Swapper

Niklas Zennstrom

On July 26, 2000, a U.S. federal court issued the first injunction against Napster, creating headlines around the world. Two days later, a Swedish entrepreneur with a Net address on the South Pacific island of Niue announced the launch of a global file-swapping service based in Amsterdam. The entrepreneur’s name was Niklas Zennström; the service’s, Kazaa [kazaa.com]. Kazaa’s FastTrack software lets users download movies, images, and documents in addition to music. And because FastTrack, unlike Napster’s software, does not rely on a central index of files, it is less subject to supervision and shutdown. By last fall, Kazaa and its two sister services, Morpheus and Grokster, were exceeding Napster’s peak volume. In October the inevitable legal barrage from record labels, film studios, and music publishers commenced. This time, though, the circumstances were different. FastTrack’s use of encryption and lack of a central index means, according to Zennström, that‹unlike Napster‹Kazaa cannot observe or control the behavior of its users. Zennström struck back by suing his principal hometown adversary, the music-publishing organization Buma/Stemra, for its alleged failure to discuss licensing his operation. Just before press time, Kazaa was sold to Sharman Networks, and file-trading on Kazaa’s network continued. Citing the litigation, Zennström was not available for comment, although the continuing storm over file-sharing suggests that the copyright wars are far from over.

Charles C. Mann is a Y-Life contributing writer.

———–

Thursday January 17 3:18 PM ET

KaZaA Suspends Downloads Pending Dutch Court Ruling

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Internet company KaZaA BV on Thursday said it suspended downloads of its popular software that lets users trade songs online pending a decision in a copyright lawsuit filed against it in a Dutch court.

“Download of the KaZaA Media desktop software is temporarily and voluntarily suspended pending Dutch court decision on January 31,” the Amsterdam-based company said in a message on its Web site at (http://www.kazaa.com).

In late November, a Dutch judge ruled in a court case, which has upped the ante for copyright abuse online, that KaZaA must stop its users sharing copyrighted music files.

KaZaA has built its service with software from Netherlands-based FastTrack. Both companies are founded and run by the same person: 35-year-old Swedish-born Niklas Zennstrom.

FastTrack also licenses its technology to other popular file-swapping services known as Grokster and Morpheus.

KaZaA, Grokster and Music City have all been named in a separate suit filed last fall by the Recording Industry Association of America (news – web sites) (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The trade groups claim the services permit users to download and trade copyrighted material without permission. The RIAA grounded Napster (news – web sites) in July with a similar suit.

Napster recently launched a test version of a new secure service that prohibits unauthorized trading of songs.

But in the meantime, FastTrack has picked up where the original Napster left off by enabling tens of millions of users to trade tracks of The Beatles and Britney Spears for free as well as movie files.

KaZaA in November said it could not comply with the judge’s order because unlike Napster, it is designed to work without a central computer server and does not know who its customers are.

-Ian.

At 01:07 PM 04/05/00 -0700, you wrote:

>I can’t remember posting anything about Foo.com to FOIB before, but I’ve
>been watching their swan dive with a grin on my face for the last 18 months.
>
>In the early going, FOO was positioned as high-fashion snob culture meets
>geekdom and the twentysomething prodigies who founded it, with their black
>ribbed turtleneck sweaters and oh-so-chic hipster glasses, were lauded as
>icons of generation Vest. Behind it all, though, none of them had ever
>done a startup before, let alone worked in the business, so they didn’t
>have a clue what they were doing. Without having the street sense to be
>able to separate fact from fiction, you tend to believe whatever people
>tell you.
>
>For starters, they obviously took the advice of your typical art-snob
>web-geeks who built a web site so technically complex that only the
>uber-wired could use it without crashing their browser. Stupid
>mistake. This just in… my mother has a Pentium 166. So do most of the
>rest of us.
>
>Next, they delayed their launch by six months for inexplicable
>reasons. Ouch! This is probably because they took the advice of a bunch
>of Andersen Consulting guys who expensed Concorde trips to New York for
>”Business Development” purposes and failed to deliver an eCommerce solution
>that scaled.
>
>Third, they had basically loaded their whole ad budget into the first six
>months (as most .com companies do), so that when their launch was delayed
>they either had to pay kill fees (what you pay to radio/tv/magazines when
>you pull your ads at the last minute) or let the ads run, pointing
>potential new customers to a “coming soon” banner. Wow: Impressive
>customer conversion strategy, guys!
>
>Fourth, when they did launch, the honeymoon with the press was long over
>and all of the articles had moved on to slamming them for the delays and
>for their technical sins. They got virtually zero good PR, had no money to
>spend on advertising, and couldn’t generate the hype they needed to drive
>any but the most anxious of customers back to the site.
>
>Finally, the founders got out. Everybody got fired. The company’s culture
>was gutted. Now they’re just another failed startup, though the corona
>from this spectacular $120 million flameout is pretty impressive. That’s
>US Dollars, kids!
>
>
>Proof that a bunch of euro-trash fashion victims posing as web geeks get
>what they deserve. I love .comMunism!
>
>-Ian.
>
>
>
> > Boo’s blues
> > By Dianne See Morrison
> > Redherring.com, May 04, 2000
>
> > With a name like Boo.com, it was perhaps a star-crossed company from
> > the very start. The Internet-only clothing retailer, backed by some
> > of Europe’s most prominent dot-com investors and savvy offline
> > players, is seeking a buyer after burning through its cash six months
> > after its launch.
>
> > Investment banks familiar with the company’s woes say Boo.com Group
> > has contacted them seeking fresh funds to survive, most likely by
> > selling itself outright. “The deal was going around to act for
> > Boo.com to help them raise more money in any shape or form, including
> > finding a buyer,” said Gerard van Hamel Platerink, an Internet
> > analyst at Salomon Smith Barney in London.
>
> > Boo.com declined to comment on whether the company is up for sale,
> > which was first reported today by the Wall Street Journal
> > Europe, and would not disclose its funding situation. The company put
> > a brave face in the possible problems it faces. “We’re doing quite
> > well,” said Dina Cholack, the company’s communications director, and
> > pointed to Boo.com’s $670,000 revenues for February, which she
> > indicated was “in line with our internal goals.”
>
> > Yet Mr. van Hamel Platerink and a source at another investment bank
> > both indicated that a sale was the most favored option. “But as far
> > as I know, none of the banks would touch it,” added Mr. van Hamel
> > Platerink. Finding a buyer for Boo.com won’t be easy, since there is
> > speculation that a staff exodus is imminent due to the current
> > problems.
>
> > BOO HOO
>
> > It’s a big setback for the company, whose investors include the
> > French millionaire Bernard Arnault, the Italian clothing company
> > Benetton (NYSE: BNG), the London-based venture fund Zouk, the U.S.
> > fund Bain Capital, as well as the U.S.-based investment banks J.P.
> > Morgan (NYSE: JPM) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS). Together, they
> > ploughed a reported £75 million (British pounds; approximately $120
> > million) into the company since its formal launch in November 1999,
> > after many months of delays.
>
> > An investment bank familiar with the matter said that potential
> > buyers include Adidas-Salomon, Reebok (NYSE: RBK), and the U.S.
> > sporting goods site Fogdog (Nasdaq: FOGD). The person noted that
> > Adidas already shares an informal relationship with Boo.com: the Web
> > site’s former chief financial officer had previously come from the
> > German shoe and sports equipment maker, although has since departed
> > for a post at Chello Broadband, an Amsterdam-based Internet service
> > provider.
>
> > To be sure, many of Boo.com’s troubles were self-inflicted. Although
> > well-hyped, it failed to execute well. The company first formed in
> > November 1998, yet took a year to launch — for reasons the company
> > never disclosed — after a number of false starts. At launch,
> > shoppers complained that the Flash-heavy site often crashed their
> > browsers, and did not work at all on Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Macintosh
> > computers.
>
> > The launch delays themselves dealt a heavy blow. As the launch was
> > pushed back farther and farther, media spots on TV had already
> > booked, and the company had to shell out a hefty sum in kill fees,
> > according to one media buyer familiar with the situation. More
> > generally, the company’s huge marketing spend depleted its cash. It
> > went so far as to get film director Roman Coppola — the high-profile
> > music video director and son of Francis Ford Coppola — to film
> > Boo.com’s television spots.
>
> > In January, the site began discounting their products by 40 percent,
> > though it originally had said it would never stoop to such measures.
> > In February, its chairman and cofounder left the company. In the same
> > month, it fired 70 staff.
>
> > BOO SCARES EUROPE
>
> > However, Boo.com’s problems are a symbolic slap to the broader
> > Internet economy in Europe. On the run-up to its launch, the company
> > was regarded as an innovative and viable Internet player — an
> > example that a completely new brand could be established on the Net
> > and one that played to Europe’s traditional strength relative to the
> > U.S.: clothing fashion and design.
>
> > Yet it now seems likely to suffer the same fate of other suffering
> > startups in Europe’s fledgling Internet economy, such as
> > Lastminute.com (Nasdaq: LMIN) and World Online, which both have
> > failed to meet their original lofty expectations. “This is just what
> > people don’t want to hear right now,” said Mr. van Hamel Platerink.
> > “It’s just more doom and gloom for the market — maybe we should all
> > jump off a tall building right now,” he said.
>
> > Part of the company’s concerns might be attributed to the
> > characteristics of the market sector and Boo.com’s investors’
> > impatience. Analysts note that in the competitive fashion world,
> > retailers do not expect to make a profit until at least two years
> > after starting. And competitors saw Boo.com’s problems early on. Eva
> > Pascoe, the UK managing director of Zoom.co.uk, a fashion site owned
> > by the UK clothing group Arcadia, had already sounded Boo.com’s
> > warning bells.
>
> > “Fashion is a long-term business,” she said, commenting directly on
> > Boo.com’s business prospects during an interview in March. “You have
> > to be in it for the long haul, not just for the next ten minutes,
> > which is what the VCs are in it for,” Ms. Pascoe said.
>
>

In the early going, FOO was positioned as high-fashion snob culture meets geekdom and the twentysomething prodigies who founded it, with their black ribbed turtleneck sweaters and oh-so-chic hipster glasses, were lauded as icons of generation Vest. Behind it all, though, none of them had ever done a startup before, let alone worked in the business, so they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. Without having the street sense to be able to separate fact from fiction, you tend to believe whatever people tell you.

For starters, they obviously took the advice of your typical art-snob web-geeks who built a web site so technically complex that only the uber-wired could use it without crashing their browser. Stupid mistake. This just in… my mother has a Pentium 166. So do most of the rest of us.

Next, they delayed their launch by six months for inexplicable reasons. Ouch! This is probably because they took the advice of a bunch of Andersen Consulting guys who expensed Concorde trips to New York for “Business Development” purposes and failed to deliver an eCommerce solution that scaled.

Third, they had basically loaded their whole ad budget into the first six months (as most .com companies do), so that when their launch was delayed they either had to pay kill fees (what you pay to radio/tv/magazines when you pull your ads at the last minute) or let the ads run, pointing potential new customers to a “coming soon” banner. Wow: Impressive customer conversion strategy, guys!

Fourth, when they did launch, the honeymoon with the press was long over and all of the articles had moved on to slamming them for the delays and for their technical sins. They got virtually zero good PR, had no money to spend on advertising, and couldn’t generate the hype they needed to drive any but the most anxious of customers back to the site.

Finally, the founders got out. Everybody got fired. The company’s culture was gutted. Now they’re just another failed startup, though the corona from this spectacular $120 million flameout is pretty impressive. That’s US Dollars, kids!

Proof that a bunch of euro-trash fashion victims posing as web geeks get what they deserve. I love .comMunism!

-Ian.

> Boo’s blues
> By Dianne See Morrison
> Redherring.com, May 04, 2000

> With a name like Boo.com, it was perhaps a star-crossed company from
> the very start. The Internet-only clothing retailer, backed by some
> of Europe’s most prominent dot-com investors and savvy offline
> players, is seeking a buyer after burning through its cash six months
> after its launch.

> Investment banks familiar with the company’s woes say Boo.com Group
> has contacted them seeking fresh funds to survive, most likely by
> selling itself outright. “The deal was going around to act for
> Boo.com to help them raise more money in any shape or form, including
> finding a buyer,” said Gerard van Hamel Platerink, an Internet
> analyst at Salomon Smith Barney in London.

> Boo.com declined to comment on whether the company is up for sale,
> which was first reported today by the Wall Street Journal
> Europe, and would not disclose its funding situation. The company put
> a brave face in the possible problems it faces. “We’re doing quite
> well,” said Dina Cholack, the company’s communications director, and
> pointed to Boo.com’s $670,000 revenues for February, which she
> indicated was “in line with our internal goals.”

> Yet Mr. van Hamel Platerink and a source at another investment bank
> both indicated that a sale was the most favored option. “But as far
> as I know, none of the banks would touch it,” added Mr. van Hamel
> Platerink. Finding a buyer for Boo.com won’t be easy, since there is
> speculation that a staff exodus is imminent due to the current
> problems.

> BOO HOO

> It’s a big setback for the company, whose investors include the
> French millionaire Bernard Arnault, the Italian clothing company
> Benetton (NYSE: BNG), the London-based venture fund Zouk, the U.S.
> fund Bain Capital, as well as the U.S.-based investment banks J.P.
> Morgan (NYSE: JPM) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS). Together, they
> ploughed a reported £75 million (British pounds; approximately $120
> million) into the company since its formal launch in November 1999,
> after many months of delays.

> An investment bank familiar with the matter said that potential
> buyers include Adidas-Salomon, Reebok (NYSE: RBK), and the U.S.
> sporting goods site Fogdog (Nasdaq: FOGD). The person noted that
> Adidas already shares an informal relationship with Boo.com: the Web
> site’s former chief financial officer had previously come from the
> German shoe and sports equipment maker, although has since departed
> for a post at Chello Broadband, an Amsterdam-based Internet service
> provider.

> To be sure, many of Boo.com’s troubles were self-inflicted. Although
> well-hyped, it failed to execute well. The company first formed in
> November 1998, yet took a year to launch — for reasons the company
> never disclosed — after a number of false starts. At launch,
> shoppers complained that the Flash-heavy site often crashed their
> browsers, and did not work at all on Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Macintosh
> computers.

> The launch delays themselves dealt a heavy blow. As the launch was
> pushed back farther and farther, media spots on TV had already
> booked, and the company had to shell out a hefty sum in kill fees,
> according to one media buyer familiar with the situation. More
> generally, the company’s huge marketing spend depleted its cash. It
> went so far as to get film director Roman Coppola — the high-profile
> music video director and son of Francis Ford Coppola — to film
> Boo.com’s television spots.

> In January, the site began discounting their products by 40 percent,
> though it originally had said it would never stoop to such measures.
> In February, its chairman and cofounder left the company. In the same
> month, it fired 70 staff.

> BOO SCARES EUROPE

> However, Boo.com’s problems are a symbolic slap to the broader
> Internet economy in Europe. On the run-up to its launch, the company
> was regarded as an innovative and viable Internet player — an
> example that a completely new brand could be established on the Net
> and one that played to Europe’s traditional strength relative to the
> U.S.: clothing fashion and design.

> Yet it now seems likely to suffer the same fate of other suffering
> startups in Europe’s fledgling Internet economy, such as
> Lastminute.com (Nasdaq: LMIN) and World Online, which both have
> failed to meet their original lofty expectations. “This is just what
> people don’t want to hear right now,” said Mr. van Hamel Platerink.
> “It’s just more doom and gloom for the market — maybe we should all
> jump off a tall building right now,” he said.

> Part of the company’s concerns might be attributed to the
> characteristics of the market sector and Boo.com’s investors’
> impatience. Analysts note that in the competitive fashion world,
> retailers do not expect to make a profit until at least two years
> after starting. And competitors saw Boo.com’s problems early on. Eva
> Pascoe, the UK managing director of Zoom.co.uk, a fashion site owned
> by the UK clothing group Arcadia, had already sounded Boo.com’s
> warning bells.

> “Fashion is a long-term business,” she said, commenting directly on
> Boo.com’s business prospects during an interview in March. “You have
> to be in it for the long haul, not just for the next ten minutes,
> which is what the VCs are in it for,” Ms. Pascoe said.