1994 launch, Bookpool has grown into one of the world's biggest online bookstores, thanks to a loyal customer base, the kind of low prices Amazon.com (AMZN) touts only for best-sellers and an ultra-narrow focus on computer and Internet-related titles.
The company initially sold books through an e-mail server, moving to the Web in 1995 when site-hosting became cheaper.
Today, Bookpool ships to 110 countries, including Mauritius, Vietnam and Fiji, and 100hot.com says it's the second-most-popular tech bookstore online.
Bookpool has no marketing department, and has yet to spend a dollar on advertising. But good news spreads quickly on an island.
- Pierre Bourque, Martha's Vineyard, Mass.
DEALS OF THE WEEK
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SCHEMES: Exploit Friends! Get Paid to Watch!
AllAdvantage's business model combines enough online memes to dazzle even seasoned Net execs. But in addition to permission marketing, viral marketing and targeted advertising, AllAdvantage hopes to cash in on a ploy with a troubled past: multilevel marketing.
The company's basic premise is to pay members for watching ads in the Viewbar, a downloadable window. Better still, members get a cut of the money earned by friends they refer to the service. Spam has been a problem as members attempt to recruit "friends" via newsgroups and message boards.
In the Net's best tradition, AllAdvantage has repackaged product features developed elsewhere. The idea of being paid to watch ads was pioneered by PowerAgent, one of the Net's best-funded flops ($20 million spent in 20 months), whose PowerFrame seems to have inspired the Viewbar.
Paying for referrals may overcome the lack of interest that plagued PowerAgent, but overcoming skepticism among ad buyers will be more difficult. "I doubt any of our clients would be interested in the kind of user only looking at an ad to make a cent or two," says Jim Meskauskas, media supervisor at Mediasmith, an online agency in San Francisco.
- Mark Dolley
HYPE: A PR Kiss Is Still a Kiss
Is there anything in the world better than chocolate? Mmmm ... chocolate. Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. We sure do love chocolate.
So we were duly impressed when Hershey's sent us a press release made entirely of chocolate. This is about the cleverest technique we've seen to get a product noticed. Of course, it was hard to read the release once we'd broken it into pieces and devoured it. (Good thing we work in heat-starved San Francisco, and not, say, Miami, or we'd have had a soupy mess.)
A second box arrived the next day, followed quickly by a third. By this time we were eating slowly enough to read. The release was for a new Web site - www.hersheygifts.com. By the time the fourth release reached us, we still hadn't surfed it, but we'd gotten the point.
A week later, a good-size chunk of chocolate still sits at the copy desk. Broken and alone, it begs us to put it out of its misery. And though the power of chocolate has not diminished, we can't quite bring ourselves to eat it. B+
- Jason Krause
