News Briefs

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 22 Mar 1999 17:00:00 -0500

Man With A Plan: FCC Chairman William Kennard announced Friday he will unveil a plan for restructuring the agency when he testifies before the House Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications on Wednesday. Kennard said his goal is to focus the FCC on three central missions: consumer services, including universal service, enforcement of regulation and allocation of spectrum.

He expects to put out a blueprint for the reorganization this spring for public comment, in hopes that some of the changes will be enacted by fall.

SEC Probe: The online brokerage industry got another scare from regulators last week. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, examiners from the Securities and Exchange Commission have met with both Charles Schwab and E-Trade officials as preliminary steps to an in-depth review of the industry. The SEC plans to meet with other firms in order to examine whether online brokerages can deliver on the promises they're making to new customers. Charles Schwab's general counsel told a California Senate panel last week that the solution is education, not regulation. Meanwhile, Schwab settled with customers who lost bundles last fall when they placed market orders for the high-flying IPO of Theglobe.com. The settlement could total as much as $1.2 million.

E-Trade Capital: E-Trade plans to do some investing of its own. The online brokerage announced Friday it has formed a $150 million internal venture fund for strategic investments in technology and international business initiatives. The firm also hired a new general counsel and announced that Stephen Richards, its senior VP of corporate development and new ventures, will now oversee the firm's electronic trading strategies.

Net Results: Internet sales at cataloger Lands' End rose 290 percent to $61 million in the 12 months ended Jan. 31, but remained a fraction of the company's fiscal 1999 revenue of $1.37 billion. Lands' End said average online orders were on par with orders from its print catalogs - about $100 per sale. Twenty percent of the customers who reached its Web site had never bought from Lands' End before.

Microsoft (MSFT) Moves: After weeks of negotiations, Brad Silverberg has decided not to return to Microsoft to lead a reorganized online and consumer division, according to sources familiar with the job search. A company-wide reorg into four groups aligned according to Microsoft's customer bases - consumers, developers, corporations and information workers - could come as early as this week. Silverberg's decision leaves president Steve Ballmer temporarily in charge of the consumer-online business. This week, Microsoft releases version 5.0 of Internet Explorer. It isn't significantly different from its predecessor, aside from scrapping push channels and the active desktop.

Travel Deal: Oracle (ORCL) paid $35 million in cash to acquire E-Travel, a Concord (CEFT), Mass.-based vendor of software that coordinates corporate travel. Oracle plans to market the software with its enterprise-resources-planning offering to more than 6,000 customers. E-Travel has more than 200 corporate customers, who pay fees based on the total number of users and transactions. Meanwhile, Oracle stock plunged as much as 20 percent Friday after the company reported weaker-than- expected revenue growth for its quarter ended Feb. 28.

Health Deal: WebMD signed a $52.5 million content and e-commerce pact with Lycos (LCOS). Terms include exposure for WebMD on USA Networks (USAI)' television shows. WebMD execs said the agreement would survive even if the Lycos/USA Networks merger does not.

AOL (dossier) Speeds Up: America Online (dossier) struck a deal with SBC Communications (SBC) last week to provide customers in the Pacific Bell and Southwestern Bell regions with faster Net access via asymmetrical digital subscriber lines technology.

Netscape Phones Home: Netscape will bundle IDT (IDT)'s Net2Phone Internet telephony software as part of its next-generation Web browser and will also in-clude the service as part of the NetCenter portal site. In the past, IDT's customers had to download the software from the Net. Since Netscape owns half the browser market, Net2Phone could emerge as a standard for Internet telephony.

Noted: Fleet Financial, which owns Quick & Reilly and discount online brokerage Suretrade, is examining options to spin off Suretrade to the public. ... As it prepares documents for an upcoming IPO, NetGravity has withdrawn the bullish forecast it made last month, which stated that the company expects to reach $9 billion in sales by 2002. ... Bill Gurley, partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (dossier), has decided to jump ship for Benchmark Capital in Menlo Park, Calif. ... Byte, the recently scrapped computer magazine, officially relaunched on the Web. ... The Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., became the first university in America to offer a bachelor's degree in e-business. ... General Electric (GE) bought a 20 percent share in home-shopping network ValueVision and pledged to develop other e-commerce projects.

- Edited by Megan Barnett

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