Word: concepting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Priceline, the company most renowned for reintroducing William Shatner to prime time, has come to represent both what is transformative and what is just plain annoying about the Web. Think of any overhyped Web term or concept: disintermediation. The auction economy. Virtual communities. Stupid TV spots. Priceline, based in Norwalk, Conn., is a poster child for these and other new- economy cliches, especially the one about how it doesn't need to make money today because it will make tons of it someday. Next year. Maybe...
Certainly, it is a very cool concept, one that founder Jay Walker predicts will eventually eliminate price-tag shopping. Never mind that fixed pricing in one form or another has been around since the time of Xerxes for a reason: people like it. As Walker points out, though, myriad products--from FedEx shipping, where rates increase with the speed of delivery, to groceries bought with coupons--fall into the variable-price category. Thus Walker argues that he is merely pushing an already flexible system to its logical extreme...
...roiling early days of the dotcom economy, this logic made perfect sense to investors, who drove Priceline's stock to $119 a share. Profits were years away, but that was something that worried your old uncle in the boring old economy. Now, of course, the hottest concept sweeping the Web--with the NASDAQ off 26% and e-tailers disappearing faster than Energy Department hard drives--is actually making a buck...
...Pharmaceuticals, a biotech firm located in Ireland, reported that they had developed a vaccine that could shrink the plaques--at least in mice. Here the idea is to prime the immune system to treat amyloid proteins just as it would any foreign invader and target them for destruction. The concept is somewhat counterintuitive, since most researchers believe that at least part of the damage in Alzheimer's disease is caused by the immune system's overreaction to the presence of plaques and tangles. But the idea was so simple and the animal studies were so encouraging that Elan researchers decided...
...story is high concept, Sundance-style: five people, each representing one of the senses, feel their way toward love or reconciliation. But a fine cast that includes Mary Louise Parker and Marco Leonardi breathes delicate life into attractive characters. And the movie manages to make its point--that we are all impaired, short on that rarest quality, common sense--without being imprisoned by its complex format. Besides, a film that is too smart for its own good is preferable to one that's too dumb for the audience...