Word: digitization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration set out to crack a Colombian cocaine ring three years ago, they opened a fully licensed--but also fully bogus--brokerage in suburban Atlanta to get inside the drug world. Even though the customers never made a single stock trade--double-digit stock gains are paltry in contrast to 400% returns on cocaine--the sting paid off last week with federal indictments of five Colombians, who are believed to have ties to the Cali drug cartel, on drug trafficking and money-laundering charges. The indictments capped an international operation in which authorities have...
Economists get dizzy thinking about this. It is all so scalable. Add a few servers, a dozen more Web pages, a couple more customer-service reps, run your traffic up another digit, expand into new product lines and sell a hundred thousand more books or CDs or power tools. This kind of growth--Internet gurus like David Wetherell, enthralled by the mathematics of community, call it viral growth--defies conventional valuation and makes the usual measure of retailing--same-store sales, sales per square foot--seem like roman numerals or the abacus, relics of another...
...slightly more active may prefer to use bar-code scanners, which a company called Symbol Technologies is embedding into Palm handheld computers. Here's the idea: simply scan the unique 12-digit bar code of each product in your kitchen as you use it, and a replacement is on its way. If you prefer to stay in the La-Z-Boy, munching on pizza, get your refrigerator to order the groceries. Electrolux and Frigidaire have already developed prototype smart fridges, which, we're promised, will automatically sense when your milk carton feels light or your cheese smells like unlaundered socks...
Then I noticed that Eddie's sign doesn't have a space for a third digit, which must have prevented Eddie from rolling past 99 because of this low-tech Y2K problem. It seems corporate behemoths actually aren't all that well structured. I work for a corporation with a market capitalization larger than McDonald's, and our television reviewer still can't get free Time Warner cable service. Maybe it's a miracle that the global community is working at all. Even so, I'm still going to dress like a sea turtle. But I'm going to continue...
...Crimson (5-3) beat Rhode Island 83-59 on Wednesday, but will have a significantly tougher time against the Mountaineers (4-2), who have won three straight on the strength of three double-digit games from leading scorer Kia Williams, who averages 17.5 points per game...