Word: smalling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This year you'll buy about $15 billion worth of consumer goods online. Businesses will spend an additional $109 billion buying from one another. And while those numbers are but a small part of the overall retail economy--which clocks in at $2.7 trillion--e-business is rapidly replacing the traditional kind for almost any purchase you can imagine. By the time the ribbons are off the packages this week, Americans will have spent $5 billion online for holiday gifts--more than twice as much as last year...
...payments that arrived with Omidyar's daily mail were small--in some cases dimes and nickels taped to index cards. But those little payments were coming in piles. eBay took in $1,000 the first month, more than it cost to run. Omidyar really knew he was onto something when he put up a listing for a broken $30 laser pointer that he was about to throw out. He fully disclosed that it didn't work--even with new batteries--and started it at $1. Inexplicably, a bidding war ensued, and someone ended up taking it off his hands...
eBay's most ambitious undertaking right now is its drive to go international. It's a big enough priority that Omidyar has returned to his native France to help oversee the effort. eBay has always had a small percentage of overseas users logging into its U.S. site, but now it is aggressively moving into foreign markets. In June it purchased Alando.de--Germany's equivalent of eBay--and folded it into the eBay site. The company also has sites running for the U.K., Canada and Australia. eBay is far ahead in those countries but vulnerable in places where it is less...
...scene from a bad spy novel. There I was leaning against a kiosk on the Champs Elysees, furtively looking at a small black-and-white photo and trying to spot the elusive Pierre, an Internet legend who tries to stay out of the spotlight. I surveyed the tables at Fouquet's, the fashionable outdoor cafe where we had agreed to meet. No dice. How hard can it be to pick out a geek entrepreneur who's worth more than $5 billion...
...Fortunately, there are a number of simple ways you can monitor the Interweather. Perhaps the most comprehensive of these is the web site maintained by Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS), a small Texas firm that turns a profit by predicting the Interweather. Every hour, Java applets on the MIDS site generate maps of the latest conditions for the U.S. and more specific regions worldwide. MORE...