Word: wholely
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...venture captures these new infonomics better than eBay, the four-year-old auction site. The eBay miracle isn't that it allows you to clean out your attic at a profit--though that's not a bad invention--but that it changes the whole way that we set prices. On eBay, buyers get to decide what something is worth, so objects migrate closer to their true value. Recently a Maine antiques store put an old-fashioned calculator up for sale on eBay for $100. Within a few days the calculator-loving collectors of the Web had bid the price...
...Amazon landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The story did two things: it introduced Amazon to a whole new stream of customers, and it caught the attention of rivals like Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, which hadn't yet moved online. Barnesandnoble.com would appear a year later--just before Amazon's initial public offering, which went off at a modest $18 a share. Never mind that the celebrated venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was its biggest institutional investor before the IPO. Wall Streeters were afraid of the threat posed by the giant Barnes & Noble...
...called AuctionWeb, which was supported on the $30-a-month Internet service provider he was hooked up to from home. (The site's domain name was www.ebay.com and eBay was the name that stuck.) There were no Pez dispensers--that came later--but there were listings for a whole lot of computer hardware. eBay started out free, but it quickly attracted so much traffic that Omidyar's Internet service upped his monthly bill to $250. Now that it was costing him real money, Omidyar decided to start charging. He concocted a fee scale similar to the one eBay uses today...
...auction. Bids race through cyberspace, winners are declared, and Wicker mails the goods to the lucky buyers--and cashes their money orders and cashier's checks, sometimes for a tidy profit and always with the thrill of a successful sale. "I've been waiting for eBay my whole life," she says...
What a delicious assignment: invite 12 people to dinner at my Washington house, come up with any menu I want, hire someone to serve and clean up, and charge the whole feast to the company. I could hear the Champagne corks popping...