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Chris Hassett

As the early pioneer of push technology, PointCast quickly rose as one of the “It” startups for the Internet, along with sister media darling, Marimba. But after passing on a $450 million acquisition offer in 1997 from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., canceling plans for its IPO, failing to land a partnership with a major telco, and watching two CEOs come and go inside two years, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based PointCast has literally gone back to the drawing board.

The big media companies are at the forefront of the wireless revolution, and the first to try to pull profits out of thin air.

What’s a more user-friendly medium for distributing news: a papyrus scroll or a desktop computer? One is handheld, portable, easy to scan. The other you boot up, log onto an ISP, type in a URL, wait for it to download… There’s a reason why scrolls dominated for nearly 3,000 years.

A number of people were taken aback when a variety of Microsoft Web sites, including the main microsoft.com site, temporarily disappeared last week.

After all, here is a company trying to convince the corporate sector that it has what it takes to support mission-critical business applications on the Web.

Since Federal Reserve Board interest rate cuts have failed to revive the US economy, rumors persist that Board chariman, Alan Greenspan may soon up the ante. Insiders report that Greenspan is considering a proposed, “borrow one dollar, get a second dollar free” incentive for banks.

The most recent gem about the Internet comes from the folks at beer.com who inform us that three-quarters of quaffers worldwide have taken steps to prepare for any bad effects of Y2K on their beloved beverage.

Life beyond geekism

I am in awe of geeks.

And I use that phrase with a tremendous amount of respect.

I’m not a technological neophyte – I’ve got my head deep into Linux, assemble my own PCs, and understand firewalls to the level of packet filtering. I hang out on slashdot.org, and probably understand 95% of what I read.

It’s estimated to cost upward of five times more to win a new customer than to retain an existing one. That means ompanies need to build client relationships based on continuing loyalty in order to be successful.

One of the best ways to build such loyalty is to establish excellence in customer service as one of your key goals — and that’s where the Internet can help.