NewsScan Daily, 23 June 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 23 June 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       European Pay-by-Cell-Phone Plans
       Consumers Finally Bitten by Online Food
       Gyro Mouse Goes Remote
       Around the Net: Some Random Stats
       Off-the-Shelf Supercomputers
       Honda's 'Cog' Ad Shows Future of Advertising
 
FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Dave Garroway

EUROPEAN PAY-BY-CELL-PHONE PLANS
Four of Europe's top wireless carriers have created a new clearinghouse for
taking payments for small purchases directly from mobile phone customers.
Using the slogan "Pay for stuff with your mobile," the promoters are saying:
"Our aim is for you to see it on music Web sites, when making a flight
booking, or even when paying a bus fare." The carriers are Britain's Orange
SA and Vodafone, Spain's Telefonica Moviles, and Germany's T-Mobile. (AP/San
Jose Mercury News 23 Jun 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6151471.htm

CONSUMERS FINALLY BITTEN BY ONLINE FOOD OFFERINGS
It took several years and the demise of several online grocery businesses,
but online food sales are finally taking off. According to Forrester
Research, Internet sales of food and beverages will total $3.7 billion this
year (up 40% from last year) -- a number that means this sales category is
now bigger than books, event tickets and even toys. About two-thirds of the
sales go to traditional mail-order food merchants who've developed a Web
presence, with online grocers making up the remaining third. Even Amazon is
getting into act -- this summer it's developing a food store that will
accommodate a number of retailers and a variety of products, from frozen
dinners to gourmet cookies. Fueling the growth is a new willingness on the
part of consumers to pay for food they can't see and trust that it will be
fresh on arrival. "People have definitely gotten more comfortable with the
psychology of not having to touch food to buy it," says the owner of Dan's
Chocolates, an Internet-only purveyor of sweets. At the same time,
traditional mail-order firms are seeing larger profits generated by their
Web divisions. "If it's a catalog-based business, it's certainly true that
within three or four years most of their business will be online," says a
senior retail analyst at Forrester. (Wall Street Journal 23 Jun 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10563137674494900.djm,00.html (sub req'd)

GYRO MOUSE GOES REMOTE
Gyration, the creator of the gyroscopic mouse, has come up with a new take
on the ubiquitous remote control: it's marketing a wireless, motion-sensing
remote-control and mouse device designed to operation with Windows XP Media
Center-based PCs. The product is a major improvement over the standard
clicker, because it uses radio frequency rather than infrared signals,
meaning it can communicate with a PC that's stored out of sight. In
addition, the motion-sensing feature means that the user can simply wave the
device in the air to control a mouse pointer or even the volume on a PC. "In
order to control their PCs, users need to simply wave their hand and click,"
says Gyration CEO Thomas Quinn. The product comes with software that expands
its capabilities, including enabling the user to zoom in on text in order to
make it easier to read. It should be available in the U.S. and the U.K.
later this year, priced somewhere around $150-$180. (CNet News.com 20 Jun
2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1095_3-1019329.html?tag=fd_top

AROUND THE NET: SOME RANDOM STATS
AUTOMOTIVE: One of every four car sales in the U.S. will take place on the
Internet by 2007, says Jupiter Research... BANKING: Wells Fargo, the
nation's 4th-largest bank, now has 4 million active online customers...
B2B: Cisco does more than 90% of its sales to other businesses online...
EDUCATION: The University of Phoenix Online now has a student body of
63,000...  ENTERTAINMENT: RealNetworks has more than twice as many Internet
multimedia subscribers as Microsoft... HEALTH: WebMD gets more than 17.2
million visitors a month... MEDIA: More than 120 million people visited
Yahoo from home in April -- that's about the same number as tuned in all the
major TV networks combined... REAL ESTATE: Realtor.com gets 9 out of 10 of
the listings of houses for sale... RETAIL: Amazon's a giant, all right, but
is still only the 54th largest retailer, well behind Sears, 7-Eleven, Barnes
& Noble, and Wal-Mart...  TRAVEL: Expedia leads the industry, with $5.3
billion in booking last year. (USA Today 22 Jun 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/2003-06-22-netwinners_x.htm

OFF-THE-SHELF SUPERCOMPUTERS
The latest trend in supercomputing is to build systems by clustering
off-the-shelf "commodity" PCs and inexpensive servers; a good example is the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory cluster ranked as the
third-most-powerful in the world. As Reza Rooholamini of Dell explains, "The
total cost of ownership much less than with proprietary systems." This is
all good news for chipmakers Intel and AMD, who are taking different
technological paths to 64-bit chips for use in high-end systems. Intel will
be announcing a new chip code-named Madison, with twice the capacity of its
existing Itanium 2 line, and AMD recently introduced its Opteron chip, which
(unlike Itanium) can handle both 64-bit and 32-bit software. (Wall Street
Journal 22 Jun 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105631479658507500,00.html [sub req'd]

HONDA'S 'COG' AD MAY SHOW THE FUTURE OF ADVERTISING
Columnist John Battelle says that the two-minute ad "Cog" for Honda UK marks
a turning point in the history of TV advertising. You can take a look at it
by linking to the Business 2.0 article cited below. (Business 2.0 Jul 2003)
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,50151,00.html

*****

FLASH CARD
     "Discretion in speech is more than eloquence. "(Francis Bacon)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: DAVE GARROWAY
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the TV talk show host Dave Garroway
(1913-1982), who is probably best remembered as the first host of NBC's
early morning Today Show, which he headlined from 1952 to 1961.
     Television critic John Crosby said of Garroway's approach, "It appears
to be directed at pleasing a few people in a living room, not at provoking
wild shrieks of laughter from a studio audience."
     To spice up early ratings, the show added a chimpanzee by the name of
J. Fred Muggs, who became a star in his own right. The show also featured a
"Today Girl" whose main job was to look good. The "Today Girl" role matured
in 1963 when they hired Barbara Walters, who expanded the position and broke
barriers to women in journalism.
     Garroway was born in Schenectady, New York. In 1937, two years after
graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, he arrived in New York
with intentions of becoming a salesman for a line of schoolbooks. A former
college acquaintance helped him get a job as an NBC page. He then enrolled
in the network's training school for announcers. In 1941, NBC offered
Garroway the opportunity to go to Europe as a war correspondent, but he
opted to become an ensign in the Navy instead and spent the war running a
yeoman school in Pearl Harbor. The Navy gave him permission to broadcast a
disc-jockey show in Honolulu, and it was there that he formulated his casual
broadcasting style.
     "After my daytime duties," he once said, "I was too tired to plot a
radio program and write continuity, so I just played some jazz numbers and
filled in the breaks with casual talk and patter, as though I was talking to
a friend over a highball. I'd reminisce about astronomy, or jazz, or
oysters, or the good old civilian days back in Chicago, or St. Louis, or New
York." 
     After the war, Garroway had the opportunity to host a television
version of his Honolulu radio show called "The 11:60 Club." In 1949 the
growing influence of commercial television, along with the completion of the
coaxial cable between New York and Chicago, prompted him to create a new NBC
program that could be carried on a national hook-up. This program, "Garroway
at Large," pioneered techniques especially devised for the TV camera,
bringing the viewer backstage, over cables and around studio props, all the
while mixing live entertainment with informal humor.
     
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0292781768/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for "Television Talk: A History of the TV Talk Show" -- or look for it in
your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations
to adult literacy programs.)

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