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August, 2001      Diablo Blue      Page 11

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market service, keep your ear to the ground. Actually this is good advice no matter what type of financial stews you have cooking online. My advice is to use the Internet to get a belly sense of how the company is doing and where they're going.
One thing to watch for are rumors that a company may be gobbled up by a bigger firm. While that may be okay, a lot depends on who's buying. For instance, Intel's famous for their purchase and desert strategy. They bought a terrific online and callback tech service, promoted it like all get out, and then abandoned it in less than a year. That was undoubtedly painful for the investors. Worse, though, are the poor schnooks trying to sell products on the Internet.
ICat was an Intel fiasco. ICat was a successful company providing the front- and back-ends for many e-com merchants. I wrote about them in PC World in 1999, and they were doing a terrific job. ICat was doing so well, Intel bought them, also giving them a virtual kiss of death. They were gone in less than a year. The lesson? If you were paying attention, you would have learned about the Intel buyout and started moving to another e-com site.
So checking a few web-savvy sites often will give you a little bit of an edge. The two sites I visit regularly provide a different perspective on the online business.

• www.thestandard.com A site with enough between-the-lines reading to make it worth a weekly visit. For instance, thinking of investing in an online magazine? Not a great idea. It's becoming clear that Salon's (www.salon.com) not doing so well. They're shifting to the model only the Wall Street Journal has found successful--subscription based access.
  
• www.ecompany.com Lots of stuff here but focus on Amy Kover's STREET LIFE column.
  
• www.****edCompany.com This famous site is based on the classic parlor game of deadpool--picking celebrity deaths with points earned based on odds, usually the age of the celebrity. (I can't repeat the actual name of the site. But I will say they buck the trend, and in order to fill in the first four asterisks, tuck your hands in your pocket, think for a minute, and maybe you'll have some luck. And be careful: Once you figure out the word, type in the URL exactly or you'll end up at some porn site. The site's variation on the deadpool game is that they bet on companies instead of people. "The lines are a little blurred," they say, "when dealing with companies because there is rarely a clean-cut death." ****edCompany is an essential tool when protecting yourself against the demise of dot.coms.
  
• www.business2.com Short, tightly written pieces with plenty of details. Writers to follow include Jenny Oh, Jim Welte, and Kevin McLaughlin. (Stick their names in the search field.)
  
• www.fundalarm.com While not a site to protect you against failing dot.coms, fundalarm is so valuable, I included it here. Their tagline is "know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run." Sure it sounds like poker but they're talking about mutual funds, and the guy gives away free, meaningful, and irreverent advice.
  

Meeting Date: 7/5/01 Time: 7:00 pm Location: Alan Mildwurm's house
As announced earlier, since the regular July meeting night fell on the day after the 4^th of July, the regular meeting was cancelled. And since the odds of a quorum of the Board showing up for the July Board meeting were slim without a general meeting to remind them, the Board meeting for July was cancelled, too.
This worked out well in one respect. Due to travel schedules our beloved Diablo Blue Editor Ron Ogg called for all articles to be submitted by July 8. This was three days before the scheduled July Board meeting would have occurred on Wednesday the 11th. How could I have written the minutes three days before the meeting?
Of course, who would have noticed? Certainly not the Board. By the time we get home the after a meeting we have forgotten everything we said and did anyway. For that matter, I have never let a little thing like missing a meeting prevent me from writing the minutes in the past, so I guess it would have worked out. In fact, it did work out, because here are the minutes!
New Business:
Raffle prizes:  Alan gave a sneak preview of some of the items to be offered as raffle prizes in the coming months. You traditionalists will certainly want to be there when we offer up DOS 5.0 in the original shrink wrap! For the more daring, cutting edge experimenters there are two copies of Windows 3.1, also in the

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