Webernet Madne$$

[nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)]

Wall Street Journal, November 3, 1995


Wall Street is in the throes of Internet mania. Or is it
Internet madness?

Investors have poured into Internet-related stocks in the
past couple of days, pushing some Web darlings such as
Spyglass and Netscape Communications to dizzying new
heights.

"People are blindly investing in anything that says
Internet," said Willian Bluestein, an analyst at
Forrester Research in Cabridge, Mass.

"Everyone wants to buy into the craze," says John
Sebrich, who works with mutual-fund investor Mario
Gabelli. ...

What is the big stampede all about? During the past week
or so, some of the highest-profile, highest-flying
Internet stocks have actually reported profits, a
development the Street wasn't expecting until next year
at best. ...

"The reason Intuit's moving up is the realization that if
you had to do the banking industry over again, you
wouldn't use brick and mortar," said Neal P. Miller,
manager of Fidelity Investments' New Millennium Fund.
"I think the size of this Internet thing is just dawning
on everyone," he said.

Neil Weintraut said, "Money managers are realizing that
there is tremendous strength behind this. It's not just
a technology chasing a marketplace." ... [and more gush]

______________________________________________________

Web and Wild [Chart]
______________________________________________________

                                             Percent
                              Yesterday's    Change
Company                       Close          This Week
______________________________________________________

Spyglass                      $70.50         +70%
Uunet Technologies             67.00         +41%
Netcom Online                  68.63         +30%
Performance Systems            21.25         +30%
Intuit                         82.75         +21%
Netscape                       98.25         +21%
______________________________________________________


-----

European Firms Join Research Group In Bid to Guide
Internet Development

By Douglas Lavin


Paris - - Afraid of being frozen out of the booming
interest in the Internet, 20 European companies joined
together to form the European arm of an Internet research
group.

The World Wide Web Consortium's European branch will work
with the U.S. Web consortium on such global issues as
electronic commerce, but it will also work on such
international issues as the use of languages other than
English on the Web, the multimedia portion of the
Internet.

"We must assure that the beautiful springtime of the
World Wide Web is not also the autumn of the French
language," said Elisabeth Dufourcq, France's secretary of
state for research at a conference here to announce the
creation of the European branch.

Several large European technology firms, including Oy
Nokia of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany, who are
hoping to play a major role in the development of the
Internet here ponied up $150,000 to join the consortium.
Particularly well-represented are telephone companies who
see the Internet as a threat to their ability to control
national voice and data networks. Among the European
members of the consortium, announced at a conference on
the Web here, are British Telecommunications PLC and the
national telecommunications companies of France, Germany,
Italy and Belgium. All five companies either offer or are
planning to offer Internet access.

One of the group's key tasks is to ensure that
improvements made by such rival companies as Netscape
Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp., both members of
the U.S. consortium, don't create separate parts of the
Internet that can only be read by Microsoft or Netscape
software.

Membership in the European consortium, which is to be
based at the French national computer-research institute,
Inria, also shows a remarkable degree of interest in the
Web by the French business and government establishment,
which only a year ago dismissed the Internet as a
American version of France's Minitel network, but now is
avidly promoting the Internet's growth.
Among the members of the consortium from France are
Assurances Generale de France, the insurance company;
Electricite de France, the electricty company; Cie. des
Machines Bull, the computer maker; Aerospatiale, the
aerospace concern; and Thomson-CSF, the arms
manufacturer, all of them state-controlled, as well as
such private concerns as Alcatel-Alsthom SA and Groupe
Michelin.

Inria, which already has taken over some Web research
work from CERN, the nuclear-research organization in
Switzerland where the Web was created in 1989 by Tim
Berners-Lee.

Mr. Berners-Lee, now at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, is heading both the U.S. and the European
research consortia.

[End]

-----


Nuclear research > munitions research > controlled crypto > 
controlled commerce > economic espionage > ten thousand-year 
reign of the PGP-DigiBank-MIT-CERN crypto-commo-libertarian 
nerds.


Phill, what's the admission code to W3 world domination?