The Academical Village in the Internet Age Forecasting the Future/Jeffersonian Principles in the Internet Age
Friday, November 12, 1999
9:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

John Casteen: Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to e-summit at the University of Virginia. I am John Casteen, the University's President. It's a real pleasure to welcome students and faculty and guests and members of this community and persons from the e-business panel before you to this morning's first session. I'd like also to welcome those of you who are watching this program live via Yahoo! broadcast. We're delighted this weekend to welcome back to Charlottesville a core group of some 35 alumni and then many others whom I guess I would describe as being non-core for this purpose but a core group of some 35 alumni who have become national leaders in Internet businesses. These are leaders who are in various ways and every day reshaping the world in which we live and building different futures for us. The genesis for this conference was in one line in a magazine article. Fortune Magazine in what I think was a side bar article wrote the following: "Hey, who needs Stanford. Check out the list of University of Virginia grads who are big time Internet players" and then the little piece ended with a line, "So what's in the water down in Charlottesville?" This is, in sense, a conference on the subject what's in the water.

We are interested in what it is about the University of Virginia that may have had some influence on the alumni whose presentations and discussions with one another that you will hear in the course of the next couple of days. We're fascinated about the relationship between academic experience and the cultivation or development of inventors, entrepreneurs, risk takers and leaders for a new age.

Then there was a more personal reason for this weekend's gathering. Bert Ellis who finished the College in 1975 and the Darden School in 1979 is a member of one of the alumni Virginia 2020 groups that has been helping us rethink from the outside, the alumni side of the equation where we are going as a University as we move toward the beginning of the University's third century in the year 2020. Bert suggested that alumni leaders of the Internet would be extremely useful in the dialogue about what the University becomes in the course of the next couple of decades. Bert's suggestion was that we invite leaders such as those who have in fact have come to talk about their experience as leaders in new technologies, how they imagine what they do, how they took the steps that led to the creation of their companies or to the development of their products. Second, Bert said that leaders of this kind would be essential as we think through the adaptation or the application or the invention of new technologies with the University. And third, he thought it might be constructive to do something we have in fact begun doing already with the session held last night at Carr's Hill and that is pose questions about the relationship between education here and the success achieved by these alumni in this first phase of an ongoing revolution in the Internet sector.

The Virginia 2020 program actually began as an attempt to write an agenda for a university whose identity is changed in basic ways in the course of this decade as it has developed new kinds of strength in teaching and in research, new resources to make it much more self-sufficient than it has been at any time in the past and a new set of aspirations about its future. Under the 2020 program groups of younger alumni, persons graduated let's say over the course of the last 20 or so years, gather in different parts of the country to work with us on questions having to do with what the University ought to be and what it ought to do in this arbitrary year 2020.

We've asked what ought to change as the world in which these alumni work and exert leadership changes. We've asked what is distinctive about the University of Virginia and ought not to change. What traditions? What core ways of doing business ought we to retain? And we have found in all of these discussions that coming to terms with new technologies and, indeed, learning ways to master those technologies is essential to every vision of what we might be in the course of the next couple of decades.

And then there is another side to the project. Virginia 2020 also includes the work of four planning commissions formed primarily out of the University's faculty here on the Grounds and charged with exploring four different activities or areas that have to do with the University's mission in the course of the next generation. These commissions have worked to try to figure out the resource issues, the exact academic strategies, the larger matters of philosophy that have to do with how we serve this state, how we serve the nation and the world in the course of our next era. The commissions addressed these topics. First, the sciences and technologies and in particular, the new technologies. Second, the fine and performing arts. Third, public service and outreach performed by faculty in the service of government or industry or education or other sectors around us. And finally, international activities and programs, especially those that bring faculty and students together in learning the nature of a rapidly expanding international culture.

The commissions are now beginning the final phase of their pre-report writing activities. Their reports will be the blueprint for building strength in these key areas over the course of the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years depending on the topic and elevating the University to national prominence in each of these four areas. The new technologies obviously affect planning across the entire University, how students learn, how and what faculty teach, where teaching and learning take place, how libraries store and distribute or disseminate information, how multimedia innovations can transform our arts programs in the international sense. Today, we ask our Internet alumni to talk to us about how these new technologies are revolutionizing our own lives and their industries and we ask them to think about the world around us and about the futures they can imagine based on what they know now about these technologies.

I should tell you that I don't expect the conversation to be simply publicity for the Internet. All of us have concerns about privacy. All of us are interested in access to information. All of us believe that the integrity of information has a special kind of importance in a university committed to truth, so don't expect this to be merely an advertisement for the Internet. Look instead for a chance to deal with the hardest issues we can think about as a society, as we confront the impacted new technologies in what we know and we learn. We're also looking to hear from you, the audience, in the course of this weekend. Alumni and faculty and student panelists will be making presentations. There will be chances for discussion.

Because this is the University of Virginia, one of the topics we know will be the Internet's impact on Jeffersonian ideals of freedom, of privacy, of security, of democracy, ideals that this University obviously holds very dear. This topic of technologies as they relate to the University's origins and history has had an impact here that perhaps is specialized because of where we are. Our founder had substantial interest in emerging technologies whether these technologies were innovative farm implements or manufacturing processes. We suspect that Thomas Jefferson would have embraced the Internet, not simply as a novel technology but also as a treasure trove of information. Indeed, his quarters at Monticello will suggest very clearly that treasure troves of information were essential to his way of thinking about his world. We suspect that he would have seen it as an empowering force and as one that was essential to the well being of the people in the republic that he imagined. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1817 a phrase or a set of phrases that have become kind of basic to our thinking about the Internet. The phrases are these: knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, and knowledge is happiness. I suspect that in the course of the weekend all of us can learn more about the ways in which information available through the Internet impacts the reality of those three statements on our own existences and on the world in which we live.

Access to information is obviously no longer limited to the privileged few. Extraordinary numbers of information sources including a vast array of texts and databases exist now in our University libraries and in university libraries around the world, and these are now available in a sense at the fingertips of computer users everywhere. The Internet is, in a sense, helping to fulfill the original vision of this place, of an informed and educated populace. Thomas Jefferson thought that information knowledge was essential to the well being of a free people. Obviously we do also, but this is also a chance to think about the implications of the Internet of these new points of access for person who are cut off from access, persons who don't have the power of the knowledge revolution at their disposal, so this is a weekend for talking about hard topics. It's a chance for alumni and faculty members and students to engage in what we hope will be provocative discussions about the Internet and about the serious theoretical and practical and social and ethical issues that surround the use of the Internet here and globally. We hope that the conversations this weekend will help us to generate plans for action to guide the University of Virginia over the course of the next couple of decades.

Finally, a couple of words of special thanks. To Bert Ellis for conceiving this project and for being the spearhead as we move forward with it. To PriceWaterhouseCoopers and to Fortune Magazine for sponsoring the weekend and then to the alumni, the core 35 and the many others, who've returned to Charlottesville to help us to find out what is in the water in Charlottesville and to help us plan for the University's third century. Thanks to all of you for coming. And now it's my pleasure to introduce Ted Snyder, the Dean of the Darden School of Business who will introduce today's speakers and moderate the first plenary session. Will you please welcome Dean Snyder?

Edward A. Snyder: Thank you, John. At the outside, I'd like to encourage the audience during this opening session to use the cards provided to you to write down your most provocative questions and we'll collect those questions at the break which will be around 10:25 and we'll use your questions to continue the dialogue after the break.

Let me now introduce our panel. I'd like to begin with the person opposite to me, to the audience's right. That's Jeff Walker. He's Managing Partner of Chase Capital Partners. He's one of the handful of top people at the enterprise. That's a global private equity firm with $42 billion invested. Chase is one of the most prominent investors in Internet companies, among them Star Media, Street.com, and Multex. Next to Jeff is Allison Abraham. She's Chief Operating Officer at iVillage. She's responsible for developing and implementing iVillage's unique strategy. It's a company that has an innovative on-line network providing solutions to problems facing women. Just to give you a sense of the scale of that community, iVillage has 2.7 million members, 7.5 million unique visitors every month.

Next to Allison is Bert Ellis. As John mentioned, the brainchild behind this conference. Bert is Chairman and CEO of iXL Enterprises. He founded iXL Enterprises in 1996 with the goal to help businesses use technology and take advantages of all the innovations that they could possibly do. To my left, right here, is Mark Templeton. Mark's President and Chief Executive Officer of Citrix Systems, which is a leading system software company. Mark has been instrumental in establishing and sustaining the company's solid financial position and importantly moving the company into the Internet market in the U.S. and beyond. Next to Mark is Lawton Fitt. Lawton is Managing Director of Goldman Sachs where since 1989, she's focused on high tech companies, providing them with equity financing and taking many of the most prominent Internet company public. She was named one of the 25 most influential people in e-business by Business Week Magazine.

In the middle of our panel is Halsey Minor. Halsey's Founder, Chairman and CEO of CNET. Halsey has built CNET into a leading source of information and services relating to computers and technology drawing more than eight million users a month. Halsey's also pioneered a media marriage between television and the web using television programming to make complex subject matter concerning technology widely accessible. And next to Halsey is Tim Koogle. Tim is Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo! He's one of the Internet's most prominent and successful business leaders. He developed the model that every major search engine has followed, namely make the site free to users and support it with advertising. The numbers change so fast. I had 80 million users per month. I guess it's over 100 million users that use Yahoo! to start their on-line work and over $500 million in advertising revenue this year, so welcome to all of you. Welcome to the panel and I'd like to have Tim start us off. Stepping back from Yahoo! could you frame what's happening out there? What's the scale of the Internet phenomenon growth, users here and elsewhere.

Timothy A. Koogle: Sure, I'll try. A few of the numbers. I jotted these down this morning as Ted gave me a little bit of warning that he was going to ask me to give you the scale of things going on. This year in 1999, best guess--about 200 million users worldwide of the web. That's up from essentially zero in 1994 and is projected to grow to about almost triple, to about 500 million users by the year 2003, which is just three years away. An interesting thing is going on in that already almost half of those users are outside of the U.S. and that's projected to continue to grow to probably two-thirds outside of the U.S. and one-third inside by U.S. by 2003 or 2004, so a whole lot of users growing really fast and what's interesting is the mix already is about 50/50 inside and outside the U.S.

Spending is an interesting thing. There's at least three categories you can kind of point to. This is a medium and it is one in which users are essentially businesses can get in touch directly with users of the web and it's a great medium for doing advertising, direct marketing and commerce and so advertising spending has been growing really rapidly from essentially zero. I think it was $40 million in the year 1995 when we started our business, world-wide market, a huge market--$40 million, to this year it's grown to about-- Probably we'll end up with about $3_ billion in spending this year in advertising worldwide and that's projected to grow to at least $24 billion in another three years. Again, mix gradually increasing outside of the U.S. to kind of favor more an international market.

There's a category called business to consumer commerce which is actually the direct selling or enabling of selling between a business and an end user consumer. Business to consumer commerce this year, probably around $30 billion in round numbers. Projected to grow to about $178 billion by the year 2003, and the last category to make you completely dizzy is business to business commerce. This is actually commerce that's done directly between businesses over the Internet and this year best guess--$80 billion with a b. In the year 2003, projected to grow to $1.2 trillion. So, a lot of numbers and big ones and growing really fast and ones when you look not very far down below the surface of them do talk a lot about the global growth and balance both in user bases as well as commerce worldwide, and those are the numbers, so those are kind of symptoms of something, and I kind of want to maybe just say a few words about what we see fundamentally going on that's leading to these things.

I think in anybody's estimation, 200 million users already is a mass market, and 500 million certainly is and when you get to these tens of billions of dollars in spending to moving to trillions, this is something very fundamental going on, and I think it kind of goes like this. Starting at the 30,000 foot level, the thing called the Internet, the web, is a medium and in some ways there're parts of it that are very similar to past media. It is about information delivery, but the difference is and this is fundamental. It is at the same time about content delivery, commerce and transactions and communication simultaneously, and also this medium is a global network and it has no time or geographic boundaries. Fundamental and very profound and so what it's doing is at the same time it's enabling a whole new generation of businesses that choose to embrace those facts and fundamentally remake the shape of media as well as commerce and for entrepreneurs like me, and I've been one for quite a long time now, it's a wonderful opportunity. It's one of those fundamental shifts that comes along at least probably not very often, every several decades probably you see a fundamental shift happening that kind of shakes things up.

Going on to the future, one of my cohorts, Jerry Yang, who I joined in the summer of 1995 when we had six people at the company and no revenue and no written business plan. I have to say this by the way. Jerry was 26 when I came down to join he and David to start this thing. They were looking for an adult supervisor [laughter]. That was the pick-up line that the recruiter used to get my attention and Jerry and David both are very unique guys and Jerry, in particular, is very articulate and many of you may have seen him or heard him speak publicly. He's quite an unusual young man. I have heard him publicly speak about something that we have had in line for quite some time and that is that our vision going out in the future in general terms is that thing called the Internet actually ends up getting woven into people's lives. In fact, the way we visualize our business, the business we continue to create and evolve at Yahoo! is fundamentally a lifestyles business and if you take that a step further, in a more detailed form, then looking out over the horizon what it means is that there's probably what will happen is much the same as happened in prior inventions like the telephone is a good example that most people can probably relate to. Probably five years from now, 10 years from now, certainly 10 years from now, I doubt that anyone will be saying I went to the Internet to do something. They'll be saying did something period. You'll be taking the devices, the infrastructure, the way you get connected and the tools you use in all of that for granted the same way you use telephones today. You don't hear somebody saying I went to the telephone to call someone. Right? It's woven into your life. You'll take it for granted and there will be plethora of devices and connection points, wired and wireless, all seamless, worldwide, and I think that it will be woven into people's lives a lot. It is profound in the opportunities it provides all of us and challenges.

There are existing businesses and I think we're going to talk about this more today that have to face cannibalization, channel rearrangement, food chain rearrangement. It's great opportunity for brand new enterprises to be formed, to take advantage of that, to work around the existing food chain and fundamentally it's a pretty cool thing. So that's it.

Snyder: Thanks, Tim. Halsey, maybe you could continue this and address some of the changes in business models that you think are most relevant and also try to bring in the individual. What are the implications for us as consumers as individuals?

Halsey A. Minor: Actually, I'll start off by saying telling a story which I think is kind of interesting. Tim might remember it. It was back in 1995 and I think it was the first day that you actually showed up at Yahoo!. It was pretty close and I'm actually telling this story at great risk to me. Not many of you are going to think I'm very smart afterwards, but I had this bright idea that this guy Jerry Yang who I knew had a pretty neat search engine built around a directory and so I called him up and I took him out to lunch and I said, we had $5 million burning a whole in our pocket and at the time it was a lot of money, and they were out trying to raise some money and I said, "hey, I'd kind of like to look at possibly investing in you guys." I said, "what's the valuation of the company," and Jerry said, "well, I think we're going to do around and probably value at about $40 million," and I said, "$40 million. Jerry, what kind of business? What do you think your business looks like?" He goes, "well, I think in three or four years, we'll have $20 million in revenue and about $18 million in profit," and of course, now, Yahoo!'s something like $60 billion in market cap and of course, $20 million was probably your net income for the last quarter [laughter].

Koogle: Half our net income.

Minor: I'm sorry, half of his net income [laughter], so anyway, generally you're not supposed to start out with making yourself look very stupid, but I have just been shocked at the degree to which the Internet has changed since 1995. We actually started accepting advertising probably a couple of months, I think, before Yahoo! in around June and I went to my sales force and I said to them, "I want 11 advertisers by the time we launch," and I don't know why I wanted 11 advertisers, but that was the number that I wanted and my sales force came back to me and they were terrified and they said, "Halsey, there're only seven advertisers on the entire Internet and none of them are paying" and that was sort of the state of affairs in the middle of 1995 and now you hear the numbers and I think our first conference that we held in 1995 was on Internet commerce but the topic was why is commerce on the web not taking off, and now, of course, today's it's sort of a foregone conclusion that Internet commerce is one of the great sea changes that we've experienced in our society and in business and everybody is now, whether you're a web only player or it's bricks and clicks as the people at Charles Schwab have now coined, everybody is obviously jumping into the game of selling products on line and yet most of them aren't making money so it's hard really to sort of understand what the implications of all this commerce really is, but I think that there are a couple of things that are very clear and one of the things that we're seeing the birth of efficient markets in an efficient marketplace across the full gamut of products and services that we buy as consumes and that businesses buy from each other and so sometimes it's helpful to actually look at precursors to sort of figure out where things are going and the only other sort of electronically-mediated market that we all know about.

In fact, many of us in this room participate in, is the stock market. Stock market, the bond markets, other kinds of financial markets have been for quite some time essentially electronic marketplaces. Now, the Internet, of course, broadens them which is why we've seen the phenomenon of day traders and others things but they're really the first examples of efficient markets and I actually worked on Wall Street for a couple of years when I left Virginia for Merrill Lynch and still many of my friends work on Wall Street and what you'll find is that really the more liquid and efficient markets become the harder it is, in fact, to make money and so the big game on Wall Street is to develop products and come up with ideas before other people can copy them. There's a window there where you're sort of alone in a marketplace. The marketplace is not efficient and you can make a lot of money and then over time other players enter the market and pricing begins to contract and spreads go down and over time essentially the businesses become break even, maybe you make a little money, and oftentimes you'll, in fact, lose money, and so what we're watching now is that same phenomenon happen across the full spectrum of goods and services on the Internet.

We're seeing it begin to happen at CNET. We have a database of about 175,000 technology products and two million prices and if you want to buy a Palm Pilot and you shop at our web site and I'll guarantee you right now there's 45 people who are selling that product. The database is updated twice a day. You can sort by availability and price and click off, so we've actually created, in a sense, a marketplace for people who want to buy Palm Pilots and so the question is if this is really the fate of commerce, how will anybody make money and sort of will anybody make money and the truth is, I think, that a lot of people actually will make money selling things, but it'll be in a radically different way.

The value of an actual transaction, I think, is worth almost nothing, so the actual act of selling a Palm Pilot and delivering it, consumers don't value. Lots of people can do it. What happens is that it's the wrapper of services and experience that you put around the selling of the product that ultimately contributes to margins, to whether people, in fact, are willing to pay and so somebody like Dell who I think has done a wonderful job, you know, you buy a Dell PC and that's great, but it's also great that they send you an e-mail when it's shipped and you can go on their web site and you can watch it through every step of the development process and they've gone out of their way to make sure that they have great help resources so if you have a problem, you can get help from them directly off of the web site. It's not the act of buying the PC that holds its value and this is particularly true of commodity products like books. It's the experience of buying. It's all the accoutrements that the web, in fact, allows and so I think that in this marketplace which is truly global, which I think offers enormous opportunity to commerce participants if you think about what Wal-Mart had to do to be global. They had to build it one brick at a time and there's still many areas of the world they can't reach. Companies like Amazon and Dell can simultaneously reach everywhere almost, but really the way that these companies will ultimately make money is through web publishing, through a lot of the same things we do. It's delivering a really great experience for the user.

Thanks.

Snyder: Well, Jeff and Lawton, your people have to size up these investments. What do you think?

Jeffrey C. Walker: We have a great team of entrepreneurs here already and they made the miraculous move in helping start up businesses and then staying with them and that's not always typical in entrepreneurial activities and so that's a feat in itself. What I find fascinating by this opportunity, i.e., the Internet, is that it's not just the Internet. It what it's doing to every business we look at, how it's changing the way those businesses are managed and the way they operate and it's in the greater global environment. They know more. They make decisions quicker. They're flatter organization structures. People are focused more on stock and stockholders' value and that's not just here in the US; it's overseas. People are now trying to make decisions in a less bureaucratic fashion and making that decision first is probably more important than waiting and analyzing it and making a decision when you have all of the facts.

And so that changes the way businesses operate. It changes the way universities operate. It changes the way all non-profits operate and those that don't change are going to fall by the wayside, and so when you look at opportunities you look not just those that are pure Internet plays but even on the ones that are basic business--how's the Internet going to change them and it's changing the companies we invest in, in the chemical industry, in the energy industry, in the telecommunications industry. Actually, we think telecommunications in the next few years is going to go through an equally large value creation exercise as we have seen in the Internet in the last several years.

What are the opportunities and where do you look for the next great growth path. Pervasive computing which means the blending of wireless technology with the Internet. Everyone's walking around with not just Palm 7s which are out now, but wireless devices of all kinds and what does that mean? When you're walking down the street and you can find out where the restaurant is nearest you that has an available table or where the hot movie is and you don't have to go on the phone or go on your cell phone. You just click it up and punch it on your little Internet access device, and those are coming out within months, not years, and what I find is amazing is when you go to the conferences and listen to the futurists, they're talking about, gee, in the year 2010, we're going to do the following, and then you look at the investments that we've looked at and a bunch of other people have put money into and they plan on bringing them out next year, and so what does that mean? It means you can't wait. It means that maybe the way we do education, i.e., ECON 201 shouldn't be held as it currently is in a large room and a lecture being given. Maybe it should be on-line. Maybe we should do that next year and not in a few years. Maybe we have to change the way we educate the inner city. Something that we're spending a lot of time on.

Eleven percent of children in the inner city have access on an ongoing basis to the Internet. That's ridiculously low, and that's going to be a have-have not kind of issue and that influences how you as an investor look at opportunities, where we focus? Are we going to focus just on the haves? Are we going to help bring the have nots into the system? So, it impacts education and it impacts organizational structure and it impacts globalness. Can we bring in this global community? Can we bring people with common interests across countries together through the Internet and I think we have and are.

I think we have to look beyond Silicon Valley. There was a real parochial approach to looking at Internet opportunities several years ago and looking just in Palo Alto area. In fact, I still see that sometimes. I think we in New York and in Virginia and Atlanta and everywhere else can produce just as good an opportunity and just as good an idea and we're seeing a lot of blossoming going on.

My last point is I've never seen so many wild-eyed entrepreneurs and wild-eyed ideas coming through which is great and that's what you look at backing people who have enthusiasm and visions, but people are now leaving universities, some of them being very successful in doing that in the middle of their educational lives. Three guys just left a business school I know of in the middle of the second year. One of them after two months and one of 15 people, got an investment from Microsoft worth a billion dollars in value, so, gee, that's successful, but is that the right thing to do? Gee, they said they can come back and finish school in a year. Is that gold rush really so important to put everything else aside? Is this the only opportunity? Biotech 20 years ago was the same kind of opportunity. A lot of people left and invest change and evolved back into the drug industry. Is this the same thing? Is this the only time we have to make money or build the new world? Thank you.

Lawton W. Fitt: Following on the wild-eyed entrepreneurs, yes, we certainly see a very large number of companies and we see them a little later as they're coming public and I think one of the very interesting things in the last year is that we've gone from having probably something in a range of 40 or 50 public companies available for investors in the Internet space to a couple of hundred companies came public and the question for investors, but also I think the question importantly for consumers, is who's going to succeed given the enormous number of opportunities that are being pursued, and I go back to something that Tim said which is that the Internet is getting enmeshed in everybody's lives and to me, the real challenge is to be where the consumer wants you to be and the way that the consumer wants you to be there and consumer can be someone who's a buyer of services. It can also be someone who's looking for information at whatever time of day or night, in whatever way, with whatever support that that user is looking to find.

And I think the really exciting thing about the Internet but the challenge for those who are providers of Internet services is empowering the user, empowering the consumer, so that they can make their own decisions and so that you become a valuable part of their lives if you think about it, once this novelty wears off, people, I think, are going to be get themselves down to a core or a handful of providers who are helpful to them, useful to them, give them information in a way that serves their needs and they will go back to those people over and over again and I think the challenge that we now face given the rate of adoption is to figure out what that business model or what that information model looks like.

Snyder: Okay. So we've got millions of people in the catbird seat. Tremendous information. A gazillion pages but Jeff, you raised an important issue which is how many catbirds seats are out there. What kind of access are we really going to have? And maybe Allison, you would want to touch on this from the point of view of your unique company. What do you see in terms of access? Who's going to really play? Are we going to move to a society where some people are in the seat and a lot of people are in this other category, the digital have nots?

Allison H. Abraham: Well, I think what we really see is that, to play off some more of what Tim and Halsey said, is that branding and that consistent experience for the consumer is what's really going to make the company successful and I think from our standpoint at iVillage, we also started very early on the Internet with a company called Parentsoup, a site that was really for products and have had a very consistent positioning and understanding of the consumer really over the last four years, and to give you a very real life example is one of the things we stand for is helping people solve problems that are a real part of their everyday life, and for example, in Parentsoup, what we found within our community was a group of about 20 parents got together and they really wanted to change the behavior of their teenagers and they couldn't figure out how to do it individually and what they did was they got together and decided that for a month they would work every day together sharing ideas each night at a specific time, working with experts, and working with each other to figure out to improve their relationship with their children, just an everyday thing, but the Internet really made that come together. There were no geographic boundaries and there were ways to be really almost intimate with people who you've never met or had never seen before, and what they found after a month of doing this was it was very successful and they felt they wanted to do it again and we watched that model evolve and help facilitate it and, so for instance, to give you an example of the growth is very recently we've run a community challenge as we now call them and we had 56,000 women dieting together every day, so they got their e-mail each morning about a particular weight loss. They could have a personalized program for them. They had specific expert and what has happened over this period of time is that they've looked to iVillage as a very trusted environment, very helpful and credible for them, and to Halsey's point earlier, is that kind of trust and branding and environment where consumers feel that they can get the information they need and really be helped by a company like iVillage then facilitates all types of different transactions to go with that and becomes a very strong environment for advertisers and for commerce and allows the medium to not drive just into a pricing and commodity kind of environment, so I think what we're really seeing is the companies that are able to be consistent, establish the brand, provide a very strong consumer experience will keep them coming back every day and that ultimately integration into your lifestyle is going to make the company successful and right now I think we're in a position where there are many companies feeling that this is an easy business model and an easy thing to do and I think we're going to see a big shakeout over the next two to three years in particular where they'll find that creating that consistent environment and establishing that brand is just not that easy.

U. Bertram Ellis: The entrepreneur loves the business we're in right now. It's the most phenomenal business opportunity I've ever seen and can't imagine trying to conceptualize anything that could be any better and we'll talk a lot about the business opportunities and upside, all of which have been alluded to. Your question and my biggest concern vis-a-vis the speed and pace and changes that the Internet is creating is, in my own view, is as it affects public education. This academic environment we're in here, I'm not worried about the colleges being able to adapt. Some will do it better than others. I hope Virginia, through its 2020 program, will be one of those that will. I'm worried about primary and secondary schools. I'm worried about their organizations, their school boards, and the like, embracing the change that the Internet requires and the speed at which is does. I think Britannica is a great example of what school systems have to look at it and here's a company that's just not even going to publish the book anymore, and how radically they've had to change to see whether they can do it. I hope they get a better server [laughter] but as our kids attended public school and I'm watching our own school systems in Atlanta not change fast enough, those kids and those teachers and that whole system needs to embrace this thing right now and they need to figure some way or another to find the money and cut out the other stupid things they do to get it into the computers and the training and the systems at their school so that kids can learn geography real time instead of using a 10-year-old textbook that doesn't even have most of the world under the right name, so I think that is one of the real challenges. It's something I worry about. I think it's something that we can make a difference, a radical difference, very quickly if our public schools will learn to change at our pace.

Fitt: I'd take a related topic to that and that is I'm concerned about the same things and I just heard some appalling statistics about some inner city libraries where the average book had been published in 1964 and that's what the kids had and when you think of the power that is available close at hand to get better information and better books, in essence, into the schools, I think about the whole question of philanthropy in the Internet generation and whether waiting for the schools to do it is the right thing, or whether, in fact, given the huge amount of wealth that the Internet has created and the fact that an awful lot of people sitting around with an awful lot of money created by the Internet, whether, in fact, it is isn't incumbent on all of us as a generation to turn some of that back and provide some of the leadership to the schools, to the education, to society overall in terms of getting whether it's computers into the schools or Internet access into the communities in the community centers and so on.

Now, obviously, some of that is starting to be done. I think the Gates Foundation, Steve Case is doing some stuff, Ted [Wait]'s doing some stuff, but I think one of the issues for us as a society is the whole question of philanthropy in the Internet age and using this incredible wealth creation machine to not increase the inequity within the social strata but, in fact, to try to level it a little bit.

Koogle: I have to jump in. This is something I feel really passionate about. And Lawton and I talked earlier about this sort of thing, but I agree 150%. I think we are headed for a digital have and have not world. I think totally. Cool--500 million users by the year 2003, right? How many people are there in the world? It's way less than 10% of the world that will have access to this wonderful seamless information thing, this medium, and as many of you in the room know, when you have access to information, especially current information, the rate at which you're able to build on that and actually do things accelerates, right. It starts with access to information, so I think unless we do something radical about getting access to more people in the world to the Internet I think we are headed for that, and I think it's not talked about enough. We can sit here and actually say all kinds of really cool words about it and stuff, and feel pretty good about it. I don't have a solution, a tangible one. I think that it starts with philanthropy but I think if that's all that happened, it wouldn't get us anywhere. Actually, you know, if a few folks or tens of people got together and spent a few tens of billions of dollars even on this whole thing, it would be just a blip frankly. I think it's grassroots and I think that worldwide, people that do have access to information and do have a reasonable income have to insist that our governments get to work on a local level and actually build out the access for everyone on the Internet and so I feel very passionate about this whole thing. It has to be grassroots plus philanthropy.

Minor: I just want to add a small point. I think everybody in the industry sees this, but I think there's one thing that we're missing is that it isn't just about access. It's also about literacy because what we forget is that there' a huge percentage of our population that can't read and the last time I looked, our services in Yahoo! and many services are textbased. I don't think that's going to go away and so for most of us, it's a keyboard and things like voice recognition are a long way in the future and I wish it were as simple as us rolling low cost access to lots of people. It's a larger issue of how do we better educate our students and with or without technology. I don't know whether technology's proven to make people better readers or not, but I know if you're not better readers, you'll never have a chance with subsidized access or not to be able to take advantage of the web and I think there's a lot of kind of basic stuff that has to happen in this country to ensure that that digital haves and have nots are not created.

Walker: You want to bring technology to the school system. I was on my board of education for four years and in getting them to change in an area that had probably enough money to make the change was arduous and so I worry about a governmental approach to the business and what we have to have is devices cheap enough that everybody can have one, and the wireless world pervasive enough so that you don't have to build out the wiring because that's what's very expensive and so those networks are being built but a lot of governments outside the U.S. are slowing them down significantly, whether it's in China or India. They're seeing them as franchise plays and they want to control them and that's the power and if you can free those, then you're real far down the road in being able to empower everybody to have one and make their own decisions about how they want to interact with the Internet and voice is coming a few years down the road. Maybe that's another empowering tool, but those two things--philanthropic enterprise is so important and I hope everybody that makes the money in this generation gives it all away because there's no reason to keep it and uses it in a good way and you almost have to stop your career by the time you're 50, because it's going to take a while to put it back coherently.

Templeton: To a large degree, the industry is its own worst enemy because it's built itself on a platform of churning the same kind of computing intelligentsia type customer over and over again so it's the same people that are buying these things that bought the $5,000 PC, etc. and there's a whole democratization that's got to take place and I agree. I think governments are going to have to step up and really be a core change agent on a worldwide basis.

____________: They won't do it.

Templeton: Well, but they're going to have to do it or they're going to die. There'll be some real serious prices to pay. The build-out of infrastructure that's required to deliver on going from 500 million to 5 billion is absolutely enormous. On the other hand, some of the third world countries, you see them putting wireless networks in from scratch because they can't afford to pull the wire and wireless works, so this thing's going to become a great equalizer but it's going to take some time to build out infrastructure and it's going to take an industry that takes a view that says, you know, we've got to start peeling this onion back and start to give access to the digital have nots, and it's more than just the cost of PCs. It's been tried--freePC.com is giving away PCs but the only people that they want to advertise to, so--exactly. So, I think pushing this into the school environments because we're going to get real change by bringing kids along--that's the real opportunity here and so I think is where the focal point of the industry's going to need to be more and more.

Snyder: Not surprisingly, I think we've hit on classic Jeffersonian question which is are we going to be good enough to take advantage of this and what kind of citizens do we need to have. What kind of society do we need and what kind of investments do we want to make? Let me pick up on another issue that I think is on the minds of a lot of people, especially when you talk about business to consumer, and that's the issue of privacy, and we've got some great experts here and my guess is all of us would be a little bit surprised if we all knew what the technology could do right now in terms of figuring out who were are, what we're thinking about, what our beliefs are, where do we live, how much money do we make, and how do we like to spend it, so could somebody maybe inform us all about what's the state of technology with respect to tracking me as an individual user?

[__________]: Frightening. It is frightening.

Templeton: The most frightening thing about it is you can come to a conference like this and you can put your name badge in your pocket and you can navigate around but on the Internet you have no clue as how to put your name badge in your pocket and hide your identity, so that you can feel free to travel through virtual space, so a lot has to happen in this space for ubiquity to actually be acceptable from a cultural perspective, I think.

Koogle: I kind of agree and kind of disagree. I think that the last sentence actually is where I kind of depart. I think that's already acceptable for most people. People are probably more comfortable with cruising around the web and consuming all kinds of and buying things, than I know we would have imagined four years ago when we were starting our business. People have taken to it quite naturally as consumers and in fact, I think the big bugaboo a couple of years ago was people would never buy anything because they just won't get comfortable ultimately with putting their credit card number in when they registered. Well, it turns out they are, and part of it is a little bit of complacency. It's what you don't know that you won't get scared of if you don't know about it, and I think we're very aware because we take this whole thing very seriously about privacy and maintaining it and here's an area also where I'm sure having not gotten to know Bert very well, but a couple of comments you made just a second ago about governments won't do it after all. I'm one of the biggest cynics there is about that sort of thing except when it comes to massively taxpayers getting together and insisting on stuff. And this area of privacy and security, we've done a lot as a company and we're very aware of various government threats to get involved in a heavy way in "regulating" security and privacy because they do know actually the danger associated with it if it goes uncontrolled and stuff, but something I'll loop back to in a second. Actually, when you look hard at the role governments would like to be playing in security and privacy, it ends up being pretty unfeasible and, in fact, somewhat ironic that they would put themselves in a position of being data collectors themselves which none of us want as citizens.

The state of it right now is that there's a lot of technology and there's a lot of data and, in fact, probably the silver lining in the cloud is that there's so much data that no one really quite knows how to reduce it all to really use it which is great. The amount of data is actually increasing at a really rapid rate [laughter]. I know we struggle with this a lot because we do-- For those of you in the room that are not techies and stuff, when you log onto the web with your computers and you go to a web site, you're actually communicating electronically with a set of computers that that company has put together, and when hundreds if not millions of other people go to that same web site, they're also communicating with that set of computers and so there's a central place where all those use patterns go through and those are typically operated by the company that's either publishing information or selling goods or whatever. That's what's called server clusters and so that means all the data from all those use patterns get concentrated at the receiving end, at the company's end, and in our case, we have server clusters. We probably have 9 or 10 server clusters now around the world, each of which is this big concentrated place where a bunch of data is being gathered all the time. We collect information because people register with us and we're not unique in this. Tens of millions of sites do the same thing. They tell us who they are. They personalize their information by saying what they like, what they want you to give them, what kind of news feeds to give them, and then there are use patterns. When they come back and they use it, there're log files that are associated with all those things. All that data is being collected all the time. We're big proponents of self-regulation, big proponents of setting up a trust relationship with consumers. We tell them what you're collecting and what you're not collecting, give them the ability to opt out of having data collected on them at the front end, and then maintain that pact with your user that you'll never divulge their personal information to anyone else and you'll maintain servers that are secure. That's the way I think it's the most pure and probably the only feasible solution is to have it self-regulated and have it distributed and probably to have third parties and we already have several third rd parties that, in fact, do offer a stamp of approval. They will come in and audit your process to say you are adhering to those basic consumer trust principles and put a stamp of approval on your site or not, in which case consumers then have the choice to look at the stamp of approval. It's kind of like the Good Housekeeping seal of privacy and security on the web, and in the end, it all comes down to that because consumers who are informed and they will be, I'm sure, horror stories where companies and/or sites abuse data, but it will be visible and consumers can choose to not go there.

Minor: I'll just give you kind two sides of this. We have millions of people who come to us every month to download software so lots of companies who produce software applications come to us to tell us about what they're doing and we see often that these companies come in and they talk about all of the data that once you download their software applications that they're collecting and so if you look, there's a story right now that's kind of raging with a company called Real Networks and they have a music player and it is one of many applications that does this sort of thing. They didn't tell you they did this, but when you sign up you put in all your registration information and then you start putting in your CDs and what it does is it takes your CDs and it loads them onto your hard drive so you can actually play your music off of your computer. What it also does is it takes that play list and it sends it up to Real Networks so they not only know who you are but they know all the music that you're playing and that is the only application that's doing that. They're many applications that are doing that, and I think that going to this self-regulation point, I think the only thing that's worse than violating somebody's privacy is getting caught doing it [laughter] and if you look what's happened--they're been two lawsuits filed. I think people will lose trust in you. I think your brand will be affected and I think there is a self-policing thing because I think people do feel that this technology can be very invasive. Now, at the same time, there're lots and lots of people who are out there doing this kind of thing and I think it's important that consumers are aware of the risks of what can happen.

The other side of the equation is, well, geez, a lot of this stuff can actually be incredibly valuable as a user. We just bought a company. It was a very small acquisition and basically what they had was a little client that you download and it reads, it looks at your hard drive and it tells you all the software that's on your hard drive and a lot of stuff about your machine and then basically it uploads it to us. Now, the purpose of downloading it is to give us that information and the reason you want to give us that information is we'll tell you whether you need to upgrade any of your software because if there's a newer version that comes out, we'll give you tips for tuning your PC. There're a bunch of different things. Ultimately we can tell you what your PC would sell for if it were on our auction sites, how much it's worth. There're lots of really kind of neat things you can do if you're willing to turn over that information, but the key is, as Tim said, whether you identify up front that you're going to be extracting this kind of information and make sure that you only extract that information for which the consumer has explicitly agreed.

Templeton: That's the state of the technology now is that there's a gap right now.

Minor: There's a huge gap. People don't realize how much stuff can be--

Templeton: Absolutely.

Walker: There's two sides of it. It's privacy but also protection. To me, on a privacy side, people are worried about financial information and health and you almost have to take a leap of faith in some other things like credit cards, but the protection side we're pretty worried about and that really slows down the systems. I know at Chase we've got firewalls you would not believe because the fear of somebody's going to get in and that really slows down what we can do, i.e., job __________, video audio streaming. You can't do it significantly so a lot of investment in software needs to be done but also probably investment in protecting us from those digital terrorists that are running around trying to explode the systems and trying to get in and penetrate things illegally. I'm not as worried about the companies that we're setting up that are going to have to have trust because you're developing a brand and if you violate that, you're dead. I'm worried about those people that come in unauthorized.

Ellis: With a non-attachment based virus.

Templeton: Exactly. I've gotten a few in the past. It's truly the wild west just in a virtual sense, and just like the wild west, they're going to be some ghost towns a few years from now where people thought there were going to mine for a lot of gold and a lot of shoot outs in the streets and one of my theories is what makes a service like AOL so popular-- If you remember back a few years ago when the net sort of started to get some traction, everyone said that's the end of AOL. Well, what makes AOL work, I think, to a large degree is it's a safe place to go. It's like going on a tour. Why do so many people, more people, sign up for a tour to London than just get on an airplane and go to London? It's because I'm going to a safe, secure kind of agenda. Someone's going to take me through, show me what I should see, not see, keep me out of bad areas, and I think that it's continuing to give them a lot of strength in this world where you log onto the net, your browsers, you point it out there and it's sort of like yahoo, right? [laughter], or wahoo.

____________: Tim, I'll take that. I'm getting a little advertising fees from this [laughter].

Ellis: Tim and I obviously share a common cynicism for government, but I think the companies will self-police. I'm still worried about the government all the time and then this thing, is it Santa Monica where they're wanting to deny banks the right to charge for an ATM fee and I'm just trying to figure out how any government can feel that that is something that they can do. Are they going to say that 7-ll's can't charge for milk [laughter],

Templeton: So what are we saying, Bert? Would you rather trust politicians or capitalists with all of this? It's probably a good case where people have to come together and jointly solve this problem.

Snyder: We've got a great afternoon session to follow up on the privacy issues, but let me try to identify another issue and I'll do it by thanks to Susan Stein who's curator at Monticello. Here's an image of Jefferson in his study. He's sitting in a chair, swivel chair. He's got a book stand that accommodates five of his some 6,000 books. He's writing one of his 20,000 letters. He's got his duplicating machine. He's got his filing for incoming letters and replies, and he's in the business of really-- It's sort of drudgery but it's wonderful work, of building a republic of letters, international in nature, and I think you can take that and say Jefferson would have been a complete fan of the Internet. It would have made his work more fun. He wouldn't have to do all that drudgery. He'd probably still complain about the keystrokes but this would be perfect for Jefferson, but today's Internet, I think a lot of people would agree, has a different feel. I have an image and I think it'll probably become outdated of somebody sitting at home, his or her friends are the UPS drivers who drop off the goods every once in a while. Their idea of the international Internet is to tune into the Worldwide Wrestling Federation on the net or on TV and they're bombarded by advertisements every day and I know, Allison, you have to encounter this issue with your iVillage but I'd like to just get some comments on the role of advertising, commercialization of the web and are you comfortable with it?

Abraham: To answer Bert's question, no, we don't have wresting on iVillage. Not yet, and probably not for quite a while. I think we'll go in a different direction.

Templeton: I'm sure it's out there somewhere.

Abraham: It is. It's probably six months out.

____________: They have women wrestling [laughter].

Templeton: Allison, go ahead and body slam him right now [laughter].

Abraham: I think one of the challenges we face is we are about improving peoples' lives and we continually have somewhat conflicts of interest with advertisers about that working within an advertising environment while trying to do that, and to give you an example, is we have a money area where our most popular area is "Deep in Debt" and it's about women who get together and they have financial trouble and they're trying to really coach each other with the help of experts to improve their financial situation. Well, we have a credit card advertiser who that is the prime place where they would like to be and will pay us a fortune to be there and they will get phenomenal results but that really is-- We actually ran it through there the first time we went through and the community went into an uproar and we basically pulled the ads out of there because we just felt that it was jeopardizing some of the integrity of what we were trying to do from a consumer base.

We've had similar situations with formula advertising in breastfeeding sites and we've had a variety of different things and it's just a continual challenge of trying to make sure that you are somewhat protecting the consumer but really making sure you've got a strong segregation between advertisers and consumers and you're also always protecting the consumers' interests, their trust, their privacy and their intentions on the Internet, so I think it's a challenge we face. It's, I think, something we will continue to face for a long time and it clearly is an issue because of the nature of the Internet where the advertising can be in your face much more so than it could be from a TV ad or a print magazine.

Minor: There're a couple of things. This advertising's been an issue for a while, back in '94 when we first started building CNET on line and the big issue the commercialization of this non-commercial medium which was the Internet and there were a whole bunch of people who were primarily academics who were on the Internet who did not welcome the advent of commercialization and we experienced it. I'm sure Yahoo! experienced it. I think anybody who was in the very early days of trying to commercialize the medium received numerous threats or whatever from various different constituencies who really did not appreciate the fact that we were showing up and that we were going to try to make money off this thing which had really been solely for these academics and now there's a lot of talk about .com advertising and we were kind of an unusual case in that we spent very little money building our business. Last year we spent about $380,000 advertising. This year we're going to spend $100 million so we're one of those .coms and I had this early theory about adoption of the Internet which was basically that no one would ever just come to the Internet. They wouldn't say I just want to get on the Internet. There was always something that would grab them. It was like I get my stock quotes quicker. I can get sports scores. There's always that one sort of application that was going to make the Internet worth it to them and then, of course, they would discover lots more, but advertising is about information. It's about communicating new products and services and the fundamentally successful Internet companies I have always believed are about challenging the status quo. They're successful by virtue of allowing somebody to do something in a new and better way, not just a new way but really a better way, and so there're so many life changing services that are being launched all the time that it really is actually a great thing that money is being spent advertising and helping people find services like iVillage or CNET or Yahoo! or the tens of thousands of other companies that will ultimately affect people's lives so I think it's actually-- I think it's a really good thing that there are so many advertisers out there who are really-- It's great for traditional media, of course, but I think it's also great for consumers because it's the single best to actually find these things.

Koogle: Let me jump in here just a little bit. I think it's important like always to kind of break the perceived problem into parts and take a look at it. I personally think that you can do advertising-- We've believed this from the beginning and I think in everything we do about building our services is all about what I'm about to say. Giving access for free as comprehensive a set of information as possible is huge for individuals, right? And people understand in general that you have to, if you're going to do that, you have to run a business where you actually employ people and you pay salaries and you have to promote in order to become more apparent to wider users and general consumers understand this, and they understand that you need to commercialize the business in order to be able to continue to do it. You do have to pay rent and pay salaries and stuff.

I remember in the summer of '95 when I came down and joined this and it probably was a day before Halsey took Jerry out to lunch and made his fateful decision [laughter], and we decided in August to put up advertising in Yahoo! and we had a lot of discussion about for about a week and there was a big fear that in fact all of Yahoo! would be boycotted actually by the users out there of the Internet if we put anything up at all that smelled like commercialization, but we reasoned that if you did it in a non-intrusive way, if you made it really clear to the consumer where the commercial message was and where it wasn't, so we weren't trying to trick them, right? You maintain that trust and build that trust relationship and the last piece is what's now known as targeting and it's highly talked about, right? It's an age-old advertising method actually. You put an advertising message that was relevant to the context in which you put it, so you placed an ad in context so the stuff you were selling was relevant to the content that the user was considering that many times the consumer would view it actually as value added, because you're bringing to their attention something that they're already preselected into. Yes, I'm interested in outdoor sports and so maybe I need a new fishing rod, so you put that in there. It's viewed as relevant if you put it in context, so you do all those three things and you stay religious about it. You place ads that aren't intrusive. You play them so that it's really clear in whatever form you're doing it, whether it banner ads or enhanced text or whatever, that, yes, this is a commercial message. Don't make any mistake about it. It's not an infomercial going over the edge trying to portray it as something else, and lastly, you're very careful about doing targeting placement in context so it's actually viewed as relevant to the consumer, that that's the right mix and consumers will go.

Then it behooves you to maintain that trust relationship with the consumer. It turns out that if you do that, that you bring the highest level of value you can imagine to the advertiser because it's contextually placed so it's probably more relevant and probably you'll evoke more consumers, right, if you do all those sorts of things, and so we're big believers that you can do it in the right way that's not intrusive. It maintains a trust relationship with the consumers and it brings the highest level of value to the merchants and that's nothing but goodness but it does take constant work and it does take making sure that you don't bend that trust.

You were talking about AOL and I think a lot of people know that the AOL service even though it's viewed as kind of safe, but there are a lot of pop-up ads, right, in that service to pay for the low margins. We can get into a commercial discussion actually about this. There's a reason why they do that, but it's viewed as intrusive to consumers and if users have choice, they will always-- Again, getting back to the sort of self-policing, self-regulation part, they will go to sites and go to companies that aren't in their face, right?

Templeton: I agree with that, but I think I agree with you, Tim, this is a small price to pay for the kind of information access and stuff that's out there in general and I'd caution everyone to get used to it because it's coming to your television set, so this same sort of model around advertising is coming to your television set. Tune into CNBC or Bloomberg and you sort of see the beginnings of that and it's going to come to Thursday night whatever-it-is on NBC.

Walker: Who's going to help pay for people getting out of the dorms or getting Mr. Jefferson out of his chair because now these sponsors are looking at these Internet access devices, these wireless, and you'll pay for them. They're going to give them out for free and so what's going to allow people who can afford it to get it in their hands and start getting out in the world so we're not sitting in front of the TV and/or the PC worrying about it. It also, by the way, floors me to think about Mr. Jefferson on the Internet. What could he have done? Just mindboggling.

Templeton: Ted, I think your actually is telling of a lot of the attitude that's out there right now in that we're using sort of old ideas to put a judgment on a new world. I'm not sure-- You're suggesting that all the wonderful, well-thought-out 20,000 letters would be somehow tarnished by a banner ad that might run [laughter] and I would say that suppose the letter was about voting and democracy, and a banner ad ran from a local government as to how to register to vote. If this get backs to what Tim said, what's so profound about this medium is that it's bringing together transactional communication and content and so there's a way to get content, make it actionable by a click-on an ad that might actually explain how to do it and maybe even take you to the transaction itself, so I don't think Jefferson would be disappointed by that at all.

Minor: I still remember people who are less today than certainly two years ago who were somewhat cynical about the model of advertising on the Internet despite the fact that both of our companies have actually proven that you can make money doing it and the argument usually goes like this--I'm on the Internet. I hate those ads, so I assume everybody must hate those ads and therefore this can't possibly work and what I always say to them is when was the last time that you watched "Monday Night Football" and you thanked ABC for a 2-minute commercial break or when was the last time you got Vanity Fair and you thanked them for the 40 pages of ads you had to turn through to the first page of edit--

[Ellis]: Or when is the last time you watched PBS?

Minor: Yes, and so [laughter]. That's true, right. As a sponsor of NOVA, I actually watch it, so even PBS now has ads because, we thank you, are one of them [laughter], so and we try to be as invasive as we can which is getting more invasive all the time actually, so there is this, and we as a medium and we as company, we have this inevitable tradeoff that we have to make which is between in some ways subverting the user experience for the benefit of our advertisers so we can make money and on the other hand, delivering a compelling user experience so we're valuable and they want to come back and we have this real estate argument all the time which is we, I think, are very conservative. We take as little amount of real estate as we can possibly get away and still monazite a page properly and have he maximum amount that goes to providing the free information that we all provide, but it's this line that you always as a publisher on the Internet walk between making sure that you deliver a page that's really valuable in terms of the information it has, but it also having enough of that space dedicated, particularly what's know as above the fold, in industry parlance, which means you don't have to scroll down and see the ad in a way that's valuable to the advertiser.

Snyder: I think the best thing right now is to take a break and we will, unlike most conferences, use more of our time for questions from you so I encourage you to get those questions to the people on the aisle and we will resume in about 15 minutes. Thank you. [break] Again, may I welcome everybody back to the session. As people are getting settled, I will make a couple of comments. I wanted to thank my colleague Carl Zeithaml for helping me sort through these questions. I think I just experienced what Tim Koogle was talking about having data grow at very rapid rates and it certainly challenging my ability to sift through a lot of great questions, but I wanted to again welcome everybody back. I see that some people are still getting to their seats. Let me begin with a set of questions that concern the role of higher education and we got this question in a variety of forms, but to the panel, if you could create a curriculum for a class intended to teach students at the University of Virginia to become you laughter, what would you include.

__________: God forbid.

Templeton: John, if you're in the room I have a 16 year old who aspires to be a UVA student, so I'll put that in as a plug, but I think that the secret here is broad exposure to technology and to all of the social and cultural issues around change and then a good measure of teaching creativity. I there're a ways to teach creativity. If you go back in history, in Germany the Bauhaus figured out how to teach people creativity. I think if I could design the optimal curriculum, I would bring those three things together because as I look back at my career, really, it's been a journey of getting exposed to just a tremendous number of people, places, things, technologies, trying things and having them not work and letting that go, not worrying about failures and coming up with your next idea and charging forward in it and keeping your eyes that way. Like I tell a lot of people that work in our company, that's why God put our eyes on the front of our head, to kind of keep looking forward, so that's what I'd suggest.

Ellis: I got asked the question the other day about what's in the water down there questions in Charlottesville ever since that article came out, and I'm not sure you can actually teach creativity. You can create the opportunity to be creative and to see and hear and feel and touch a lot of different opportunities but the thing I go back to my undergraduate experience most particularly and what I think is unique about this University was the way they did then was to allow the students to actually run the student organizations with very little monitoring from the faculty and the administration. I'm concerned that there's more monitoring now of some of these organizations, particularly some that I were involved in than they were then which to me that was how I cut my teeth on entrepreneurism. We had that chance to do it as an undergraduate here with the University Union and PK German and stuff like that and there were so many different opportunities with Judicial and the Honor System and making your own mistakes and learning how to run something and getting that feel under your fingernails and once you've done it, there's no turning back and that is a huge opportunity that the University of Virginia has.

Minor: Actually I think it's a relatively simple formula--join a fraternity, become an anthropology major so no one will hire you, attend three out of five classes and choose your friends who take really good notes [laughter] and I found that that's not only worked for me but a lot of people who know who've become very successful [laughter].

Templeton: Then I guess that would have to go with what's in the water in Charlottesville? I can tell you--it's about 90 proof, I think [laughter].

Ellis: What's in the beer in Charlottesville? It just didn't play as well, did it?

Templeton: An absolutely important part of the University experience as it were.

Walker: You've got to talk about the Honor System and it makes UVA so unique and it's the respect that everyone has for each other and it's the respect the professors have for the students and I think it's kind of like the Internet in that at very few levels there are people that are willing to be self-driven because people just trust you and let you go do it and there's a lot of places that aren't like that and that's pretty unique.

Snyder: Several questions get at the issue of what frightens you the most. What would be the biggest threat to the success of the Internet? What do you worry about with the government? What do you worry about that the government may fail to do? Tax the Internet came up. Not surprisingly, the world antitrust policy.

Koogle: So let me start since I bowed out of the other one. Let me make one comment by the way as I see the dean of the Engineering School sitting down here. Let me just say that the engineering curriculum here was just wonderful [laughter] and

Ellis: You can check that one off.

Koogle: Everybody in the College should be required at least one engineering course [laughter]. Actually it's only partly in jest. I think it helps a ton to have folks get a ton of exposure actually to technology, so let me start on this one. It's kind of a tricky area, right. I think all of us that run businesses, that are entrepreneurs actually, I think the one thing we all adhere to the Andy Grove only the paranoid survive kind of school of thought and for those of you that have not read any of what Andy Grow has written, he's a big proponent of this whole concept of staying really paranoid all the time about your competition, about shifts in technology, what have you. I'm an advocate of that, plus and I know Andy pretty well and he knows that I also have the-- TK, me, I have this possum rule also and those of you from Virginia know that in Virginia in the southeast, mostly you have a lot of possums, right? And you find usually dead on the road and the reason is they see the headlights coming and they're paranoid, but they refuse to act [laughter] so you should be paranoid but you shouldn't be afraid to act and we have that philosophy at the company. Do something. Even if it's wrong, do something. If it's wrong, fail. Fail fast. Get on with it is the whole thing. So, I stay really paranoid about the competition and about shifts in the landscape and will advertising really continue to work. Will governments come in and try to regulate privacy and everything else and all those sorts of normal every-day sorts of things, mostly having to do with our competition and trying to beat each other out there, but the thing that actually worries me the most is, and it hasn't happened yet, but I think we all need to stay vigilant is that there is possibility, there's always a possibility that either one or a small number of companies who get control of one maybe core technology that everything relies on [laughter] and actually there's more than one company that potentially sits in this seat, starts to use that then to preclude the ability of users to freely get to things on the web. It is one underlying thing that keeps me awake at night and it's relative to what it would do for consumer, what it would do for the industry, etc., etc., so that's one thing.

I think that, of course, there's a debate going on right now with Microsoft with the current case going on about whether the government should actually wade in and legislate some remedies, etc., etc., and this is a tough tough question really truly. Everybody in the industry fears Microsoft. I'll just go ahead and say that openly and at the same time, everybody in the industry who's really prudent in taking about free commerce, free trade, and I'm a big believer in free trade, also knows that if we set up a process by which the government begins to heavily legislate everything you can do from a product design and commercialization standpoint, it will slow the industry down so you're caught between those two things, so that's my nightmare--if one or two companies who are in a position because they control a key technology start to preclude open access to a broad range of things. Secondly, on the government side of things, I am not a big believer in the government setting up an ongoing process by which they monitor everything that every company's able to do.

Minor: Microsoft is at the center of this conversation and I fear more the government than I do Microsoft. I think the great irony here is that in almost every instance markets move faster than governments and so here we have the government going through a lengthy process that will probably be concluded in a year or two or more about whether Microsoft can incorporate a browser into the operating system. It's over. I mean, the debate is in my mind is completely-- browsers are going to be in everything, including your cell phone. Why can't they be in an operating system, so that's a single example and I think the great irony is that I see Microsoft as embattled now as they have ever been and I watch what's happening in terms of-- You know, it used to be that nobody would invest any money in trying to compete with Microsoft in the application business because they'd kind of won that and smart capital was invested in companies that were going to do other things that Microsoft wasn't a part of and didn't want any part of it, and now you see hundreds of companies who're building applications who're trying to replicate the very same things that Microsoft does, including operating systems, huge amounts of venture capital, lots and lots of smart entrepreneurs going into these opps. and so I think they have a major strategic years ahead that has nothing to do with the government. It's to do with the amount of capital and smart people who are picking at almost every single one of their businesses, so I fear-- As Microsoft has said all along and I'm not saying that they've been choirs boys, I mean, I think we all know they haven't who've dealt with them, but I'm not sure that the government is really in a position in fast-moving technology markets to serve as an arbiter and to try to remedy situations without doing more damage.

Templeton: Well, Halsey, you have to admit that the case that the government mounted against Microsoft certainly provided enough friction for a lot of competitors to charge the gates at a really critical time, I think, so there's a counter side to this but I share your perspective about the government should get out of the way in this stuff.

Walker: Microsoft should be feared. They're spending $3 billion a year in research more than I think anybody else in software and so they're running ahead as they're fighting these other side battles, but I do believe. I kind of agree with __________ Christianson from Harvard who's written about disruptive change and he thinks most of these large companies die of their own weight, and I'm amazed how quickly Microsoft's turned several times in its life but it's going to a point where it's too big. It will be broken up, my guess is eventually and it'll probably make even more money for shareholders by doing that.

Snyder: Let me just maybe go a little bit more into the science behind the Internet and put the government aside. Do you foresee that the competition is going to be over which proprietary software becomes the standard in various applications or do you see much more as the open source kind of community approach to the development of software and its applications?

Koogle: So, I'll kick off and I know Mark's going to want to talk on his because what his company is in business doing and what we're in the business of doing also on this whole thing. I think it's a mixture actually to tell you the truth. Fundamentally, there has to be some common-base software that interfaces between the hardware, the physical stuff, and what it does. Today we call that OS, an operating system, and browsers could become OS. It could be merged with an OS or whatever. There's some basic kind of software level or layer in there that in order to get widespread adoption of applications and things you have to have a common base and that's where the threat is always because the OS has to be common and typically has to come from a rational small set of suppliers in order for it to be effective and therefore you do have pinchpoints, right, at the OS level, and at an application level, what's interesting and I hope we can talk about it a little bit this afternoon and sort of the commerce shift kind of session is that there is a very profound shift going on right now in which application software products, things you used to buy physically at Egghead or wherever off a shelf, rip the hard-to-remove plastic off and install it in your PC are turning into services that are resident on servers somewhere else, and it's fundamental and what that's allowing is a wide array of companies to write application products or services, if you will, that are more open, certainly more distributed in terms of the development of these things. It is one of those fundamental shifts going on and I think it's nothing but cool because it's stimulating a whole new wave and it is more open than proprietary.

Snyder: Let me shift to another set of questions from the audience that I found intriguing and it might be just the nice Virginia audience that we have that they tended to pick on a company not represented here, but they picked on Amazon and basically the question when is the company ever really going to make money and for maybe Jeff and Lawton, in particular, how confident do you feel about the various metrics that everybody uses to judge the path of these companies towards profitability. Be nice now.

Fitt: I can't answer the question as to whether Amazon will ever make money. I think that they are clearly making a decision to go for market share and to invest now and that is a decision that I think given what's going on in the industry is entirely the right one, and I think the metrics that are being applied makes sense as long as one doesn't stop just with those metrics. I think that the question, the analytical question, is not just how m any people are coming to your site but how much business are they doing or could be they done and what does the model look like as you forward and have you built a business that ultimately can, in fact, make money and those of us who sat through Darden School classes, we all learned to do discounted cash flow and it ain't actually such a bad approach t o figuring out whether these companies at the end of the day can make money. Now, you then have to make lots and lots of assumptions about what is the world like and how much money will people spend and once Halsey gets done with them, what will they pay for their Palm Pilot and whether the margin structure that these companies are building is one that can be supported and I think the most interesting opportunities that we're seeing are some of the most challenging opportunities that we're seeing in the Internet world today are opportunities and T.K. and I were talking about this before, like web fan, where, in fact, it's not about the front end. It's about the back end, and can you completely rethink the distributing of goods and services because of what the Internet allows you to do in a way which if they make it work the way they think they can make it work will actually ultimately be more profitable than the current way of distributing groceries and getting people fed, so I mean I think the answer is that metrics are useful as far as they go as long as you don't allow that to completely replace now what's a sensible business model thought.

Walker: What I find amazing is that the last 10 years the whole market has changed so you can evaluate future cash flows as opposed to current peoples, as opposed to historic numbers and those are tough to look at and you can't analyze Amazon by looking at its past in that the public is actually-- Individuals are investing more now in buying shares than ever before and so they're driving recognizing growth. Are they over-recognizing growth? Probably. Do we need 14 pet sites on the net? No. We need one or two and that'll be a work out. Is Amazon going to be a survivor? I think so. I mean, it's got a heck of a brand and a big investment in building that brand. They've got incremental gross margin of 21%. They've got 60-day float on cash so they're making money there. They've got shipping paid for by the customers themselves and so we've got a business that's pretty interesting on the margin profile that keeps on adding new businesses to it and that's why they keep on losing money, but the sticky-- I don't how many people who've ordered on Amazon, probably a lot of us, but this one click is very powerful. This e-mails that you get saying, gee, you just bought the Tom Clancy book a year and a half ago. He has a new one. Do you want it? Click here. That's free for Amazon to send and it's free for me to click back and say yes. That's a different way of doing business and so I wouldn't sell Amazon short and I've had the stock for several years. [laughter] You've got to disclose things.

Snyder: Have you ever tried Amazom.com? It's a fun exercise if you ever want to try it. Misspell Amazon.com. Put an "m" on the end instead of an "n" and you actually find a site that competes against Amazon, but--

Templeton: Do they make money?

Snyder: I don't know [laughter].

____________: What do they sell?

____________: Their marketing costs are lower [laughter], but it's still the get a bigger truck business model.

Koogle: Can I chime in a little bit just on this one. I'll make it really fast. I think about this stuff a lot, actually drive time and mostly fly time when the phones aren't ringing and my pager's not coming off and I can get time to sort of sit and think at the 30,000 foot level about commerce and stuff and I think that if you look at the goods and services companies sell and will sell and we'll be inventing more as we go out in the next three to five years. We're talking about books here and something that's pretty pedestrian. If you're selling goods-- It comes down, I think, to two things. One is a combination of the economics in the business as to whether you can get to break-even faster rather than slower, and second, it comes down to something more fundamental which is the frequency with which you're interacting with the customer. I think it says two things and the commish on the economic side of things I think pretty often about if you're selling high-priced point high gross margin goods that traditionally carried a high cost of promotion and distribution, some or all of which you can replace with lower cost of promotion and distributing on the web, so you recoup part of those margin dollars, you're probably in a position where you can to break-even sooner. Right? I didn't go to business school, and that a combination is a way of thinking about goods and services out there and there're some companies that operate way out in the quadrant called high price point high gross margin and high physical costs to promotion and distribution that they're going to rip out by going onto the web and reaching a wider range of customers at lower costs and they can get to break-even sooner, but the interesting dichotomy in it all is that you probably if you're selling that kind of goods or services, you're probably in a less frequently buying relation with the customer and you'll have less of a persistent brand with the customer, so you have higher costs of marketing. I hate to get too technical with this whole thing, but there is that combination to keep in mind and it is one reason why Amazon is moving more laterally into other goods to establish a more persistent buying relationship with the customer in order to in the long term begin to drop their steady state cost of marketing. It is one reason that isn't talked about too much and it's a really good one.

Minor: Yes, that's great, because I think it kind of boils down-- It's a little more complicated than this, but brands you remember and brands you don't and so because you interact with Amazon you remember them. Yahoo, you interact with a lot. We thought a lot about this and it went into our deciding whether to spend the money that we're spending marketing which basically we realize that audience is so large because everybody on the web as a computer and cares about technology that we're one of the few verticals because we're just about a specific thing where people will-- Our reach is enough and our interaction is enough with these people that we can actually have them remember us. Now, if you just sell bicycles, for instance, which may be very well be a high margin business particularly if you sell your own branded bike, the problem is that you only interact to specific about Tim's point, you only interact every couple of years with them so when you go to buy a bike, you're not necessarily going to remember them, so those people are the people who show up at Yahoo's doorstep and our doorstep looking for essentially distribution or advertising deals so they can be in the stream of people who are looking for people who sell those kinds of products.

Walker: And you're adding your brand in the trust level.

Minor: Right. That's exactly right. So, I mean, there are those people who are sort of downstream of media companies essentially and there are those people who develop and sort of cultivate customers on their own. I mean, Dell's great success is that Dell doesn't make money by the people who call up and buy off of their ads. They make money by the businesses who just use them over and over again and they say, well, we need PCs, let's call Dell.

Snyder: Halsey, let me continue with a conversation that was directed at you following up on this service wrap for example using Dell that illustrates the service accessibility. They've been keys to their success. Given the technological, these practices are easy and cost effective. The question is what's the next stage of business or technology innovation that will give product-oriented businesses their competitive edge in the marketplace?

Minor: It depends on the kind of business. I'm looking at the software companies to go back to something that Tim said and I alluded to earlier, these software applications are going away. I mean, the ones that you buy from-- Well, it used to be Egghead but they're not really around anymore other than as Internet seller and would install on your PC, that's just not going to happen five years from now. You're going to go-- I mean, I'm being a maybe little extreme, but in a lot of cases, you're really going to use applications that come over the web and, in fact, you're not going to pay for the application part. You're going to pay for the service part. We had this sort of epiphany in our company about six months ago where we had been reviewing applications like Excel or Word or Office or any of these and we all of a sudden started realizing that it may be that three or four years from now no one's going to really care about this because there's this explosion of other things that are happening on the web that do the same kind of thing and we had missed them because we saw them as services and not software, but what they're replacing is software, and so more and more of our economy is-- I mean, this is a trend that's been going on for a long time but is it being accelerated by the web which is more and more it's about the service that you put around the product and, in fact, some times in software the product will become the service. There won't be a product that's left and so I don't care what industry you're in, basically everything that we buy today must have some sort of service component that is brought about by using the web in a novel and unique and ultimately value added way.

Templeton: Ted, I don't think the formula changes. I don't think the web changes product formulas. Innovation is the only way that products can differentiate themselves over any amount of time and I think there'll be all kinds of ways to serve up applications. We're a big player in that space, but the physical product. You're not going to be able to ship a printer, for example, over the net and so those products are going to have been-- You're going to have to innovate and make them better and better all the time just like the world works today.

Walker: We have an investment company called 800 Flowers and you order flowers on line. You can do it be telemarketing or the Internet. What they found was it's not two separate businesses. These are totally integrated and the service mode was key to it because if you want to order flowers you see on line and you have question, well, you want to click a button and be able to have the operator live go on and answer your question, so it's an integrated business approach that the Internet helps but it's tied into how well you can distribute and how well you can deliver. How well you can merchandize to them and it's a whole-- That's the answer long-term, I think, for all the Internet is the chase we're looking at is big time. How can you integrate the old legacy approach with this new approach and make something even better.

Minor: Just on the printer example. What I really want in my next version of my printer is since it's already connected to my network anyway and my network's already connected to the Internet, I'd love it when if there was a problem with my printer, that Hewlett Packard would call me and not have me call Hewlett Packard or I'd like if it's running low on toner and paper, for it to automatically let my supply people know and, in fact, maybe at some point they'll roll it all up and it'll automatically order for me, so I think services do become a big component of every product.

Koogle: This is probably the core answer to your question really. Products that are actually