Just Outta Beta
The Street Strikes Back
When Dow Jones & Company instituted a subscription fee for The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, many new-media savants predicted its patrons would jump ship in favor of sites that offer free business content. Six months later, more than 70,000 people are ponying up US$49 a year for access to wsj.com (reduced to $29 for subscribers to the analog edition).
Building on that success, Dow Jones is nearing completion of a comprehensive Internet strategy. The company plans to develop a push and-pull news service from its existing Dow Jones Publications Library, which contains more than 65 million articles from 3,600 publications. This summer, online subscribers will be able to search, sort, and retrieve articles from the complete archives on the Web. And a wire service called CustomClips will scan the library and deliver news direct to the desktop.
"Search engines cull the equivalent of 18 months of junk mail. There's some value to it, but it's hardly something a professional would pay for," says editor of online services Tim Andrews. "Quality content has real value, and the lesson learned from wsj.com is that more value deserves a corresponding higher price point."
While it's easy to bemoan the xenophobia typical of big-media forays into interactive publishing, Dow Jones has an instructive track record of pioneering information systems - a vaunted tradition that dates back to the 1890s, when the Dow Jones News Service began pushing electronic news and stock quotes in the form of ticker tape over telegraph wires.
Many experts have predicted a shakeout in the Web content business, a piece of punditry that might be dismissed as fearmongering by entrenched old-media interests or embraced as sound business advice. Whatever. Having dabbled in new media for the past 100 years, Dow Jones has learned what the suits are willing to pay for. Which, if for no other reason than that, makes the company's moves worth watching.
Jesse Freund
Release: Summer. Dow Jones Interactive Publishing: on the Web at bis.dowjones.com.
No Shit
Sherlock Holmes is best known for employing his powers of deductive reasoning to combat crime. In The Strange Case of Mrs. Hudson's Cat, a book that updates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth, author Colin Bruce presses Holmes into service to solve some of physics's most vexing problems, such as elastic space-time and quantum theory. Think of it as science made fun and, um, elementary.
Release: June. Addison Wesley Longman: +1 (212) 463 8440.
Built for Speed
UUNet Technologies, the nationwide ISP, plans to spend an unprecedented US$300 million to build a network backbone running at OC-12 (622 Mbps). The move is all the more impressive because its giant parent corporation, MFS Worldcom, already owns all of the components of a complete public communications network.
Release: Summer. UUNet: +1 (703) 206 5888.
Border Skirmish
Do browser wars matter in the age of ubiquitous push media? You bet. Netscape and Microsoft are readying the next iterations of their popular software, and the battles for the best email, groupware manager, and tuner are just heating up.
Release: Summer. Microsoft: +1 (206) 882 8080. Netscape: +1 (415) 254 1900.
Cry Fowl
The star of the popular USA Network show Duckman is featured in a forthcoming PC CD-ROM game. Help the sassy and sarcastic hero outwit his archnemesis, King Chicken, by guiding Duckman through a succession of perplexing puzzles.
Release: June. Playmates Interactive Entertainment: +1 (714) 428 2100.
Look, Ma!
Voice Pilot Technologies is ramping up production of a totally hands-free speech-recognition IRC chat client. Just log on, go to your favorite online hangout, and start yapping out loud. Voice Pilot Deluxe does the typing. It even translates between Spanish and English on the fly.
Release: June. Voice Pilot Technologies: +1 (305) 828 5600.
Independence Day
Someone at NASA has a sense of humor. The Mars-bound Pathfinder is due to touch down on the Red Planet on July 4. Once the craft's surface rover starts sending back data, we'll finally be able to analyze the machinations of those evil Martian microbes.
Release: July. Pathfinder*: on the Web at* mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/mpf/news.html.
