As the weather outside turns frightful, retail businesses with "e-tail" (electronic retail) Websites are hoping that consumers will turn to their home computers for their holiday shopping. A Forrester Research report estimates that seven million shoppers will spend close to $4 billion in online shopping, three times more than last year. However, this equals less than one percent of total holiday...

As readers of this report will discover, Americans are growing more sophisticated in their use of the Internet, both in terms of what they want out of it, as well as how they lend themselves to it. The Pew Internet Project reports that Americans are becoming increasingly more demanding and thoughtful when it comes to the Web, spending more time interacting with it in personally meaningful ways,...

Recently, in Red Herring, Charles Conn, CEO of Ticketmaster Online-City-Search explained the difficulties of hiring people in San Francisco: "Everyone seems to know someone whose company just got bought for millions of dollars," and according to Conn, job seekers in the Internet industry put stock options high on their list of benefits and incentives. This week's In The News examines stock options...

An update of the 1998 US Department of Commerce document Emerging Digital Economy (reviewed in the April 17, 1998 Scout Report), the second volume of this annual report shows that, although ecommerce remains less than one percent of the retail share of the economy, it continues to grow, "outpacing last year's most optimistic projections." New chapters and analyses include "Contribution of...