A friend (let's call her "Steffy") wants to buy a car. She goes online, researches cars, reads Consumer Reports online, and when she finally picked out her car (incl. color and features), she then searched for a dealership within a 200-mile radius. All that dealership advertising came to zero for influencing her decision.

Two months later, she is moving into her new house. She needs a mattress. The local mattress stores advertise heavily in TV/radio/print. Again, she researches online. Decides which one she likes, so she goes to a store and tries it out. They wanted $3,500. She had no intention of buying in the store. She goes online and gets the same mattress for $1,300 (66% lower).

Now she's planning to buy a house. To do this, she is eliminating as many bills and debt as possible. And of course, she uses the web to learn how to do this, such as blogs on debt management.

What's the future for offline business? How will offline stores survive? 0 comments

Here's andreas.com in German, Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. How did I do this? Use Google's translation tools. Translate your home page. Copy the URL. From that starting URL, people can read your site in that langauge. It's not a perfect translation, but it's fairly readable. Pretty cool, no? 0 comments

The Dot Com Boom is on again. Yep, the Dotcom boom is back. Deja irrational exuberance! Lap $300 champagne out of your girlfriend's belly button! Party like it's 1999! Is the boom really on again? Let's do the numbers. (And kids, we all know numbers don't lie!)

1) Loony ideas get funding. Yep: Dogster.com got one million dollars in funding last week. What is Dogster? Social networking for dogs. Your pooch creates his online acct, adds pixs, blogs about his fave things, and links up with other dogs for fun and business. Sorry, dogs only. There's also Catster.com. Yep, social networking for cats. But cats aren't sociable. They got funding anyway. So that dumb dotcom idea your unemployed brother-in-law keeps bugging you about? PowerPoint the business plan in four slides, spam it to 400 VCs, and get that gray Ferrari that is so rightfully yours.

2) Speaking of Ferraris: a friend emailed yesterday morning, just before the news hit the Wall Street Journal. His company was shutting down. No, not just shutting down. He was worried his company might actually cause the collapse of the US economy. A few months ago, he moved to Boston to work at a hedge fund. Zero work experience. Never interviewed before. Didn't even have a resume. But those are only for little people. Starting salary $200,000 per year. He's been living un poco loco in Boston. Until last week, when one of the traders had a bad day. The 32-year old trader drives a gray Ferrari. His summer car. In winter, he prefers a Bentley. "It handles better in snow." Anyway, he was betting hard on natural gas futures. Last year, he made a billion dollars on gas futures and seeing as how hurricane season is coming up, he played hard this year. Until he lost $5 billion in 5 days. Wiped 30-40% of the fund's assets. Investors lost their Ferraris, their runway-model girlfriends, and their $5 million studio apartments. One guy was leveraged 8x on his assets. The last time a hedge fund got wiped out, it nearly wrecked the American economy. For several hours yesterday, it was pretty dicey. The Wall Street Journal and all the business news shows talked about this. Anyway, he's out of a job. Anyone want to hire a $200,000 guy with three months work experience and a gray Ferrari?

3) You've heard of Web 2.0? Don't know what it is? Don't worry. Obsolete-o-rama. Someone else started Web 3.0. Don't know what that is? Who cares? Web 4.0 was also launched. In fact, we're up to Web 16.0 this morning. Nobody has Web 17.0 yet, so here's your big chance. Announce Web 17.0, send out PowerPoints to your VCs, and get that gray Ferrari delivered to your door.

More later. I gotta go to an all-Elvis business meeting. 0 comments