From: Richard Seltzer Subject: *CAL* Chat reminder -- Thursday, Jan. 7 -- It's Getting REally Crazy; Now , How Do We Compete? Date: Monday, January 04, 1999 8:45 AM ***BUSINESS ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB -- WHERE WORD OF KEYSTROKE BEGINS*** Please join us for chat this Thursday, January 7, to talk about what's changed over the lasat year and how we need to adapt to build successful Internet businesses in the future. Reportedly, online shopping this Christmas was about triple what it was a year ago. I have no hard statistics, but my gut feel is that the number of online stores was even more than triple last year -- meaning the competition for attention and dollars is incredibly intense. (I wonder how many of the newcomers will survive after the costs of post-Christmas exchanges and returns, or the even greater costs of customer dissatisfaction.) Meanwhile, totally engaging interactive events like auctions and person-to-person games have matured to the point of compulsion. Why settle for the best price from a store when you can get the same merchandise at auction for far less, and in an compettiive environment with intense variable reinforment (all those bargains and amazing collectibles that jsut slipped by) and lots of interpersonal interaction. This style of shopping borders on gambling and is at least as addictive. So while the static catalogue-style stores scramble and spend trying to induce shoppers to come back now that the gift-giving season is over, the auction sites are likely to remain packed and draw even greater traffic as newcomers find them and get hooked. And while the auctions are competing with you for shopper dollars, the online games are competing for their time and attention. Now when you buy a game on CD ROM, you don't just play agains the computer. Rather, you can at any time connect to the Internet version and strike up a game with other people like yourself from all over the world. My nine-year-old son got Starcraft for Christmas and immediately got hooke don the Internet version (Battlenet). Over Chrismas vacation, it looked like there were always over 20,000 players connected at any time, so there were many choices of games to join and it was easy to set up your own game with your own starting conditions and quickly recruit teammates and opponents. At the same time, I got hooked on online blitz chess. I had done that quite a bit in the days before the Web. Now the look and feel of the online environment is compelling and, with at least hundreds and sometimes thousands of people wanting to play at any time, you can typically get a game wihtin a few seconds with a player near your strength and with a time control of your choosing. At last count, over 60,000 games were played a day at www.chessclub.com When you check your stats -- your rating and won lost records at different speeds and in miscellaneous variants of chess -- they also tell you your accumulated hours and the percent of your life that you have spent connected to their site. (In my case, for the first three days that amounted to nearly 25%. I may be in need of an addiction support group.) So the environment has changed. More people are spending more of their time online and less of their time at static sites. What do you intend to do about it? What can you do to make your site and your online business more compelling? What lessons can you learn from the auctions and the games and how can you adapt that to your specific needs? Please spread the word and join us at http://www.web-net.org, Thursday, noon to 1 PM US Standard Daylight Time = GMT -5. ***NB -- we are now on standard time. That is GMT -5, not -4*** Transcripts of previous sessions are available at http://www.samizdat.com/chat.html For related articles, see my newsletter Internet-on-a-Disk at http://www.samizdat.com/ioad.html Please email your followup comments/suggestions to me at seltzer@samizdat.com for possible inclusion with the transcripts. Best wishes. Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com Internet writer/speaker/consultant/evangelist For details, check http://www.samizdat.com/consult.html PS -- Check the improvements and new directions of the DE Chat Community at http://www.cottagemicro.com and join in on Tuesdays at noon Eastern Time at the web-net.org site. If you have questions, suggestions or would like to help, please contact Bob Zwick