Stories about: Neoforma

As regular as the four seasons, Saleforce.com Inc. unveiled this week its Spring 04 edition of its online CRM application.

The pending sale of the assets of Exodus Communications in bankruptcy court isn't likely to be a disaster for the Web hosting company's customers, users and analysts said.

To kick its e-business initiatives into high gear, GE told its unit chiefs to save their businesses by figuring out how to kill them

Some executives like to conceive their company's future through strategic-planning exercises. Not Jack Welch. For him, strategic planning is too safe, too theoretical. Instead, Welch had his business units envision how the future could hurt them. He called the exercise Destroy Your Business (DYB).

A virtual turf war is breaking out in the health care industry as emerging dot-com companies, established manufacturers, distributors, and traditional brokers scramble to establish competing Internet marketplaces for buying and selling everything from Band-Aids to MRI machines. At stake are potentially billions of dollars in revenue, savings for hospitals and their IT departments, and a controlling interest in the way health care goods are bought and sold in the future.

Chalk it up as a year for the record books. Venture capital investments in network companies topped $11 billion in the fourth quarter of 1999, shattering all previous records and pushing the year-end total to $23.1 billion - more than quadruple the investments made in 1998.

If you believe the hype, every company but your own is on the Internet buying and selling at one of those business-to-business trading exchanges for industries such as health care, paper and steel. But the reality is that most of these Net market-maker sites have almost no transaction volume.

Take a look at some of the big movers in the Internet sector today. Amazon.com closed up 13 percent. Drugstore.com closed up 20 percent. The first Internet IPO of the year, Neoforma, finished up an astounding 300 percent. And FreeMarkets.com ended up nearly 30 points.

Monday was a fine day if you were part of the Net health business. Despite a lousy session for the markets as a whole, some companies moving to the forefront of Web-based medicine (or, in the case of Drugstore.com, the forefront of Web-based Q-Tip and cotton-ball sales) scored impressively. Amazon.com increased its investment in Drugstore.com, throwing in another $30 million to gain 28 percent of the online pharmacy, although the money will flow both ways: Drugstore.com will pay $105 million to Amazon during the next three years to get better placement on the e-commerce giant's site. Perhaps Jeff Bezos wants to be balanced and have cash in both his front pockets.