| National Semiconductor uses its website as an integral part of building relationships with its customers. National has carefully optimized its website to support the customer buying process as efficiently as possible. National also carefully monitors website visitor behavior and uses this to influence future product production predictions. | |
| Hoover's is an online business information publisher pioneering web business practices that are valuable in many industries: measuring the results of online marketing and distribution, measuring the connection between web content and user behavior, and leveraging the value of context for e-commerce. This report describes these and other innovative practices at Hoover's. | |
| Bay Networks's business model relies on an indirect distribution channel. Thus, while their website is used to provide product information and self-service support to end-users, an equally important use is to support their channel partners. This report highlights the ways that Bay Networks is using a mix of static and dynamic web pages to support both end-users and channel partners. The report also describes important web lessons that Bay Networks has learned. | |
| PropertyandCasualty.com provides a business-to-business community website aimed at the insurance industry. Revenue is derived from advertising. Original content is used to attract audience attention. A strong immediate focus is on web activity tracking and measurement, with plans to implement personalized content delivery in the near future. PropertyandCasualty.com is one of the vertical community sites under the VerticalNet umbrella. | |
| A look at a company focusing on retail sales of magazine subscriptions. This is a new pure web business. The focus of the business is on gaining share as quickly as possible, and thus on rapidly increasing traffic. A critical examination of the use of advertising on and for the site reveals some surprising results: click through ads on other sites are very effective, but ads on the site produce less revenue than devoting that space to the site's own content. |