What do you think? Buzz over to nwfusion.talk and add your two cents. Or bee a good source and send your honey of a tip to Chris Nerney at cnerney@ nww.com More NetBuzz

B y C h r i s N e r n e y
10/12/98

What are you doing here?
Last week's Fall Internet World drew hundreds of exhibitors, from household names such as IBM and that company Bill Gates runs to obscure start-ups unknown beyond the founder's family and personal credit-card provider.

The vast majority of exhibitors at the New York show had two common goals: 1) To sell servers, applications, routers, etc., to corporate buyers; and 2) To enjoy the kind of amenities available only at the conveniently located Javits (sp? correct?) Center.

But there are always a handful of booth denizens whose presence at a show designed to attract IT buyers (and journalists who write for IT buyers) strikes one as, well, puzzling. What is the strategy behind their Internet World appearance? 'Net Buzz just had to ask a couple at last week's event.

Over at booth #361 was the United States Postal Service (USPS), offering not to mail postcards from the Big Apple, but to tout its soon-to-be-running Web site providing services to small businesses, home businesses and whoever else will pay to use it.

Called PostOffice Online, the service enables customers to save time spent printing letters, stuffing envelopes and applying postage by having someone else do it for you. All you do is place an order through www.postofficeonline.com, and the Postal Service takes care of your order.

That's right, from the comfort of your own home or office, without even leaving your desktop, you too can go postal.

"It's our first transactional service on the Internet," says program director Paul Courtemanche.

The service has been tested in Tampa, Fla., and Hartford, Conn. The Web site is scheduled to be up and running next week for market testing in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and will be restricted to the first 5,000 businesses that qualify for the pilot program.

Then there was The British Library (TBL), located at booth #3114 and offering this tantalizing promise: "London to New York inside two hours!"

However, before I could sign up for my free Concorde flight, I realized these people were talking about a new service called Inside, which offers users Web access to TBL's massive warehouse of information. The organization's database covers science, medicine, engineering, business, law, finance and the arts.

The deal is that anyone in the U.S. ordering an article from one of the 250,000 journals or 16,000 conference proceedings is guaranteed to receive the information via fax within two hours, if requested, for $13.50. A one-year annual subscription password to the service costs $750. Pricing on a Concorde flight was unavailable.

TBL's Inside Web site can be found at www.bl.uk/inside. 'OK, how 'bout this one? These two vendors walk into a bar . . . '
Will Bluestone Software be the next Web applications server start-up to be bought by a larger vendor? That's the rumor 'Net Buzz heard last week at Internet World.

Word is that Bluestone will be bought by "a Unix hardware vendor - either Hewlett-Packard or Silicon Graphics," according to one source.

Asked about the possible acquisition, HP's Internet marketing director Bill Murphy would only say, "We are talking to a lot of companies."

John Capobianco, Bluestone's senior vice president of marketing, says the start-up is sticking to an IPO track and plans to turn a profit by the fourth quarter. He says he is familiar with the HP rumor but not the Silicon Graphics talk.

"That's the first time I've heard that one," Capobianco laughs.

In early August, 'Net Buzz reported Bluestone rival WebLogic might be bought by HP or Novell. BEA Systems wound up proving us wrong last month by snapping up WebLogic.

Send 'Net Buzz your best rumor about a Web application server start-up before they're all bought up. Hell, send along any Internet- or intranet-related rumor. Contact Chris Nerney at (508) 820-7451 or cnerney@nww.com.