Wired watch: Google adds catalogs, Usenet notes

12/27/2001

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

Fans of Google are going gaga over two new features.

The popular search engine has entered the online shopping venue with an impressive catalog compendium and updated its memory banks for Google Groups with more than 20 years of Usenet messages.

The beta version of the searchable catalogs.google.com site opened last week and is already gathering kudos. From Lands' End to Brookstone, more than 1,500 catalogs from 600 retailers have been meticulously scanned into this massive shopping database.

On the other front, the Google Groups (groups.google.com) appears to be the most complete collection of Usenet messages ever assembled. The online archive now contains 700 million messages going back longer than most people's Web memories.

A timeline shows the way to the first mention online of Microsoft, the first review of the IBM PC, CERN's announcement of the World Wide Web, Linus Torvald's Linux announcement, the first Kibo post to alt.religion.kibology, and many more historic firsts.

Phere transforms into robot toy

It's been a great year for Phere – the Fort Worth-based Battlebot that showed so well in competition featured on Comedy Central in August.

Phere is now part of Milton Bradley's Rumble Robots collectible card game, which combines card play with action from a battling robot that receives commands swiped through its built-in scanner. In the contest, participants win cards from opponents, then swipe those cards through a robot to give it more power. Robots then battle in an attempt to kill each other's power supply by tipping the opponent over, hitting an antenna-like terminate switch, or sapping power with a laser attack.

TheStreet.com faces number of adjustments

Once the darling of Wall Street and the Internet world, TheStreet. com, a New York provider of financial information, is facing big debt and some big changes, says a recent Dow Jones Newswires story.

Staring at another year of losses and a deficit of $132.7 million over the first nine months of this year, the company is considering a move away from its popular Web portal toward pricey fax and e-mail subscription services.

After introducing six or seven subscription newsletters in 2001, TheStreet.com expects to introduce four or five more in the next year. Among the offerings: Street View, a fax product carrying a hefty $30,000-a-year price tag, and Action Alerts, an electronic missive that tells subscribers when and why chatty hedge-fund manager James J. Cramer buys a specific company's shares.

Net notes

Apple Computer will introduce a flat-screen iMac at Macworld in January, according to a report by a respected Wall Street analyst. Meanwhile, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has joined the board of directors of a Silicon Valley start-up that is creating a handheld Internet device called the Hiptop. The company, Danger Inc., says the Hiptop will be a Blackberry pager-like system for checking e-mail, surfing the Net, and storing personal information.

Beckett.com has teamed up with thePit.com to launch the Beckett Daily Trader, a daily electronic sports card price guide.

Compiled from staff and wire reports