The Impact of E-Commerce Strategies on Firm Value: Lessons from Amazon.com

Managers would like to understand which strategies generate value in e-commerce environments, and researchers are just beginning to explore this issue. Which strategies are useful and which are not? In a step towards answering this question, we estimate the impacts of several competitive strategies on the value of Amazon.com, the well-known Internet retailer, during its first 1000 days as a publicly traded firm. The strategies analyzed include pricing, offline expansion, alliance formation, product line expansion, and service improvement. The results provide insight into the usefulness of various ways of competing online and could be useful for strategic planning in new Internet ventures.alliance; competitive advantage; competitive strategy; event studies; internet; valuation

Web Acquisitions & Collection Development

This article and webography is based Oil a workshop of the same title presented at the /999 ACL Annual Conference. It discusses the growing number of resources on the World Wide Web that may be useful for doing acquisitions and collection development. It begins by introducing librarians to AcqWeb, an excellent site for librarians who do acquisitions and collection development. Then representative web sites which may be useful as verification tools, review sources, collection development resources or in finding out-of print materials are listed in an annotated webography

APIs and Your Privacy

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, have been the topic of much recent discussion. Newsworthy events, including those involving Facebook’s API and Cambridge Analytica obtaining information about millions of Facebook users, have highlighted the technical capabilities of APIs for prominent websites and mobile applications. At the same time, media coverage of ways that APIs have been misused has sparked concern for potential privacy invasions and other issues of public policy. This paper seeks to educate consumers on how APIs work and how they are used within popular websites and mobile apps to gather, share, and utilize data. APIs are used in mobile games, search engines, social media platforms, news and shopping websites, video and music streaming services, dating apps, and mobile payment systems. If a third-party company, like an app developer or advertiser, would like to gain access to your information through a website you visit or a mobile app or online service you use, what data might they obtain about you through APIs and how? This report analyzes 11 prominent online services to observe general trends and provide you an overview of the role APIs play in collecting and distributing information about consumers. For example, how might your data be gathered and shared when using your Facebook account login to sign up for Venmo or to access the Tinder dating app? How might advertisers use Pandora’s API when you are streaming music? After explaining what APIs are and how they work, this report categorizes and characterizes different kinds of APIs that companies offer to web and app developers. Services may offer content-focused APIs, feature APIs, unofficial APIs, and analytics APIs that developers of other apps and websites may access and use in different ways. Likewise, advertisers can use APIs to target a desired subset of a service’s users and possibly extract user data. This report explains how websites and apps can create user profiles based on your online behavior and generate revenue from advertiser-access to their APIs. The report concludes with observations on how various companies and platforms connecting through APIs may be able to learn information about you and aggregate it with your personal data from other sources when you are browsing the internet or using different apps on your smartphone or tablet. While the paper does not make policy recommendations, it demonstrates the importance of approaching consumer privacy from a broad perspective that includes first parties and third parties, and that considers the integral role of APIs in today’s online ecosystem

The Rise and Fall of the dot com Entrepreneurs

This paper looks at the dot com phenomenon drawing mainly on examples from the USA where the boom started and was most pronounced, but also from the UK which had a number of high profile dot coms. It starts by asking the question, ‘Who were the dot coms?’. it then goes on to consider the factors which led to the emergence of the dot coms such as the emergence of the commercial Internet, the lowering of entry barriers which followed from this and the funding available for new businesses through venture capital. The article also looks at the reasons why it was believed that the dot coms represented a threat to established businesses. The article then looks at the booming IPO market for dot coms and the opportunities this provided for exit by venture capital investors. The crash of 2000 is considered, lessons are drawn for entrepreneurs and investors and finally the article will look at future prospects for the dot com sector

A Hypothetical Non-Infringing Network: An Examination of the Efficacy of Safe Harbor in Section 512(C) of the DMCA

This iBrief will present a hypothetical network that allows dissidents to transfer information outside the watchful eye of an oppressive government. It will argue that because a network operator meets the requirements of the safe harbor of section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the hosts of the network are immune from any vicarious copyright liability

A Hypothetical Non-Infringing Network: An Examination of the Efficacy of Safe Harbor in Section 512(C) of the DMCA

This iBrief will present a hypothetical network that allows dissidents to transfer information outside the watchful eye of an oppressive government. It will argue that because a network operator meets the requirements of the safe harbor of section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the hosts of the network are immune from any vicarious copyright liability

The Path of Internet Law: An Annotated Guide to Legal Landmarks

The evolution of the Internet has forever changed the legal landscape. The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace, copy machine, and instrumentality for committing crimes, torts, and infringing intellectual property. Justice Holmes’s classic essay on the path of the law drew upon six centuries of case reports and statutes. In less than twenty-five years, Internet law has created new legal dilemmas and challenges in accommodating new information technologies. Part I is a brief timeline of Internet case law and statutory developments for Internet-related intellectual property (IP) law. Part II describes some of the ways in which the Internet is redirecting the path of IP in a globalized information-based economy. Our broader point is that every branch of substantive and procedural law is adapting to the digital world. Part III is the functional equivalent of a GPS for locating the latest U.S. and foreign law resources to help lawyers, policymakers, academics and law students lost in cyberspace