Stories by: Anne Stuart

Three decades of IT innovation have meant organisational change everywhere; developments at Visa USA and The Wall Street Journal optimise the trend

In preparing for the busiest online holiday shopping season ever, e-retailers have visions of record sales-and nightmares about repeating last year's mistakes

E-commerce strategists are battling to become the brainpower behind online business. Clients call them essential. Critics call them overrated

If there's one trait all great Web ventures share, it's this: They make it easy, pleasant, even downright enjoyable for customers to do business with them. Sounds painfully obvious, doesn't it? But, like common sense, it's not all that common. As Patricia Seybold notes in Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond (Random House , 1998), too many online businesses still squander too much time and money on everything but providing the ultimate experience for their current and potential customers.

Marshall Davidson's goal for his Web-based news service couldn't be simpler: He wants APB Online to be to crime what ESPN.com is to sports and what Weather.com is to weather.

All netrepreneurs -- online entrepreneurs -- start out in the same place: big ideas. Lots of energy. Typically, nowhere near enough money. Of the 30-plus enterprises we've visited in the past four years in our Netrepreneurs column, several are thriving, most notably 800-pound gorilla Yahoo Inc., profiled in the debut issue of WebMaster in June/July 1995 and now the Web's most-visited site. Many, including Tripod, WebRing and Inquiry.com, have changed hands, some more than once. Many are still trying to turn a profit.

To build a replica of 15th century Venice in record time, architects used 21st century technology.

A little money can go a long way toward building a functional-if not fancy-intranet. Dorothea Eiben didn't have much in terms of resources when she launched her campaign to establish an intranet at Genzyme Corp. No budget. No staff. And initially little support from management. "We built the entire thing using a summer intern," recalls Eiben, the associate director of information services for the Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company. As the company phased in its intranet in the summer of 1996, "you could see [the intern] learning," Eiben says. "The day she learned about frames, all our pages had frames." By September the intern was a veteran developer-and, for the cost of her summer job, Genzyme had its intranet. Today the Genzyme Information Exchange, dubbed Genie, provides 3,500 employees in 40 branches worldwide with access to everything from industry headlines to a corporate year 2000 compliance database to personalised stock-option data.