these are links I collected from 1994 to about 1995 or 1996. So if they actually work, well, woah!
Commercial Connections
- Electronic Storefronts
- Online Shopping Centers
Bringing that Home Shopping Network interactivity to the Internet! - Digital Cash
It will change the web - only a question of how, who, and when. - Practical Commercial Connections
- Commercial Indices
Electronic Storefronts
When I first started exploring the web, I saw commercial sites as real foe to creativity, and a force for general crappiness. Now I've come to see that crappy sites are crappy sites, be they commercial, or self-indulgent net.heads. Here I have listed electronic storefronts, sites that, while being commercial, have presented their content in an engaging manner. That is the future of advertising. Allow the consumer to interact with your product and if it's good, and the interactivity is engaging, you'll sell stuff.
- Chicago's cheesiest, and most prevalent, singles publication Single's Choice has a well-engineered web site up. They've got a lot of personals, and a pretty good interface for searching/categorizing them. I had a lot of fun picking my race, and the race of my future beloved, and entering my personal online (even with a link to my page in it!) when I discovered that they wanted to charge my credit card $32! Feh. Maybe if they accepted digital cash... They've got 500 ads though, and it looks as though the web site mirrors the content of the print magazine.
- Billed by Wired Magazine as the world's first Digital Supergroup, video game makers Rocket Science are following in the Hollywood tradition of big explosion, whiz bang, special effects heavy design. Check out their web site for the latest pix and clips from their heavily-produced futuristic titles.
- While you are waiting for HotWired, you might try the Hot Hot Hot site. Exemplary of the new net marketing site, it features an online hot sauce catalog that can be viewed in four different ways (name, ingredient, origin, or heat). There are inline pictures of many of the labels, as well as short descriptions of each of the sauces. Mildly entertaining, more interesting as a precursor to millions of commercial web pages. Fortunately, these guys have a subject more interesting than most to play up. They haven't done as much as they could, that's for sure...
- For condom-mania with a decided Texas Twang, check out Condom Country. Browse their slick online catalog and get a model by model perspective of the prophylactic potentials. With condom jokes, history, and a snappy one-line review of each available condom, you will leave this site know more about those lil' latex love tools than you ever imagined possible. Behind the disarming exterior lurks a full-featured online sex shop. If you find yourself in need of any prophylactics, edible underwear, vibrators, whips, oils, or books, you can order it online with a credit card, without having to leave the comfort of your own keyboard. Definitely for the geek too meek to peek in the door of a condom store.
- Disney subsidiary Buena Vista Pictures has a website. They seem to be following the recent trend towards imagemaps - each screen is an attractive whopper. I don't know what you are supposed to do if you have a text browser.
For your browsing pleasure, they have onlined press kits, and promotional pages on all of the recent releases from Hollywood, Touchstone, and Disney pictures. Video clips are available for downloading.- What someone called the second sign of the coming apocalypse: order a PizzaHut pizza online. Only for denizens of the Santa Cruz area during its beta test period, but look for it soon in a market near you.
- Looking for an autograph? This company has set up a web site with listings of famous stars they have the signatures of. They are all for sale. Unfortunately, there are virtually no pictures of the autographs online.
Online Shopping Centers
Any wonder that both of these places have already been bought up by non-Internet based conglomerates?
- As pretty and polished as the real thing, the Netro Mall is an example of useless heavy imagemapping. No text interface, no modularity, just one big map .gif. The gifts offered by the online merchants tend towards the useless/Christmasy side, so if you crave engraved glassware, sundries, or cookware, try here.
- Started by some Swarthmore graduates, the NetMarket company landed on the front page of the New York Times business section after it launched. They are using PGP encryption to use credit cards to move flowers and CDs over the net. An early experiment in online sales - by a bunch of college kids in a house in New Hampshire. Sounds likeable, right? They have already been bought up by CUC International, only months after they launched.
- Owned by the Home Shopping Network, the Internet Shopping Network offers power shopping for computer peripherals. No e-cash here, just credit card based online shopping.
Practical Commercial Connections
- Want to see an up to date graph of the month by month stock performance of Snapple Beverage Corp? The Experimental Stock Market Data page at MIT provides free, daily updated, graphs and quotes of stocks from the big board, as well as mutual funds. If you want to know the closing price of that certain NYSE stock, check in here - it's wonderfully simple. No registration, no charges, just graphs and prices.
- How do companies achieve net.presence? One company offering home page authoring is cookware. Drive by this site to check out their commercial presence.
Commercial indices
- Open Market's Commercial Sites Index used to be at MIT, and then these folks bought it. Commercial listings, yellow pages, lucrative. Like,
- Yahoo from Stanford is goin' big time, check out their search engine or subject listings, I find them plenty useful.
- Commerce-minded folk are definitely interested in ISDN. For those of you unfamiliar, ISDN is a new, expensive way of getting 8 phone lines into your home through one pipe. This page has coordinated ISDN resources in a thoughtful, timely fashion. There isn't really any original content, but he's found everything else by everybody else online about the subject.
This page and all its contents Copyright 1994, 1995 Justin Hall. All rights reserved. Contact me with any questions you might think of, permissions you might want, or problems you may have.
Yer Mama Net Productions / Justin Hall / <justin@cyborgasmic.com>