Business World

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Aug 31, 1999

Dick Clark's Millenios

GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. (AP) -- Dick Clark, the ageless king of New Year's Eve, is pitching a new breakfast cereal celebrating the end of the millennium. Clark will soon introduce Millenios, a sweetened whole grain oat and corn cereal made into 2s and 0s to mark the upcoming calendar switch to 2000. "Everyone knows Dick Clark is synonymous with New Year's Eve," said Pam Becker, a spokeswoman for General Mills. The limited-time offering will hit store shelves in September. General Mills likely will sell the cereal through January.

Mythical maps

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Anyone who wants to pinpoint where James Bond met that blonde with the bottle of champagne on her curvy hip need only consult Language of the Land, an unusual book published by the Library of Congress offering maps of imaginary places. Another map shows just where Tom Sawyer whitewashed his famous fence. Still another points out the spot at which Paul Bunyan's ox Babe, trying to catch a field mouse, dug the Mammoth Cave. L. Frank Baum's Wonderful World of Oz is charted. Illustrator Dick Martin located the Shifting Sands and Deadly Desert, with Emerald City and Glinda's Palace smack in the middle. A Yellow Brick Road is there too, though it's not clearly labeled.

Language of the Land describes and reproduces the fantastic maps, along with many others covering the literary landscape. The $50 book was compiled by Martha Hopkins of the library's Interpretive Programs Office and Michael Buscher of the Geography and Map Division.

Now you see it...

NEW YORK (NYT) -- The stock price is everything at many Internet start-ups. And more than a few of them have taken to posting continually updated prices on their internal computer networks, so employees, many of them paid partly in stock or options, can can draw minute-to-minute inspiration from how rich the company has made them.

E-Loan, an online mortgage broker, permitted its 200 or so workers to watch gleefully at their desktops as the company's share price shot to $74 from $14 after it went public June 29. But when the shares then sagged back into the $50 range, it suddenly didn't seem so good for morale, and the stock price was removed from desktop view at E-Loan.

"You can't watch it minute to minute and day to day" anymore, said Janina Pawlowski, president of the Dublin, Calif., company, adding that no one complained when employees were notified that the stock updates would be withdrawn.

Many companies large and small post their stock prices on internal computer networks, known as intranets, and some, like Ford, even post their competitors' share prices. But executives at some Internet companies say they have found that productivity declines when employees become too focused on price fluctuations."We're just not interested in putting distractions in front of our employees, and watching the stock price is a distraction," said Brian Elk, a spokesman for Priceline.com in Stamford, Conn.iVillage and Theglobe.com, both in Manhattan, said they had similar policies. Prodigy Communications, the Internet service provider based in White Plains, takes the low-tech approach of simply posting the previous day's price on paper in its lobby.

Some intranet consultants say that not displaying updated quotes can be just as distracting. "You can't really keep people from paying attention to the stock price," because workers can seek out stock quotes on the Internet, said Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif. And Steve Crummey, president of Intranets.com in Woburn, Mass., said that regular stock price updates were a simple way for companies to make sure their internal networks stayed current and interesting for employees -- instead of being electronic versions of memos from personnel shoved unread into a drawer.

Vying for online trust

ATLANTA (Cox) -- One of the main things online bankers and brokerages hope to do is become the place on the Web where you make your money decisions. The logic works something like this: If you trust one company to handle your checking account online, you're more likely to trust them with other financial decisions, such as buying insurance and trading stock.

A study by Synergistics Research looks at the idea of cross- selling from the customer's perspective. The study found that the Web offers tremendous opportunities for banks to sell things to their customers that they would not ordinarily sell. About one-third of people polled said they would be interested in handling their investments and getting life, car and homeowners insurance from the company that handles their checking account.

Synergistics Research asked about 1,000 people in May. The survey also found that younger people are more interested in the idea. Most banks are not taking advantage of the interest yet, the study found.

Debt of the poor borrowers

WASHINGTON (NYT) -- Alan Greenspan says personal bankruptcies have grown in recent years because "Americans have lost their sense of shame." But analyses of lending data by several researchers suggests another reason: Banks and credit card companies are loaning increasing amounts of money to lower-income people.