Of geese, golden eggs and posh pooches

Come 2003, a red hot 87 per cent of all online advertising and ecommerce revenues will still be generated by people using the good old PC. A tepid 11 per cent will come from digital TV. And mobile? A distinctly chilly two per cent.

According to Jupiter MMXI, who carried out the research, this is partly because companies are failing to notice the bleeding obvious - namely that three doesn't go into one. In other words, a mobile isn't a PC, which isn't a digital TV. One analyst said: "Just as the traditional companies were slow to get on the web, today's web portals, ecommerce and content companies have made the mistake of simply distributing their website to interactive TV and wireless without understanding what consumers want from these new mediums."

But if you reckon you have worked out what consumers want over their mobile devices, you might like to consider setting up a company in the Isle of Man, possibly the best place in the world to do ecommerce, definitely the home of the world's largest working water wheel (not that the latter's especially relevant to this discussion.)

Manx Telecom, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT, reckons it's leading the rest of the planet in the roll-out of a 3G network. According to Mark Briers, director of UMTS at Manx Telecom, the UMTS project on the Isle of Man has been in development since April 1999, and is due for commercial launch in May 2001.

Manx Telecom is working with NEC and Siemens to build the network, and already has a handful of content deals in place with the likes of Imagecom.co.uk (a real-time video applications specialist) and Gameplay (you can guess what they do).

So the network's going to be there. But can your company think of a way of making cold, hard cash out of it? If not, all those lovely 3G network building efforts are going to be akin to a Manx cat chasing its tail.

In other words, a complete waste of time.

It's a bit strange that we're all getting excited about this new channel when very few companies have even got to grips with the net as it stands today. Research house Ovum tested 114 leading online businesses (44 per cent of which were internet start-ups) to find out if they can handle multiple communication channels. An astonishingly embarrassing 76 per cent of companies who had invited customers to contact them via their websites failed to respond within 24 hours. Some of them never responded at all.

Of the 97 companies inviting electronic form submissions or emails on their websites, only eight per cent were able to refer to the original internet contact when they were called by phone.

Looks like, for most businesses, CRM stands for customer relationship mismanagement.

Give the dog a (gold-plated) bone

Two high-tech gurus became a teeny bit richer this week. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is set to rake in $935m or so from the sale of some 15 million of his shares in the company. Even before he cashed in this latest tranche, he'd disposed of another 16 million shares in the last three months, making him a cool $1.14bn. So he's done quite well for himself really.

This puts the £70m or so made by Autonomy boss Mike Lynch this week somewhat in the shade. But Mike - whose company listed on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday and looks set to make it into the FTSE 100 - certainly knows what to do with his cash. When Sky News asked him what he was going to spend his tidy little pile on, he said he was planning to buy an Otterhound dog.

Up til now, Scott McNealy has been the most famous canine-owning IT CEO. His pooch is, apparently, called Network. (Remember kids - the network is the dog).

Two of our favourite comments this week came on the back of rumours that Letsbuyit.com is a tad impecunious, and is looking for some new backing - and might even consider selling out altogether. The company's former CEO, Hakan Ramsin, told silicon.com that it's £70m short. he said: "Letsbuyit.com needs additional funding soon which will be hard to find. The business model is viable, but the market conditions have not been on their side. With 90 per cent certainty, the company will be bought by a large chain or an established bricks and mortar player."

Two of our viewers asked: if we want to buy it and all club together, can we force the price down a bit?

Finally, while we're on the subject of selling out, Greg Dyke, the bearded BBC supremo, is apparently considering carrying advertising on the supposedly non-commercial BBC Online. The Round-Up was under the impression that the licence fee was funding this, and we'd really rather not have to pay for the privilege of seeing adverts. Either that bit of the BBC is part of its public service remit, or it's not. Make your mind up Gregory.

But an even bigger sell-out happened this week: Napster signed a deal with Bertelsmann (http://www.silicon.com/a40557 ) which almost certainly heralds the beginning of the end of free music downloads. This was inevitable really, but there's still something rather sad about it. Does everyone who enters adulthood sporting Coke-stained, pizza-encrusted T-shirts with as many holes as a mature Swiss cheese have to end up wearing Armani suits?

It's the end of Napster as we know it. Do you feel fine?

The Round-Up will be humming tunelessly again next Friday...