Venture capitalists invested $42M in Internet companies last year, and the total may reach three times that much this year. IPOs and acquisitions are also becoming common. Sales of WWW software are expected to climb from $260M this year to $4B in 1996. Internet-related companies are having to turn away eager investors. One analyst reports strong interest in "spiders" and other software for searching or indexing the net. [Amy Cortese, BW, 10/23/95, p. 110.] (Marty Tenenbaum's Enterprise Integration Technologies -- EIT or EITech -- has been purchased by VeriFone. I've also heard of at least one VC-funded spin-out from EIT. EIT has been building CommerceNet, an "industrial strength" Internet using ISDN and multimedia software for commercial information exchange.)

The San Jose Mercury News carries a 3"x4" display ad seeking Internet software business plans for investment or acquisition. , 011 49 8158 993058 Fax. [SJM, 10/16/95, 3E.] (Beware too much money funding less-than-great business plans and less-than-great management teams. Or VCs who haven't time to shepherd the start-ups they fund.)

Dave Winer has released his Clay Basket 1.0b5 outliner-based website builder and browser, on . It can be used with his free Frontier/Aretha scripting language or with AppleScript. AppleScript is simple, English-like, well-documented with screen shots, and easy to learn -- the "Bob" of scripting languages. Frontier is faster and more powerful. "Ease of learning counts only for people who are meek about making an investment. Geeks are not meek! Once you've learned how to do something, ease of learning is a non-issue." [, DaveNet, 10/24/95.]

Winer says he's learned a lot about free software this year. He's learned that a company's value depends more on its control of standards than on projected sales or distribution strength. The stock market doesn't care about routine profits and boring business details; it cares about market dominance and control over one's own destiny. Even an IPO with few products and little revenue can get a stellar valuation and enormous R&D budget if it controls an uncontested standard. (Netscape is still trading at about $60/share.) Therefore, freeware makes sense. The issue isn't whether people pay, but whether they build on your foundation. "If Netscape can get people to say their pages are Netscape 2.0-enhanced, they continue to win." Companies that own standards can give their software away through the net, and companies that make retail software "boxes" will find it hard to keep up. [Dave Winer , DaveNet, 10/24/95.]

Mark R. Anderson notes that vaporware is a more effective weapon on the net than in the CD ROM market, since development costs are half as much and distribution is global and instantaneous. "Whole companies can come at you out of nowhere," as with Netscape, Spry, Id, and Yahoo. [, Strategic News Service, 10/22/95.]

"Owning the operating system and associated tool libraries becomes irrelevant to selling applications. Owning the application or channel becomes irrelevant to selling the content. To the extent that Java or a similar language prevails, software becomes truly open for the first time. The Microsoft desktop becomes a commodity; the Intel microprocessor becomes peripheral -- the key 'microprocessor' is the software code in the Java interpreter." -- George Gilder, "The Coming Software Shift," Forbes ASAP, 8/28/95. [Bill Park, 10/12/95.]

You can find George Gilder's comments about the future of telecommunications on . 14 Forbes ASAP articles are reprinted, with permission, from Gilder's forthcoming book "Telecosm." [. Chuck Morefield , 9/29/95.]

Speaking of controlling content: Bill Gates has purchased the Bettmann Archive of historical photographs for Microsoft's wholly owned subsidiary Corbis Corp. [NYT, 10/10/95, A1. EDUPAGE.]

"Scenarios: The Future of the Future" is a special edition of Wired magazine. HotWired will dedicate a 10-week section to the issue, posting articles in installments and hosting Scenarios writers for live, online discussions in Club Wired . Paul Saffo and Steward Brand have appeared, to be followed by Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Wilkinson, Douglas Coupland, Neal Stephenson, Ralph Merkle, John Perry Barlow, and Danny Hillis. [, net-hap, 10/11/95.] (Steve Holden and Bill Park recommend it as having great content, despite the advertising.)