Copyright 1999 Boston Herald Inc.
The Boston Herald
December 20, 1999 Monday ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: FINANCE; Pg. 034
LENGTH: 460 words
HEADLINE:
TECHNOLOGY TODAY; TECH NEWS In Brief
BODY:
Glitch
delays toy shipments
LOS ANGELES - A manufacturing glitch is playing
Grinch to thousands of kids hoping to get one of Mattel's flashy new Barbie or
Hot Wheels computers for Christmas.
Faulty power supplies - the part
that distributes electricity to a computer's components - has forced Mattel
licensee Patriot Computers Corp. of Toronto to delay the shipment of about
40,000 computers, Patriot spokesman Michael Harrison said.
Patriot is
replacing the bad parts, and hopes to have computers in customers' hands by
early January. Patriot builds and sells the computers for $ 599 under a license
from Mattel that allows it to use the Barbie and Hot Wheels names and load the
machines with 20 titles of Mattel game and educational software.
The
Patriot PCs are sold through specially created Web sites, Barbiepc.com and
Hotwheelspc.com. All have a 333-MHz Intel Celeron processor, a 3-gigabyte hard
drive and 15-inch monitor. - ASSOCIATED PRESS
Web sites get personal
WASHINGTON - Shoppers going on-line to pick up the latest gifts and
gizmos may find that the Web sites they visit are picking up personal details
about their habits and selling the data to marketers, according to a survey
conducted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a leading privacy group.
Of the 100 most popular e-commerce Web sites surveyed, none met all of
the "best practices" to protect the privacy of personal
information, such as clearly disclosing what data is collected and how
it may be used, letting the consumer to opt out of data collection and giving
the consumer an opportunity to check and correct the information.
Many
of the sites also use data collection practices that have been called into
question, such as allowing outside advertising companies to track and profile
Web visitors.
Of the 100 top shopping sites, 35 have outside companies
doing profiling while 18 of the sites made no disclosures about information
collection policies at all. - REUTERS
GM holds first auction
DETROIT - General Motors Corp. recently held the first
business-to-business auctions and purchases over its own Internet trading site -
months ahead of schedule.
GM believes its TradeXchange Web site has the
potential to save billions by streamlining orders and allowing some 30,000 to
40,000 suppliers to get lower prices themselves.
GM also expects the
site to earn money through trading fees.
GM said 108 companies took part
in an auction for metal stamping presses Friday.
The site also handled
about $ 500,000 in purchase orders this week from catalogs on TradeXchange that
list 200,000 items.
Ford Motor Co. has a similar site under development,
called AutoXchange, also aimed at putting its suppliers on the Internet. -
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOAD-DATE: December 20, 1999
