As high-profile guests drop like flies from the Web party, France's LVMH (aka Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey, parent company of such gilded names as TAG Heuer, Celine and Sephora) is boldly moving ahead in the flashiest of frocks. Its latest venture? Convincing the moneyed class to buy luxury goods the new-fashioned way: online.

Don't expect the Parisian luxury purveyor to make a splash -- at least not yet. Eluxury.com launched late last month, but LVMH won't begin marketing it until the fall. Nevertheless, the site now hawks a wide range of designer items with eye-popping price tags. Why the soft launch? Perhaps amid the doom and gloom, LVMH understands that selling $17,000 Bulgari watches, $900 Louis Vuitton pooch carriers or $100 La Perla undies may be seen as a little tactless.

But market faux pas or not, this is no nouveau riche VC experiment. Through Eluxury.com, LVMH plans to aggressively showcase and sell the latest collections of its key brands, including Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy, to name a few.

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Mossimo's flames flickering out?

Three creditors that say they're owed $650,000 have filed a petition to liquidate the sportswear company, reports the New York Post. The New York Stock Exchange halted trading in the trendy fashion house after the filing was disclosed and may delist it permanently. Shareholders already seem to have written off the company; it began the year at $8 a share but was at 88 cents until the trading halt. Mossimo plans to lay off 90 percent of its employees and close its Los Angeles store.

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Shoppers and analysts alike found Boo overly ambitious and few were surprised by staff cuts announced in January. Still, the death of this short-lived, high-profile venture marks Europe's first major dot-com failure. With big-name backers like Benetton and Bernard Arnault, the famed chairman of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, Boo.com was one of the most publicized e-commerce efforts.

According to a BBC report, a last-ditch effort to secure another $30 million failed, and while the site was growing, it wasn't getting enough orders to make up the vast sums already spent starting the company. So, some 300 people were reportedly clearing out their desks Wednesday.

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It didn't take long for an e-mail address to get hit on by a bulk e-mailer. After four days, an unsolicited commercial e-mail made its way to the address listed on the masthead. The message touted "the all new exclusive Y2K highly targeted e-mail address CD volume #7!" And to make doubly sure that Wallis didn't miss his chance to buy one of the 27 remaining CDs, the spammer sent two copies of the same e-mail. We got spam!

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But talk to Hans Peter Brxndmo, 37, founder and chairman of Post Communications, and you might be persuaded that this e-mail is a great service to you. Brxndmo may be an e-mail marketer, but he's as passionately anti-spam as any frustrated user could be. "Spam is unsolicited, unwanted, unexpected and soon to be unlawful e-mail," says Brxndmo. "What we do is help companies establish communications with existing customers -- everyone has signed up and given permission for the company to communicate with them." But even legitimate companies, Brxndmo adds, send too many e-mails." If companies keep sending users so much mail, then users will stop responding, just as they stopped clicking on banner ads."

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When Gates, dressed in a conservative dark sweater, says "Since then, [the PC has] become a tool that has transformed our economy and had a profound effect on how we live and how our children learn," he may as well be saying, "Look what I've done to transform our economy. A vote for Microsoft is a vote for a strong economy." Gates doesn't go so far as to say to write to our congressperson and tell them to call off the Justice Department hounds, but it wouldn't feel out of place here.

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PlanetOut, under the direction of CEO Megan Smith, already serves up daily news, an Internet radio show called "Homophonic" and numerous discussion boards and chat rooms to its 485,000 registered members. It also runs the gay and lesbian sections of AOL (which owns a stake in PlanetOut) and several major portals including Yahoo, Netscape and Lycos. A mechanical engineer by training, Smith, 35, did a stint at MIT's Media Lab and led product development at the pioneering handheld computing firm General Magic before joining PlanetOut in 1996.

PlanetOut just announced a merger with Liberation Publications, publisher of Advocate and Out magazines. What are your plans?

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"The Court concludes that Microsoft maintained its monopoly power by anti-competitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market," declared Jackson in his "findings of law." "Microsoft placed an oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune, thereby effectively guaranteeing its continued dominance in the relevant market. More broadly, Microsoft's anti-competitive actions trammeled the competitive process through which the computer software industry generally stimulates innovation and conduces to the optimum benefit of consumers."

Specifically, Jackson determined that Microsoft violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by unlawfully "tying" its Web browser to its operating system, and by a series of other anti-competitive acts that included foregoing millions of dollars in revenue through its practice of giving away the browser for free, and applying extreme pressure on Internet service providers and hardware retailers. Jackson also declared that Microsoft's creation of a version of the Java programming language incompatible with Sun Microsystems' Java fit into the same pattern of abusive practices.

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The nearly 39,943 online votes (of a total of 85,970) relied on the technology of Election.com, a Garden City, N.Y., firm that set up the online polls and worked to ensure that there was no virtual ballot-box stuffing, no ballots cast by the dead, no denial-of-service attacks. A for-profit company, Election.com was started in February 1999 (it was called Votation then) to run online elections for private companies as well as the government.

CEO Joe Mohen, 43, previously founded a networking software company called Proginet. But in his spare time, he did a lot of civic volunteering and organized elections for the school board, the village mayor and other local offices -- doing everything from finding polling places to renting machines. He says all that election grunt work "wasn't my passion," so he created a smoother system with Election.com, hoping to spare others the headaches.

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Epinions doesn't seem afraid of controversy. Other cinema viriti-style ads it plans to air include a woman demonstrating a mechanical breast pump on her own breast and a snowboarder trying to break into a skier-only resort. The ads, which started airing last week, star regular-Joe consumers who wrote provocative reviews on the Epinions site, and caught the eye of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, the San Francisco advertising agency who brought us the "Got Milk?" campaign.

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TRUSTe didn't look so trusty last year when a security expert found that its licensee RealNetworks had been collecting user information on the
sly. Instead of reprimanding the company, the nonprofit argued that because RealNetworks' privacy violations took place via its RealJukebox software, not its Web site, the incident was outside the purview of TRUSTe. More recently, it's been other privacy advocacy groups like JunkBusters that have alerted the public to privacy violations such as Intel's decision to include an identifier in its Pentium III chip; JunkBusters also started a campaign against DoubleClick's acquistion of Abacus when it was announced last June.

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But competitor 24/7 Media already has a database of about 20 million people's names and personal spending habits, which it sells to advertisers. And it hasn't provoked the suspicions of the FTC. David Moore, the president and CEO of 24/7, says the key to avoiding trouble is asking permission. 24/7 Media's information is based on opt-in marketing, and Moore, 47, who got his start in advertising selling ads for Turner Broadcasting and Lifetime Television Network, says his goal is to get everyone with an e-mail address to agree to receiving targeted e-mail and ads.

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Alcazar and 14 other Dutch clubs are installing biometric smart-card scanners to ensure that whoever is working the door will know who's been naughty and who's been nice. The biometric ID technology was created by Keyware Technologies, which expects that the clubs will not only use the cards to identify patrons, but to store data such as the frequency with which patrons visit -- offering, in return, "disco dollars" or other frequent flyer-like promotions redeemable for drinks or a free coat check.

"A small number of individuals can wreak havoc on the atmosphere at a nightclub, destroying the fun that most attendees seek," says a Keyware press release. "By implementing Keyware's cutting-edge identification system, nightclub owners will be able to prevent the problems caused by unruly patrons and provide a safer and more enjoyable environment for all."

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It's an enticingly chaotic scene that the Eazel founders have acted out before -- several as seminal members of the original Apple Macintosh development team. This time around, these ace programmers and business folks are set on a new "Let's change the world" course: to build a user-friendly desktop for Linux-based operating systems and to make managing the notoriously tricky Linux a breeze.

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"If it was mine, I'd pierce its tongue -- my tongue is pierced," says Debra Chang, who works in Pets.com's order processing department. "Then I'd create a Web site for it and put up pictures." Unfortunately, her hopes were dashed when she came in third among 70 bidders -- with an offer of $14,500. "I was going to go for 25 [thousand dollars], but then I thought that might be a little more than I wanted to spend."

The winning bid belonged to Randall Smith, a computer contractor for the Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco. "It's not the type of thing I'd normally do, but I thought, let me buy a ticket on this ride and see where it goes," says Smith. He says he's no dot-com millionaire, just a "regular working guy" willing to give some spare cash to the charity that supports animal-loving organizations. "I'm single. I have nothing else to spend it on."

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Back in 1996, I helped my boyfriend's father, Curt, get online -- by arranging a six-month subscription to AOL. We thought it would be an easy way to give him a taste of what the Net was like, and that he would quickly graduate to the wide-open Web. After all, Curt didn't know much about the Internet then, but he had had a home computer for ages and engaged in some distinctly non-newbie activities, like defragging his hard drive and editing his digital photos. Curt is a smart man, a retired executive who now teaches management courses at University of Michigan. I figured it would be relatively simple to "upgrade" his Net connection after he got his feet wet. Boy, was I wrong.

I've learned from Curt and others like him that it's not just the stereotypical newbies who like AOL. Among AOL's 20 million subscribers there are some technically proficient people who honestly prefer the proprietary network. It lets them log on from practically anywhere without long distance charges; it makes it easy for them to customize their view of the Internet and funnels right to them lots of information they regularly go online to find.

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There is also the Java programming "Ubkrcoder: The Man Who Can Build Anything." "That's right," reads the poster's fine print, "the ubkrcoder can build anything to run anywhere on any device, because the ubkrcoder has the power of the dot in .com." And then there's E10000: Bigger and Badder, featuring a Sun server looming like the Terminator -- "It's back, and it still means business." E10000: Bigger and Badder -- "a dot in dot-com production" is a big meanie: It "devours terabytes like appetizers, and your competition like the main course" and is rated "HC: For hard core capitalists only -- some material may not be suitable for squeamish bourgeoisie." ("The Dot is rated LB -- "lame business people strongly cautioned.")

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The acquisitions are a little puzzling. Gemstar is certainly an up-and-comer in the TV world. It's the maker of VCR Plus, or Video Plus, technology, which lets you record a TV show by entering a code rather than navigating through your VCR menu. The new TV Guide owner is also a major provider of interactive TV guides that let you browse cable programming. America Online has licensed Gemstar technology for its upcoming TV service.

OK, but what's a TV-centric company going to do with digital books? The official line is that the acquisition is a straightforward attempt to corral a new market before it really takes off.

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Old-time Net heads and Web business people quickly focused on the big issues raised by the big merger. Will independent voices still have room to thrive on an Internet increasingly dominated by huge corporations? Will this merger dumb down the Net? How open will this new-old media powerhouse make its content and its network? Will AOL-Time Warner -- or anyone -- figure out how to make broadband work?

We surveyed a number of geeks, new-media savants and technology critics to get their take on the century's biggest mega-merger (at least so far). Here's what they had to say:

Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of Times Company Digital, the Internet unit of the New York Times Co.

It's great for those of us who go back to the earliest days of AOL, back when they were Quantum Link with a service that ran over 300-baud modems for Commodore computers. Who would have thought that they'd be taking over Time Warner?

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"We have very little cash in the bank," said Williams, CookExpress's CEO. The San Francisco company burned through $3.5 million of private financing in the last two years, establishing a nationwide dinner delivery service, serving the fixings for pre-fab gourmet meals like lamb chops with Madeira sauce.

With the help of famous chefs like Bradley Ogden (of One Market in San Francisco), CookExpress adapted over 100 time-consuming recipes to create easy-to-use meal kits. Customers could place an order on the CookExpress Web site by 2 p.m., and before dinner time you could expect a package of pre-prepped ingredients. More than a step up from takeout, the kits offered meals such as pan-seared scallops, wild mushroom lasagna and butternut squash stew. (The only drawback was environmental: Every order involved lots of plastic bags and cardboard boxes.)

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