Thus, formerly Scottish Telecom, has suffered the fate of Icarus as a profit warning issued by its ISP, Demon, wiped out 30 per cent of the share value.

The company said that Demon had been hit by the explosion of flat-rate unmetered ISPs. Operating losses rose to £18million compared with £4.6million in the same period last year, despite a six per cent increase in the company's turnover.

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Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang joined the board of Cisco Systems yesterday. The network vendor also made Larry Carter, Cisco's existing CFO, a member of the board.

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Barnesandnoble.com posted bigger than expected losses of $39.9 million for the second quarter. Sales at the online bookseller were up 77 per cent from the same period the previous year to $67.4 million. The company added 700,000 customers in the three months to make a total of more than 5.5 million users.

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Terra Networks reported a net loss of $156 million in the first half of the year despite notching up increased revenues over the same period. The share price fell 4.4 per cent to close at E41 - down from a high of E140 in February.

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E-outfit, SDL International, has signed a $10 million agreement with Microsoft to offer translation services for a new gaming product.

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OpenTable.com and lastminute.com have announced a deal that will extend lastminute's restaurant offers into the States, and in turn expand the US Web company's reservations network in Europe. This will allow lastminute subscribers to make real time table reservations in the US. The exchange is expected to be completed within a few months.

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Internet advertising rocketed 163 per cent to £51 million last year, according to PwC. The vast majority of the money (90 per cent) though, was spent on just the top ten Web sites.

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The founder of DoubleClick, Kevin O'Connor, and iVillage founder Candice Carpenter have both decided to hand over their CEO positions and move to the chairman position. It's fair to assume that the movement is to allow a change in management approach as the two companies enter a new era of heavy expansion. ®

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