Petopia, the American e-tailer, has sacked 120 people - 60 per cent of the workforce. The company says it will continue to seek more funding - but as online pet product stores are a particularly overcrowded sector, both in the US and in Europe, it doesn't look like too long before Petopia get served up for dotcom dogfood.

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It's like asking how long is a piece of string. But just how big is the Internet economy? The latest research firm to have a go is Gartner which estimates the size of the Internet Economy - in Europe - is $53 billion this year, and will grow to 87 per cent a year to $1.2 trillion in 2004.

Transactions, or ecommerce, which will account for $1.04 trillion of the total pile. Infrastructure spend will account for most of the rest.