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No longer a tool of science and academia, the net is now a key part of the world's commercial and financial infrastructure -- and it's even created a raft of new businesses and models that were previously unimagined.

At one end of the spectrum of "cyber-entrepreneurs" we have the pond-scum that waste everyone's time and resources by trying to flog fake Viagra, porn, shaky stocks and shonkey pyramid schemes. At the other we have enterprises like eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Google and a growing number of others who really are providing valuable services and making money in the process.

The key thing about these success stories is that both the companies and the customers get a good deal.

But where to from here?

Can there be any new net-based business models for entrepreneurs to exploit?

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

Well Here's one that certainly seems focused on the "good deal" concept and is even locally based.

I've been watching this site for a couple of days now and they seem to have had some pretty impressive deals on offer -- which is certainly good news for customers.

They make it very clear that this isn't a regular retail store so you're not going to be getting the hand-holding and other benefits that come from shopping at Harvey Normans and the like. However, if you just want to pay bottom dollar for computer products, they appear to fill a niche.

I guess they're buying product at sufficiently low prices to allow a reasonable margin -- but if you look at just how low the overheads of such an operation might be, that margin need not be too much in order to turn a tidy profit.

My only concern was the link to this site, which is a locally-based emailing service.

Of course my first thought was "spam!" - so I contacted CustomMail to get some indication of just what their attitudes are.

I was told that they're definitely not in the spam business and that their customers are all grilled to ensure that they understand this.

Having heard a million "we're not spammers, we're simply marketers" type pitches before, I made some suggestions as to how they could avoid falling foul of some unscrupulous "customer" whose mailing list might have actually been less than clean.

One of those suggestions was to validate all new mailing lists and list entries by sending an email that required those people to actively opt-in before they received any other messages. If they failed to reply in the affirmative, that name would be automatically removed from the customer's list and they'd never see any of those "marketing messages".

In many ways it's a shame that spammers have really stuffed up the genuine email marketing industry to the extent that they have. I have given my permission to a number of companies (that I regularly buy from) to send me emails advising of special deals or whatever. The information in those emails is actually valuable to me (whereas pitches for penis-enhancing products are not) so I get annoyed when they occasionally get classified as spam by spam filters.

If you are in any doubt about providing an email address to FirstIn.co.nz then just do the usual thing and provide something other than your primary address -- at least until your confident that you're not going to be receiving unwanted "marketing messages" as a result.

Have you spotted any interesting new net-based business models or services recently that seem to offer customers a damned fine deal?

If so, tell everyone (but this is not an invitation to pitch your supplies of fake Viagra -- you have been warned!).

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