An Asian Netcenter, based in Singapore, will be online before the end of 1998, Netscape Communications Corp CEO Jim Barksdale has told Reuters. Barksdale is touring Asia-Pacific, with stops planned for Australia, China and Japan. In highly-wired Singapore, he preached to the converted on the merits of the net economy. Barksdale also suggested that businesses suffering from Asia’s economic blight needed entrepreneurship and a risk-taking mentality in order to compete in the global market for electronic commerce. Some might say that’s what got them into this mess in the first place. Netcenter is central to the still-unprofitable Netscape’s future plans. Since the company decided to give away its browser and source code, those plans have revolved around the twin businesses of selling enterprise server software and supporting a portal- like infrastructure for electronic commerce.
