DIGITAL L.A. : TALES OF AN INTERNET ENTREPRENEUR FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

Byline: David Bloom 

For a quick and enjoyable read about life as an Internet entrepreneur, check out Michael Wolff's ``Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet.''

The term burn rate refers to how fast a company is ``burning'' its capital. On the Internet, where most companies seem better at spending money than making it, burn rate determines how long your company has to live. To Wolff's mind, the term also implies that, sooner or later, everyone gets burned on the Internet.

Wolff, a former journalist, got into the Internet entrepreneur business almost by accident. His small publishing company created popular books such as ``NetGuide'' and NetBooks, then branched into related online products.

Those products made his company an attractive partner for the Internet's major players, who at the time were hungering for content to draw customers. By the time Wolff's particular dance with the big dogs was over, he had made a little money, spent a lot, lost his company and gained a great deal of wisdom about Internet business.

``The Internet would defeat everybody - except the very, very quickest to alight and then be gone,'' Wolff writes. ``It was a speeded-up version of culture itself, a series of fads and trends mixing with social and historical and economic forces and technological advances and roiled by constant upheaval and sudden reversals. Maybe.''

For a taste of Wolff's brisk style, check out the excerpt in the latest issue of Wired magazine, which describes a failed merger deal almost chilling in the cold-blooded power plays of the investment bankers involved.

But the rest of the book is worth a read, too, with some interesting perspectives on America Online as chat-porn megasite and Microsoft as clueless 800-pound gorilla. And not only does www.burnrate.com include more information about the 268-page book and related links, it also includes the book's index.

``Burn Rate'' is published by one of those stuffy old-media companies, Simon & Schuster, and costs $25.

Getting on the Bus

Being a computer user often means swimming in an alphabet soup of acronyms, but here's one PC and Mac lovers alike probably will get to know well soon: USB.

It stands for Universal Serial Bus, and is a fairly new technology that replaces the various parallel, serial, SCSI, ADB and other ports that connect Macs and PCs with everything from keyboards to modems to hard drives. Though USB has been around for more than a year, it's not been widely used in existing computers.

Expect that to change this summer. The soon-to-be-released Windows 98 will include USB as a native part of its code, unlike in Windows 95, which should dramatically improve the notoriously balky software problems that have bedeviled the bus.

And Apple Computer's nifty new iMac, to be released in August, will be the first Macintosh to use the more flexible USB interface on that platform, further expanding the market.

The next step will be for peripheral makers to finish converting their products to the new connection. Companies have been reluctant to do so, given the reliability problems and smaller markets, but this summer's changes could push USB-based products into wider availability.

And with a connection that works on both PCs and Macs, without the need for adapters or other gimmicks, everyone should benefit from cheaper prices. Hurrah for that.

`Unreal' experience

The buzz is big over ``Unreal,'' the new computer shoot-'em-up from Epic Megagames and GT Interactive that just came out to huzzahs all around the videogaming biz.

But get this: To really appreciate the amazing effects and look of the game, you need not one, but two 3-D graphics cards in your computer, said Bill Paris, a writer with Next Generation and Play Station magazines.

``I don't know how you make the cards work together, but if you saw it, it'd be worth it,'' Paris raved. ``You'd want to go out and get another card, just to get the full effect.''

The game's arrival at Imagine Publishing, whose several computer publications include both that employ Paris, has virtually blotted out interest in any other games among the many hard-core players there, Paris said.

Beanie Ball

It had to happen, given the nationwide fervor inspired by Beanie Babies. Now there's a ``complete unauthorized guide on CD-ROM'' called the ``Ultimate Collector for Beanie Babies.'' Blame Palladium Interactive for this one.

The disk includes just about every smidgen of information a collector of the little beanbag animals could want, including variations on the toys' tags, the poem accompanying each type of toy, their release and retirement dates, item number and value (one 1995 horse Beanie is valued at $4,000, it says), as well as pictures of the pets.

The database will calculate such things as the value of a collection, and allow you to track purchases, trades and sales as you enter your acquisitions into the program.

It also gives you access to a special World Wide Web site that regularly updates the database's figures. For more information, contact www.palladium.net, which is Palladium's Web site.

Personally, the disk provides WAY more beanie than this baby can handle. But then again, I'm not the one buying five Happy Meals at McDonald's to score more Teenie Beanies. There's no explaining the heart of the collector.

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Photo: no caption (Book cover - BURN RATE)