Miss Boo is a sassy cartoon shopping robot dreamed up by two 28-year-old Swedish entrepreneurs to guide customers through their global Web sportswear store. Launching in August, boo.com has financial backing from a Who's Who of European fashion, from the Benetton family to Bernard Arnault, whose French company owns Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior.

With its swirling 3-D shoes, virtual dressing rooms and animated models wearing click-and-sizzles, the site could define a whole new generation of high-end retailing on the Internet. But if it fizzles, boo.com could send investors scurrying back to off-line retailing and give greater impetus for e-tailers to focus on price and no-frills products.

Either way, boo.com is an experiment worth watchingbecause it cuts to the core of retailing's struggle to reinvent itself online.

``What's different about boo.com is that we are bringing lots of the style and fashion back into electronic commerce,'' said Ernst Malmsten, the company's chief executive and co-founder. ``We are also offering a global selection and many things that are very hard to find in traditional stores.''

Malmsten and his partner, former model Kajsa Leander, persuaded about two dozen manufacturers to let boo.com sell everything in their sportswear lines. Customers will be able to find cult-chic streetwear from Cosmic Girl, cool jackets from the North Face, street-hip active-wear from Puma. To encourage shoppers to take a chance on clothes they can't try on, the site will accept returns at no charge and include return shipping labels with each package. Shipping is free in the US, with delivery guaranteed within five days.

Boo.com's founders believe electronic commerce is ready to move beyond the first-generation of price discounts.Boo.com wants to use the cost savings from the Internet's efficient distribution system, not to lower prices, but to build interactive tools that mimic the touchy-feely experiences and glitzy merchandising that have been so essential to real-world shopping.

Privacy concerns

The US House Rules Committee has finally agreed on the language that would permit banks and other financial institutions to freely share names, account balances and other information with affiliated businesses.

It was the culmination of weeks of intense skirmishing over the role that privacy concerns should play in legislation that would dramatically expand the ability of banks, securities firms and insurance companies to merge with one another -- and to share customer transaction records and other sensitive information, according to a report published in The Washington Post.

Lawmakers and medical groups around the nation are also concerned about how the legislation would affect the use of medical records by financialservices firms.

The bill would revamp the balkanised financial services system established during the Depression, a system that now mandates the separation of commercial banks, securities firms and insurance companies.

Perhaps the only thing that legislators, advocates and others agree on is that the debate over financial services is just a precursor of things to come on Capitol Hill, as Congress wrestles with medical privacy, electronic commerce and other related matters in coming months and years.

``Privacy issues-because of electronic commerce, because of the vastness of electronic information -- are going to be central to public policy debates from now on,'' said John Byrne, senior counsel for the American Bankers Association.

``There's this vague unease and annoyance and anger, and a readiness to embrace this as an issue,'' said Kathleen Collins, a banking privacy specialist with the law firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

Earlier, the Commerce department allowed individuals to fight againstinvasion of privacy. But financial services lobbyists have staged a focussed campaign now to convince Democrats and Republicans with industry ties to do a turnabout and limit what consumers would be allowed to do. They warned such curbs would hinder the ability to offer consumers new services and products.

Combining companies under one roof would ease the way to use computers, networks and huge reservoirs of financial and insurance information to track and profile customer activity, generally for marketing purposes, but also to detect fraud.

Music beats sex

They came to San Diego's MP3 computer music summit with their music, their dreams, but most of all their deals, reports The Washington Post. The artists of digital music are making room for sharp-eyed entrepreneurs, who are trying to wrest some of the $38 billion worldwide market for recorded music from traditional labels.

The summit, held at the University of California at San Diego this month, was as much about money as anythingelse. Web surfers have long known there's a trove of songs on the Web. MP3, a basic format for music on the Web, has surpassed ``sex'' as the most sought-after term in Internet search engines. Last year came the first drop in record sales to the 14-to-24 age group, says the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group attributes the drop to music on the Web.

At past Web music gatherings, musicians discussed their latest uploaded song or a Webcast concert. A New York Internet Music Expo in February featured back-to-back bands. But in San Diego, much of the hair was shorn and slicked back with mousse.

Brand is joining hands with bands in the world of Web music. Get young fans to flock to talented bands on the Web, the idea goes, and they will buy not only recordings, but concert tickets and high-margin merchandise like T-shirts bearing the band's logo.

Twenty somethings Eric Garrison and Dykki Settle of Chapel Hill, N C, could easily be mistaken for the San Diego students intermingling withthe conferees. But in the last year, they have merged and partnered with a dozen Web-based retailers, crating a business called www.catalogue.com. They came to San Diego to learn how they might add downloadable files to their offerings on the Web. Asked when the downloadables might be added, they answered in typical short-product-cycle style, ``in days or weeks''.