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Everyone's getting rich--except you! Or at least that's how it sometimes seems in the Internet Age. Half-formed ideas suddenly translate into oversized fortunes for kids who should still be in school. The phenomenon tore through the U.S., driving stock markets to dizzying valuations and coining, seemingly overnight, tens of thousands of fresh-faced millionaires. Now it's Asia's turn.
That doesn't mean we've entered an era of easy money. As we show in this week's cover package--conceived, reported and written by our Singapore-based business and technology correspondent Eric Ellis--successful Net ventures become that way through a combination of genius, risk-taking and, yes, luck. For every dazzling IPO, there are hundreds of proposals lining dustbins in the offices of venture-capital firms.But the ones that make it tend to make it big, with technologies that can change the way we live, work and play. So to help TIME's readers better comprehend the Internet phenomenon that's now steering Asian stock markets and creating the New New Rich, Ellis set out to profile the various categories of players who need to come together to make a Net venture work. The line-up includes characters that seem to have walked out of a pulp novel: the Angel, the Incubator, the Sell Out. But while the valuations these players create may seem fanciful, their potential effect on us all--as investors or just consumers--is very real.

Ellis is well placed to evaluate Asia's chance of developing a world-class information-technology industry. Before joining Time last year, he worked for an Australian daily, covering first Asia and then, from 1996-99, Silicon Valley. When he first set foot in California, he realized he had entered a bizarre new world. At the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, my room-service salad was delivered by a Chinese-Vietnamese waiter. After we exchanged pleasantries in Cantonese, he asked about my laptop, whether it had a Pentium inside. He said he was writing code for Intel. I realized that in Los Angeles, waiters want to be stars. In Silicon Valley, they want to be Andy Grove, only richer.

When Ellis returned to Asia last year, the region seemed quaintly out of the Internet loop. But it's gaining fast: experts expect as many as 200 Net-related IPOs in the region this year. The enthusiasm for the Net is more infectious and corporate-mainstream in Asia than it was in the U.S., says Ellis, because it's not about innovation, but money. That's right, everyone's making it--except, of course, you.