Here's a list of pre-ipo and post-ipo innovative sites I wrote up today for my website. Enjoy!
November 22nd, 1999 - Monday
Innovative Sites
Innovation is the key to success on the internet. The following is a list of sites I put together from days past and present that have changed the net landscape. Please comment and email to editor@tigerinvestor.com about sites I've missed.
Site: Blue Mountain Arts
URL: bluemountain.com
Description: Bluemountain.com was started in 1996 by Blue Mountain Arts Publishing Company, a maker of specialty greeting cards founded by Steve and Susan Schutz. It became the category leader in free electronic greeting cards with 9.7 million unique users and ranks number 21 in traffic among all internet sites. Recently acquired by Excite@Home for approximately $1 billion.
Innovation: Bluemountain.com was the ?first-mover? in the free electronic greeting card space and took advantage of the ?viral effect? as people used their service and spread it to their peers.
Site: Silicon Investor
URL: siliconinvestor.com
Description: The leading online investing community started in 1995 with over 5 million monthly users and over 11 million posted messages. Offers portfolio tracking, in-depth personalization, free email, and investing news & content. Acquired by Go2Net in June of 1998 for $33 million.
Innovation: The first online investing community to reach a critical mass in membership and high quality message boards. As it gained in popularity it became more and more valuable. Silicon Investor was a pioneer of such features as ?SubjectMarks? and ?PeopleMarks?, where members can easily
track messages written by other Silicon Investor members or subjects they found useful.
Sites: Webshots.com
URL: webshots.com
Description: Photo portal specializing in providing high quality images for screen savers and desktop wall-paper with 1.5 million users. The site's software has become the 3rd most popular downloaded net application behind WinAmp and ICQ.
Site: Evite.com
URL: evite.com
Short-take: A new startup which offers a new innovative way to manage events online. Invited guests receive an email with an html link where they can see who's invited, who has decided to come, what to bring, answer fun questions, and participate in an online comment community. A very viral ?email all your friends? model.
Site: Deja.com
URL: deja.com
Short-take: Deja.com was the first to offer a friendly web-interface for internet newsgroups. Using this as a foundation, the site expanded itself to become a product rating portal and discussion community.
Site: Della & James
URL: della.com
Short-take: Started as a Viant incubated startup focusing on online management of wedding gift registries. With a recent 20% investment by Amazon.com, the site expanded itself to include an ?all-purpose? gift registry site.
Site: eCircles
URL: ecircles.com
Short-take: Online community that helps member bring together ?circles? of their friends by developing a homepage website with discussion boards, email lists, photo albums, and chat rooms.
Site: FindLaw.com
URL: findlaw.com
Description: The leading web portal for lawyers providing 25,000 human-edited legal related links, free legal resources, guides, & research, Law Crawler search engine, free email, and professional discussion boards. Founded
in 1995 by Timothy Stanley and Stacy Stern as a resource for Northern Californian librarians.
Innovation: Unbelievable listings of legal related sites, high quality free legal information, active professional community discussion boards, and impressive ongoing feature implementation.
Site: VerticalNet
URL: verticalnet.com
Description: The first firm to create highly focused vertical business-to-business marketplace sites. Founded in 1995 with the Waters Online site and has grown to include over 40 specific vertical markets from waste management and insurance to meat and poultry.
Innovation: The first mover in the vertical market business-to-business community space. Offers high quality content/news, online community, and business-to-business commerce & auction capabilities to its members. VerticalNet captures a percentage of any sales done on the site.
Site: WebMD
URL: webmd.com
Short-take: A leading provider of online health information and community. Offering extensive high quality content such as ?self-care? advisor, active message boards for doctors and consumers, and community chat forums. Recently merged with Healtheon and currently serves over 280,000 doctors
and 510,000 consumers.
Site: Web Monkey
URL: webmonkey.com
Description: Started by Wired Magazine, web monkey has become the leading online education site for new web developers offering content, how-to articles, and in-depth step-by-step technical lessons on anything related to web development.
Innovation: Quality of free online education resources and reference material. Perfect for web novices wanting to learn programming or design.
Site: Digital Think
URL: digitalthink.com
Description: New startup providing web-based training solutions for consumers and Fortune 1000 companies. Began with a focus on providing technical programming related courses, but now has expanded to include custom designed integrated training solutions for large companies.
Innovation: The pioneers in web-based training offering intensive high quality technical skills training. Academic credit can be applied for a University of Phoenix degree.
Site: CNET
URL: cnet.com
Description: Leading online media company started in 1995 as the definitive guide to technology products. Has expanded into news, television, investing coverage, and value-added shopping services.
Innovation: Comprehensive product guide with professional & customer reviews, in-depth guides and content, and smart price-bot shopping. Acquired the critical mass as the destination site for technology related products and issues.
Site: Eopinions
URL: eopinions.com
Short-take: New startup founded in April 1999 focusing on providing unbiased online buying advice by using an aggregated database of customer reviews/ratings.
Site: Brandwise
URL: brandwise.com
Short-take: Recent startup funding by Whirl-pool aiming to be the ?CNet? of consumer appliances offering comprehensive product guides/reviews and comparison shopping.
Site: Gomez
URL: gomez.com
Short-take: A respected online e-commerce site rating service known for its ?internet scorecard? tables.
Site: Amazon.com
URL: amazon.com
Description: Started in July 1995 as the first online book retailer and now offers CDs, videos, toys, games, software, consumer electronics, tools, electronic greeting cards, and auctions. Has served over 12 million customers and regarded as the leading innovator in the e-commerce space.
Innovation: One-click shopping, customer book reviews, personalized gift wrapping, artificial intelligence personalized recommendations, Amazon.com Associates affiliate partnership program, and e-commerce stores for the masses (zShops).
Site: eBay
URL: ebay.com
Short-take: The leading person-to-person trading auction community with over 8 million registered users. On a daily basis there are over 250,000 new items and 2 million ongoing auctions. eBay gets a percentage of every successful transaction done on the site.
Site: My Yahoo!
URL: my.yahoo.com
Description: One of the first personalized homepage portals offering an array of services such as news, stock quotes, weather, sports scores, tv listings, bookmarks, address book, email, etc. all on one page.
Innovation: Impressive homepage personalization options from hundreds of content and service providers to the color and size of the fonts.
Site: Yodlee
URL: yodlee.com
Short-take: New startup that lets users consolidate all their personal information across different internet sites on one personalized homepage. For example on one page a user can see his/her Citiback credit card balance, status of recent Amazon.com orders, Charles Schwab investment portfolio, checking account balances, and the latest New York Times article headlines. |
