Remember, it's the competition, stupid
Date: 12/04/2001
Mark the first anniversary of the tech wreck by revealing brainwaves that were dumpers.
Dancing Dinosaurs by Paul Hamm
Inspired by the sublime American Web sites yourcoffin.com, hampsterdance.com and zoodoo.com (which supplies elephant excrement), I hoped to mark the first anniversary of the tech wreck with a competition.
Contestants simply have to send in their dumbest Internet ideas and most absurd business models. Anyone can apply.The contest is open to mums and dads, school children and grandpas. The exciting prize is yet to be announced.
If you don't want your name in, simply tell me (if you win, I'll ensure you receive your prize in great secrecy, at the public lavatory of your choice etc). Or send in other people's most embarrassing ideas/quotes/Web moments. Winners will be published in a forthcoming column.
To get brains ticking and gums foaming, let us take a quick bicycle ride down memory lane.
The magazine eCompany Now offers a happy hunting ground for ideas that may inspire Australian contestants. Its April 10 issue lists the 101 dumbest moments in [American] ebusiness history.
Consider Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA). Last November IUMA awarded $5,000 to 10 parents who had entered their unnamed babies in the "Name Your Baby IUMA" contest. One shudders to think what horrors await all these little Iumas; I suppose their only hope is a rash of Iuma self-help groups bound to proliferate in 40 years.
There are worse tortures than being called Iuma. You might have named a company "Accompany". The software vendor, launched in 1998, had to change its name to MobShop after baffling potential clients. A typical cold call would run, "Hi, I'm calling from Accompany". "Which company?" "Accompany, dammit!" And so on.
Melanie Griffith had a clearer self-image when she launched MelanieGriffith.com: "I don't care if people think I'm a dumb blond or stupid or an over-age actress or over the hill. I don't care because I'm gonna have a very successful Internet company, and I'm gonna have $100 million in the bank and I don't really give a shit what anybody thinks!"
Troubled e-tailer buy.com was less gung-ho. Its brochure humbly explained its curious business plan: "We sell a substantial portion of our products at very low prices. As a result, we have extremely low and sometimes negative gross margins on our product sales." It lost wagon loads of money.
That's nothing compared with Pixelon which, reports eCompany Now, spent $US16 million - 80 per cent of its latest funding round - on a Las Vegas gang nosh featuring Tony Bennet and the Dixie Chicks, before it emerged that the firm's CEO was a fugitive conman.
The most shocking example of investor credulity, reports eCompany Now, was Theglobe.com, whose share price rocketed from $US9 to $US97 on its first day of trading, capitalising the company at $US1 billion - 370 times the revenue it received in its brief, nine-month existence.
As a result, Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman, founders of Theglobe.com, told Vanity Fair, modestly: "Todd and I are good material to be shown around. The downside is you get stalkers, proposals, love letters."
Few ideas were as brilliantly misconceived as AllAdvantage. It promised to pay Web surfers to surf, @53c an hour, if they agreed to suffer relentless exposure to banner advertising. It was deluged by millions of viewers. Within three months it owed $US40 million to its "members" - many of who were uninterested in ads. They were too poor.
But some were forced to eat their words - literally. Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, predicted in a 1995 column that the Internet "will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse". In front of a 1997 conference of Web engineers, he blended his column with water and drank the pulp.
The swan song award goes to Utek, a business development firm. Its prospectus warned: "Our management has limited experience operating a business, has had no experience in managing and operating a business development company, and has little or no experience in corporate finance and corporate mergers."
Utek's veiled warning was lost on the digerati who hoped to monetise eyeballs for a piece of mind share. The genius of the English language is that it survived the tech wreck, almost intact.
My own dumbest idea? To be announced, with the winners. Send ideas to: paulham@businessgene.com
Paul Ham is publisher of the e-business Web site, www.businessgene.com
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