See Inktomi bit at the bottom of this piece just out from TheStreet.com.
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Venture Downtown Showcases Silicon Alley
Hopefuls
By George Mannes
Staff Reporter
5/10/99 12:36 PM ET
If you're looking for a preview of the next group of Internet IPOs from
New York's Silicon Alley, a good place to start is the Hilton New York &
Towers in midtown Manhattan tomorrow morning.
That's the location of the third Venture Downtown, an almost annual
one-day event where 26 privately held companies will make
presentations to an audience made up of investors and venture
capitalists. (Venture Downtown was held in 1996 and 1997 but not last
year.)
In the previous two conferences (which were actually held in downtown
Manhattan), investors got early looks at now-public companies such as
iVillage (IVIL:Nasdaq), MiningCo.com (MINE:Nasdaq), Multex.com
(MLTX:Nasdaq) and EarthWeb (EWBX:Nasdaq). Among the presenting
class were Medscape and Juno Online Services, both of which have
filed to go public this year, as well as firms that were later acquired, like
Yoyodyne Entertainment, snapped up by Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq) last
year.
At this year's event, one company is already slated to go public.
BigStar Entertainment, an online retailer of videos and DVDs, filed IPO
documents Friday. CEO David Friedensohn says he'll be presenting
anyway. Other companies to look for include Flooz.com, an online gift
certificate clearing house headed by iVillage co-founder Robert
Levitan; Nerve.com, a Web site devoted to "literate smut"; and Virtual
Growth, an accounting services company that works with its clients over
the Internet.
Late registration for Venture Downtown costs $650. Be warned, though,
that not every money-seeking company will be a success. Netcast
Communications, a 1997 presenter, specialized in broadcasting audio
programs over the Net. That business worked out well for
broadcast.com (BCST:Nasdaq), which is being acquired by Yahoo!.
But no such success story for Netcast, which ceased operations only a
few months after it ventured downtown.
Clean Slate
To get an idea of the little things that Web sites can do to boost their
revenues, take a look at Microsoft's (MSFT:Nasdaq) online magazine
Slate, scheduled to launch a redesigned version of its site today.
Slate, which dropped its subscription fee in February for full access to
current stories on the site, has instituted several changes that it hopes
will beef up its ad revenue and maybe even make for happier readers.
(Slate still charges for archived stories and other special features.)
Previously, each page ran one banner ad at the top; now, there are two
ads for each page you load up -- one at the top and the other in the
right-hand column -- doubling the ad inventory.
Furthermore, Slate has made it easier for readers to navigate the site.
Previously, the only way to move between stories was to backtrack to the
table of contents and then move to the next story from there. Now each
page has more story links at the top of the page and on the left-hand
column. The idea is to make the site stickier, says publisher Scott
Moore, using the Internet industry jargon for creating a site that
encourages visitors to hang around. "If they click around and read more
articles, oh, by the way, that gives us more ads to sell," he says.
The biggest driver of Slate's traffic, of course, was the decision in
February to open up most of the site. The online magazine's unique
visitors increased from 239,000 in January to 411,000 in February and
697,000 in March, according to Media Metrix. But other smaller
changes are also having a big effect. When the MSN.com Web site,
Microsoft's portal site, started placing a regular headline link last week
to Slate on its home page, Slate's daily viewership jumped an
additional 20,000, Moore says.
There are no plans for Microsoft to spin off Slate as a separate publicly
held company, Moore says, as some companies have or contemplated
doing with their own online subsidiaries.
New Deja News
More makeovers. The Deja.com Web site is scheduled to debut this
morning as the reincarnation of Deja News.
Created in 1995, Deja News has been the place to search and read
through postings on Internet news groups -- discussion areas like
alt.tv.x-files or misc.activism.progressive. Well, that's the old Deja News,
says CEO Tom Phillips, formerly president of Disney's (DIS:NYSE)
ESPN Internet Ventures and ABC News Internet Ventures.
The new Deja.com is "the word-of-mouth network," says Phillips, who
came aboard in December. "It's what do you want to know about stuff."
What that means is that Deja.com is creating 400 different categories at
its launch for people to share their opinions on, such as, for example,
what's the best Japanese car? Or who's the best movie actor around?
Readers can rate individual entries in each category -- ranking, say, the
Honda Accord's comfort and reliability on a five-point scale -- add a
comment or just surf through other people's opinions.
Sounds nice, but is it a business? Yes, says Phillips, who hopes to have
thousands of categories by the end of the year. Each item, or entry, he
explains, is an advertising opportunity. If someone is checking out other
people's opinions of a car, for example, that Web page is a perfect
place for a car dealer to place an ad.
"The natural partners in all of this stuff are the retailers," Phillips says.
"Retailers love what we're doing."
Already Phillips has signed a deal with Inktomi (INKT:Nasdaq) that links
specific products on the Deja.com site to Inktomi's new shopping
engine, which people can use to find online stores carrying that
particular item. Phillips also has plans to link from products on the site
to online auction sites elsewhere. "They're very interested," he says.
"We just haven't done it yet." |
