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Technology Stocks : PCW - Pacific Century CyberWorks Limited -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (1074)	4/12/2001 1:58:31 PM
From: ms.smartest.person	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2248

Sniff-Company DigiScents Is a Scratch By Ronna Abramson Apr 11 2001 06:10 PM PDT The 2-year-old developer of scents delivered via the Net is closing its headquarters and laying off all 70 employees. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The smell of the market has turned sour for DigiScents, a small startup that has been toiling at delivering odors over the Internet for nearly two years. DigiScents said Wednesday that it is shutting down its Oakland, Calif., headquarters and an R&D facility in Israel. All of its 70 employees will be laid off. The company made a splash with its iSmell scent box in November 1999, which was featured on the cover of Wired magazine. At that time, DigiScents conjured up images of developers adding the scent of a dank and musty dungeon to their videogames, fragrance manufacturers adding perfume scents to Web sites peddling perfumes, or consumers firing off nasty e-mail messages that reeked like a filthy outhouse. But in this more discerning market, DigiScents could not find more venture capital funding to move beyond developing prototypes. The company has received $20 million from angel investors as well as Hong Kong-listed Pacific Century CyberWorks, which planned to introduce DigiScents' digital scent technology to the Asia-Pacific market. With its own problems, including a plummeting stock now trading at less than $4 on the New York Stock Exchange, Pacific Century CyberWorks could not pony up more funding, according to CEO and co-founder Joel Bellenson. "The fact that we are such a novel technology and application has always made it difficult for us because we didn't fit very neatly in any of the existing categories for venture investors or traditional investors," says Bellenson, who is still looking for partners to license the company's technology. "Because of that, we've always been much more successful [at acquiring] strategic partners in industry." That might be true, but was adding scent to digital media just a silly idea? Even during the heady days when DigiScents debuted, the idea had its skeptics. Analysts at that time called scent more of a novelty than anything else - and the least important of the five senses in the scheme of game development, which was seen as the technology's most lucrative potential application. Some recalled the demise of its 1950s movie predecessor, the Smell-O-Vision. But Bellenson and fellow co-founder and President Dexter Smith stand by scent, pointing to the considerable interest they say their prototype attracted in various industries. Smith says DigiScents distributed nearly 5,000 software-developer kits in the gaming industry, complete with code snippets and Java objects that developers could insert into gaming code. DigiScents also developed alliances with such companies as Procter & Gamble and RealNetworks. Trouble is, that code could be activated only if consumers had an iSmell personal scent synthesizer connected to their computer or game console. The next step for DigiScents was to move from research and development into manufacturing the iSmell device, which connects via a USB connection. It contains cartridges with essential oils and a fan to release the scent from those oils, as ordered from the computer code. Smith and Bellenson - who also co-founded bioinformatics software developer DoubleTwist, formerly Pangea Systems - were turned on to scent while vacationing in Florida, surrounded by a menu of aromas including suntan lotion, the ocean and tropical drinks. Little did they know then that they eventually would be calling a 2 p.m. meeting Wednesday to tell employees that there was not even a whiff of hope left for the venture. thestandard.com