Perfectly said, Roger! And I believe this, and I quote, is true of so many of us....
"I don't know about others who once posted on this thread...but for me and my family, Paul Allen's major investment in GNET (with the reasons for that investment so clearly an unequivocally stated and restated by everyone involved) was THE PRIMARY REASON we not only held onto it, bought more, and continued to hold it for way too long. I strongly suspect many GNET shareholders also held onto the stock, many even long after the disastrous "merger" with INSP, still absolutely believing it eventually would play a major roll, as was so often stated by the key executives and analysts involved...as, "A cornerstone of Paul Allen's Wired World" vision...initially through his Charter Communications cable company."
Someone said recently that PA needed a "tax writeoff"...so sold his interest in INSP. Does one invest $415 million, and sell at what.....$21 million....JUST to get a tax writeoff????
Re Digeo....yes, there were ample notices about GNET and Digeo....
and..............PS, Roger.....he would have recognized you anyplace...the puce colored burqa and military hiking boots are a dead giveaway...
**************>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Forbes.com
May 29, 2000
google.com.
Cautious Hunter
RUSSELL HOROWITZ IS HAVING A field day in the aftermath of the Web stock crash. In recent weeks the 34-year-old chairman of Web firm Go2Net has heard half a dozen entrepreneurs ask him for another shot at deals they refused last year.
"The lights have come up and the cockroaches are scrambling," he says.
Horowitz is on the prowl. In 18 months he has made 13 acquisitions or investments, looking for Weblets he can buy on the cheap to add to Go2Net's existing properties--the Go2Net portal, stock chat room Silicon Investor, search engine MetaCrawler and others.
With many Internet stocks down almost 90%, Horowitz looks for bargains in companies whose value has been sliced in half or worse. "Nowadays you're either a buyer or a seller. If you're neither, you're dead."
He aims to acquire six more companies this year and to invest in a dozen others, all in the areas of communications, entertainment and small business. Possible targets could include sites like Myplay, where users can store and share music files; ImaginOn, which lets users create their own interactive fare; CenterSpan, which provides instant voice and data messaging; and perhaps a Web direct marketer such as NetCreations.
With his T shirt and Levi's and shag rug of blonde hair, Horowitz looks like every other "Red ink? What red ink?" dot-commer. But appearances deceive: Horowitz is every inch a value investor. At 14, he was reading Value Line cover to cover while attending the elite Lakeside School in Seattle.
Horowitz is a player to watch. Behind him stands Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who bought a third of Go2Net a year ago for $426 million in cash. That offers Horowitz a link to 140 companies in Allen's portfolio. Go2Net, through its partnership with Digeo Broadband Inc., will be the exclusive portal for the broadband product to be offered to the 6.5 million cable subscribers of Allen's Charter Communications.
Horowitz is the youngest fixture in Allen's inner sanctum. He serves on the board of Digeo, the joint venture of Allen's various telecom and cable properties. Horowitz even attends Allen's "movie night" at his home theater and shoots hoops on Allen's NBA-regulation court. "Paul hits some pretty deep three-pointers," he says.
When he founded Go2Net in 1996, Horowitz vowed to build an Internet network with predictable earnings. He buys sites with dedicated followings and content created by users, making them cheap to run. Running a money-losing business makes him nervous. He delivered $24 million in pro forma earnings on $48 million in sales in the past 12 months.
Until the recent carnage in tech stocks, Horowitz had been criticized for his thrifty ways by institutional investors and Internet executives. Despite being in the black, Go2Net stock is off 49% this year, right along with Nasdaq. "People wanted me to apologize for being profitable. They said my priorities were all wrong," Horowitz says.
By refusing to pay too much for anything, Horowitz usually veers off the beaten path. Two years after Sequoia Capital paid $1 million for a third of Yahoo and CMGI paid $4 million for an 80% stake in Lycos, Horowitz bought MetaCrawler for $100,000, plus a small cut of ad revenue, from a professor at the University of Washington. In August 1998 he bought a 60,000-member free Web host called HyperMart for $4 million in stock, or $67 per head. Six months later Yahoo paid more than $1,000 a head to buy GeoCities, with 3.5 million members.
At first glance, Go2Net is a mish-mash of Web properties, but Horowitz puts them together in strategic ways. HyperMart began as a free Web host; he then turned it into an e-commerce hub for small business. Authorize.Net, a payment authorization service he bought last year, will enable HyperMart's 800,000 customers to sell online. Haggle.com will let users hold auctions.
Unlike Yahoo and AOL, which Horowitz sees as mass media growing increasingly dependent on ad revenue, Go2Net seeks to rely more on licensing deals. Horowitz wants advertising to be only 40% of his total take. It is at 57% today, down from 80% in 1998.
In December he agreed to combine Go2Net's PlaySite gaming technology with Hasbro to create a cobranded site featuring Monopoly and Clue. In February he signed a deal linking Go2Net's Silicon Investor chat rooms to National Discount Brokers, which will grant Go2Net its trading technology. Go2Net and Allen invested $30 million in conjunction with that deal.
With market volatility shutting off new stock offerings, Horowitz should be able to shop for vulnerable companies as long as he remains debt-free and cash-positive. He has no faith in other Weblets such as Webvan or Amazon that lose money and carry huge debts.
"Some of these guys could end up in the fetal position on the floor sucking their thumbs," he warns. For his sake, let's hope sugar daddy Allen stays close enough to be sure Horowitz isn't one of them.
Message 16327008
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On October 1, 1999 Charter Communications Holding Company, Vulcan Ventures, an entity controlled by Mr. Allen, and InfoSpace, Inc. (successor by merger to Go2Net, Inc.) entered into a joint venture to form Digeo Broadband, Inc.
Message 15716658
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Regarding Digeo: INSP filed a DEF 14A Proxy Statement with the SEC on 4/18/2001. The only references to Digeo contained within it are as follows, and the only thing they indicate is a continuation of the status quo from GNET's original arrangement:
On October 1, 1999, Go2Net entered into an agreement with Charter Communications and Vulcan Ventures to form Digeo, Inc. (formerly known as roadband Partners), a joint venture. We acquired Go2Net in October
19
2000. Digeo intends to provide broadband portal services initially to customers of Charter Communications, RCN Corporation and HighSpeed Access Corporation, and potentially to other cable operators. Vulcan Ventures will
own 55.2%, Charter Communications will own 24.9% and Go2Net will own 19.9% of Digeo's capital stock. Vulcan Ventures is a minority stockholder of RCN Corporation and High Speed Access Corporation and a majority stockholder in
Charter Communications. Vulcan Ventures, which held approximately 30% of Go2Net's voting capital stock prior to its merger with us, holds approximately 6.7% of our common stock. In addition, William D. Savoy, one of our directors
and a former director of Go2Net, is President of Vulcan Ventures and a director of Charter Communications.
Message 15709729
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About Go2Net, Inc.
Go2Net (http://www.go2net.com/) is one of the Internet's leading providers of Internet applications and infrastructure technologies for both narrowband and broadband devices. Go2Net licenses its applications and technologies to strategic partners such as Hasbro, National Discount Brokers, Allegiance Telecom and Digeo Broadband, a joint venture among Go2Net, Charter Communications and Vulcan Ventures. The company's HyperMart Network offers small business hosting and e-commerce solutions to more than one million members worldwide, while Go2Net's Authorize.Net payment-processing platform enables more than 80,000 merchants to securely process transactions online. The Go2Net Network features MetaCrawler, Silicon Investor, the HyperMart Network, PlaySite, Dogpile, and 100Hot.
On July 26, 2000, Go2Net signed a definitive agreement to merge with InfoSpace (Nasdaq: INSP), a leading global provider of cross-platform merchant and consumer infrastructure services.
Message 15586891
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Exclusive Reports
From the May 12, 2000 print edition
seattle.bcentral.com
Allen's next firm: Digeo
Pushing for interactive TV
M. Sharon Baker Staff Writer
Paul Allen is building a new company aimed at weaving together several pieces of his Wired World.
Kirkland-based Digeo Broadband Inc. is hiring at least 30 people as it ramps up a plan to create next-generation content for interactive television and computers. In addition to its in-house staff, Digeo is collaborating with other Allen portfolio companies, including Seattle-based Go2Net Inc. and Charter Communications Inc., the nation's fourth-largest cable company.
Officials aren't saying much about Digeo's plans, and declined to be interviewed for this article. But mentions in the Securities and Exchange Commission filings made by Allen's various companies offer a sneak peek at what Digeo is hatching.
It plans to finish testing the services this year, and the first to view it will be customers of Charter and RCN Corp., a provider of bundled phone, cable and Internet services in which Allen recently invested $1.65 billion.
Heading up the Digeo effort is Jim Billmaier, whom Allen tapped from another of his companies, Click2learn.com Inc. of Bellevue. Billmaier, previously chief executive of Click2learn, is credited with turning around the online learning company after he was brought in from Sun Microsystems.
Allen first began pursuing the promise of interactive television back in 1992 with the creation of Starwave Corp.
By marrying computers with television, Allen and others envision a day when everyone can surf the Internet over a television, and watch movies on demand with VCR-like features such pause, rewind and fast forward. At the same time, consumers could access e-mail, shop from a video catalog, and run some software programs, among other things.
In the early '90s, however, cable, computer and telecommunications companies fought over the direction of the nascent industry, significantly delaying its arrival. Meanwhile, the Internet caught fire.
Although Starwave quickly changed its focus to build on the potential of the Internet, Allen didn't give up on his vision of interactive television.
Now he hopes to deliver on interactive television with Digeo Broadband. The company evidently aims to be an early leader in what Jupiter Communications predicts will be a $10 billion market serving some 30 million households by 2004.
Digeo is jointly owned by Allen's Bellevue investment company, Vulcan Ventures, Charter Communications and Go2Net. Allen owns 30.3 percent of publicly traded Go2Net, thanks to a $419 million investment last year.
Billmaier is in the midst of ramping up his operation, listing 30 job openings on the company's Web site, digeo.com. His team will work closely with Go2Net, which is helping to build an interactive destination site.
Go2Net, run by co-founder Russ Horowitz, has created an Internet destination site, offering such services as a search engine, online gaming, investor areas and an online mall for small businesses, among other features.
Go2Net plans to build on that foundation and create a starting page for Charter's cable subscribers, who will be accessing the site through high-speed connections. Such connections will allow Digeo and Go2Net to create a site with rich, interactive features including sound and video.
Safa Rashtchy, a stock analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, ran some preliminary figures and estimates that Go2Net could reap as much as $30 million from the Digeo and Charter partnership due to the increased traffic that the company will be able to sell to advertisers.
"They're not investing cash but resources," he added. "It's a tight partnership, and they are getting reimbursed for their share of the expenses."
Go2Net, which holds a 19.9 percent stake in Digeo, is getting reimbursed by Vulcan Ventures for any work the company does over its budget on the Digeo interactive site for the first four years, according to SEC documents.
Vulcan Ventures is also funding Charter's contributions to the partnership for the first four years. In return, Charter has agreed to use Digeo's services for the first six years. Charter also can't engage in any business outside of cable transmission with the exception of the Digeo joint venture, according to SEC documents.
Charter owns 24.9 percent of Digeo, while Vulcan Ventures owns 55.2 percent. The joint venture partnership is for 25 years.
If Digeo can create a site that's up and running by the end of this year, it has the potential to be seen by 7 million Charter customers. That's how many customers will have access to Charter's digital cable infrastructure by the end of the year.
Just how many elect to pay anywhere from $3.95 to $8.95 a month for access to the Internet and other interactive services remains to be seen.
Message 15586879
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Also found this on Digeo, Sy....before they changed it and left Russell's name off....(they can't take those casche' away from me.....<G>)
google.com.
Chairman
Paul G. Allen
Directors
James A. Billmaier
CEO, DIGEO BROADBAND, INC.
Ed Harris
Analyst, Vulcan Ventures Inc.
Russell C. Horowitz
Chairman & CEO, Go2Net
Jerry Kent
President & CEO, Charter Communications
William D. Savoy
President, Vulcan Northwest Inc.
Message 15586858
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NOTE THE DATE: March 29, 2001!!!!!
classifieds.nwsource.com.
DIGEO BROADBAND, INC. is a joint venture between three of Paul Allen’s affiliated Wired World Companies: Vulcan Ventures, Charter Communications, and Go2Net. DIGEO is building the future of television by providing compelling audio-visual experiences that are delivered over television and/or data networks to TVs and PCs.
Contact Information:
Digeo Broadband, Inc.
8815 122nd Ave NE
Kirkland, WA 98033
Tel: (425) 896-6000
Fax: (425) 896-6062
E-mail: jobs@digeo.com
Web site: www.digeo.com DIGEO BROADBAND, INC. is a joint venture between three of Paul Allen’s affiliated Wired World Companies: Vulcan Ventures, Charter Communications, and Go2Net. DIGEO is building the future of television by providing compelling audio-visual experiences that are delivered over television and/or data networks to TVs and PCs.
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Message 15586800
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This speaks for itself!!!! with references in spades!!
Message 15448006
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