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To: CanynGirl who wrote (2654)	7/5/1998 4:25:00 PM
From: Sea Otter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10081

A few things. First, I liked your point about branding. Yes, branding is king. For instance, I have a friend who bought Yahoo way back. He's a technical geek like me, so he analyzed and bought due to technical merits. Then he sold - about 120 points ago. You see, he bought and sold on purely technical considerations and missed the fact that Yahoo was creating a killer brand. Yahoo has soared for a number of reasons, but this branding is the key factor. (Now my friend walks around banging his head against every available wall, bemoaning the lost million dollars that "could have been"). So Portico needs to become a strong brand too. I don't know the GMGC marketing VP. Does she have the right stuff? Anyone ever meet her and form an appraisal? Well, a lot of valuation rides on that question. I know it sounds like hype, but I do seriously believe we have the chance to be another Yahoo type of play if all the pieces come together. On the technical front ... What search engine is gmgc using? My suspicion is that they use their own. This is not as daunting as it appears. It's easy to buy an indexer and crawler nowadays from a number of vendors. Throw in maybe 50k of hardware and you have an internet search service. This is what gmgc is doing, I speculate. Not only does this have the advantage of cheapness, it allows them to easily tune the search system to the needs of Portico. Btw, agents are not search. You would never use the agent technology to replicate a search engine. Instead, agents are integral to the next generation of internet commerice and multicast groupware applications. This is why Microsoft invested (again, my speculation). Sea Otter