@LARGE
By Scott Kirsner
Globe contributor, 2/21/2000PC law
Boxes from Dell Computer line the hallways and cluster in the corners of conference rooms at MyCounsel.com. It's the telltale sign of a young company in rapid-growth mode. The computers and monitors in the boxes are assigned to employees who have yet to start work - or even be hired.
The idea for MyCounsel.com came to Stan Soper and Nathan Gilliland last winter, as they were riding a ski lift in Park City, Utah.
"There were financial sites that empowered consumers, and medical sites like DrKoop.com and WebMD that empowered consumers," says Gilliland, who was then working with Soper at a Utah company. Gilliland was devising the Web strategy, and Soper was the general counsel. "We felt there was a need for a site that would facilitate the relationship between consumers and attorneys."
Gilliland and Soper, a Yale Law grad, began writing a business plan, quit their jobs, and closed on $4 million in venture funding from Cambridge's NetVentures last September. Since then, they've brought on Ken Carson, formerly a partner at Sugarman, Rogers, Barshak & Cohen and the founder of Netlitigation.
com, to build MyCounsel's attorney network; and David Tarrant, former chief executive of ServiceSoft, as CEO.
MyCounsel aims to explain the complexities of the law in plain English, help consumers connect with the right attorney, and even offer "product-ized" legal services, like wills. The site launches this spring. Next week, MyCounsel moves to a former carpet warehouse near North Station to accommodate even more growth. And Dell boxes.
Its day has come
AnyDay.com cofounders Stephen Watts and Dennis Kelly insist that being acquired is not in their plans.
"We think there's an opportunity to become the world's calendar," Kelly says. "We don't want to be just a feature on someone else's site."
But Web-based calendars are a hot commodity. Last month, a little-known Silicon Valley firm called Quaartz bought Day-Timer Digital. Last year, America Online bought When.com and Microsoft bought Jump Networks, and in 1998, Ya-
hoo purchased WebCal and Amazon.com snapped up Cambridge's PlanetAll for about $90 million in stock.
What's curious, though, is that once the calendars are absorbed into their new parents, they seem to lose steam. Amazon has scarcely promoted PlanetAll, and Microsoft right now is turning away potential new users of Jump.
That leaves AnyDay in an enviable position. Next week, it will formally announce membership numbers for the first time, and sources say the number will be just north of 2 million. (Visto, a comparable service that is partially funded by CMGI, announced a million members in November.)
AnyDay.com is also on the verge of a big partnership with the highly trafficked Waltham portal site run by that energetic black lab, though I can't say more.
There are also a number of cool new features on the way, say Watts and Kelly. Before long, AnyDay.com will be able to notify you via a text message to your cell phone or Palm VII when your spouse makes a change to your calendar.
The company will offer tools to Web publishers that publish event information on their sites, so that users can easily add happenings into their AnyDay.com calendars. And for those whose calendars are barren, AnyDay.com will offer suggestions of things to do, based on your interests.
Behind Wheelhouse
Frank Ingari, the former chairman and chief executive of Shiva Corp., launches his newest venture, Wheelhouse Corp., Sunday at the Direct Marketing Association's net.Marketing conference in Seattle.
Wheelhouse has impressive backers - Charles River Ventures; Integral Capital Partners; Kleiner, Perkins; George Bell, CEO of Excite@Home - and the firm has been hiring like crazy. Incorporated last October, Wheelhouse already has a corps of 60 employees in Burlington, and he's planning for offices in New York and Silicon Valley by year's end.
With Wheelhouse, Ingari is trying to create a new niche in the massive Internet professional services market. (IDC, a Framingham research group, says companies will spend $78 billion on Internet services, like building or revamping a Web site, by 2003.)
Wheelhouse will be an Internet marketing integrator, meaning that the company will tie together the various systems that run a company's Web site in a way that will help the company more effectively communicate with - and market to - its customers.
If you're shopping for a new car on the Honda site, for example, and Honda has a database that lists you as a current owner, shouldn't the carmaker know that and present you with a special offer to encourage you to buy another Honda, instead of switching to a Toyota?
"The goal," Ingari explains, "is to help companies move their site visitors into a profitable, long-term, mutually satisfying relationship."
Before forming Wheelhouse, Ingari, who serves as chairman of the Massachusetts Telecom Council, had been consulting for a handful of tech firms. He worked partly for equity, which has proved wise. Three of his clients - Allaire, MicroStrategy, and MCK - have already gone public, and others are on that path.
The big show
The Harvard Business School Cyberposium is, hands down, the best Internet conference held in Boston each year. So it's not surprising to learn from Kate Adler, the Cyberposium's director of marketing and a second-year MBA student, that the event sold out - 1,000 tickets at $50 a pop - in just two days.
The Cyberposium takes place Friday through Sunday on the HBS campus, and it features keynotes from Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, CMGI's David Wetherell, and Andreas Schmidt, the chief exec of AOL Europe. The panels aren't bad, either. They'll cover topics like broadband access, branding, business-to-business e-commerce, and open-source software. My favorite title: "Internet Valuations: Justifiable or Tulipmania?"
A group of about 120 HBS students assembles the conference, now in its seventh year, and this weekend they expect to host attendees from 23 other business schools. Unlucky non-MBA student, non-ticket holders can tune in - and even submit questions for speakers - on the conference site: www.cyberposium.com.
Scott Kirsner is a Boston writer and a contributing editor at Wired, Fast Company, and Boston Magazine.