@LARGE
Nailing down a name

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Staff, 3/13/2000

Digitas, the Back Bay direct marketing and Web development shop that is slated to go public this week, nearly had a domain-name debacle on its hands. The company, formerly known as Bronnercom, and before that Strategic Interactive Group and Bronner Slosberg Humphrey, announced that it was changing its name to the vaguely medical-sounding Digitas last Christmas, but neglected to secure the address Digitas.com beforehand.

Not exactly what you'd expect from a company that helps set Web strategy for clients like Dell Computer, American Express, and Federal Express.

The central problem was that Digitas had trouble tracking down the owner of the Digitas.com domain, Digital Associates of Clearwater, Fla., which was unlisted and apparently defunct.

So Digitas hired a private investigator who, though unsuccessful in tracking down Robert Lazarchik, who had registered the URL for Digital Associates, did locate his mother, who instructed her son to return Digitas's phone calls.

After a short negotiation, Digitas purchased the domain for about $10,000, according to one source at the company. (A Digitas spokesperson declined to comment, citing the mandatory quiet period that precedes a public offering.) Before that, they'd been using the rather clumsy temporary address www.Digitas-Inc.com.

Now, Digitas execs are negotiating with William Fiske of Burlington, Vt., who owns the domain Digitas.net. Fiske is the president of a software engineering company, and as a labor of love a few years ago, he produced a CD-ROM of fine art and literature that he titled Digitas.

''It's pretty ironic that a Web development company would neglect to secure their own domain name,'' says Fiske, who adds that he's ''not really eager to sell it'' - at least for the $5,000 Boston's Digitas has offered.

The Digitas.org domain, incidentally, is still available.

Rewarding idea

Michael Bronner, Digitas's founder and chairman emeritus, is already deep into development with his next company.

It could be called LifetimeRewards.com; it could be called Upromise.com; and it could be called something entirely different - Bronner won't say. But last month, he hired former Open Market vice president of marketing Jeffrey Bussgang as his president and chief operating officer. And the stealthy investment firm General Catalyst is helping get the company off the ground, though a partner there wouldn't say exactly how.

Sources say the new company will enable consumers to accumulate cash rewards for many of their purchases, online or off, and put them toward a child's college education. Bronner's PR rep released this statement from him: ''We are currently laying the groundwork for an Internet company that will address one of the most pressing social issues facing American families today.''

Bronner himself wouldn't be more specific, saying only that ''we're still evolving the idea.'' Launch is set for winter 2000.

High marks for buzz

OpenRatings has been generating some impressive buzz over the past few months. It's only partly because of the firm's clever freebies.

At Harvard Business School's Cyberposium in late February, marketing vice president Kirsten Alexander was doling out plain and peanut M&Ms in a doctored package that read ''the sweet Internet start-up with the chocolate center'' and listed ingredients like ''cofounder Patti Maes'' and ''angel Nicholas Negroponte,'' both well-known personalities from MIT's Media Lab who are involved with the Cambridge company. The free candy yielded 20 resumes and 1 hire, so far.

At PC Forum this week in Scottsdale, Ariz., they'll be handing out bottles of Tabasco plastered with OpenRatings labels that slyly refer to the company's technological ''secret sauce.''

The company, which got started last May, will finally uncap the secret sauce today at PC Forum with its first public demonstration. OpenRatings' technology creates a trust and quality rating for sellers on the Net, initially with a focus on business-to-business transactions. In their demo, Maes and CEO Stan Smith will be using Matte Elsbernd's ''Firm List,'' a compendium of Web design firms.

So if you're in the market for a Web design firm, you can see how clients who have worked with a given firm have rated it on various criteria.

But not every user's ratings of the firms are given the same heft. OpenRatings takes into account the reputation of the rater, the size of his transaction with the firm in question, whether it can be verified, and how recently it took place, for example.

OpenRatings is the only Boston company debuting at Esther Dyson's tech-world soiree, though Akamai Technologies CEO George Conrades will be giving a speech.

Surfing en masse

Lynne Wilson is right: Being in the basement of the Athenaeum Building in Kendall Square is just like being inside a Bertucci's pizza oven. The ceilings are low, arched, and made of brick, and the temperature is a few degrees too warm.

Since October, the basement has been home to iKena, a 25-person company that's launching a nifty group Web surfing application this month. The firm was started by Matt Eichner, who graduated from Harvard Business School last May, and before that was at Broadview, an investment bank. Wilson, iKena's VP of marketing and business development, came from Fidelity Interactive.

iKena's genesis story: Eichner wanted to encourage his parents to start using the Web, but found there was no way to guide them around unless he was physically sitting with them at the computer.

So iKena (pronounced I-kenna) offers a downloadable application that lets groups of people chat and surf together. Any user in the group can go to a Web site within his browser, and the whole group sees that site.

It even accommodates sharing of audio, video, and animations, and the interface is friendly and intuitive - even for parents.

The word iKena is Hawaiian. It means ''view'' or ''impression.'' Eichner explains that all the interesting English domains were taken, so he turned to an online Hawaiian-English dictionary. Just like the founders of that other Cambridge Net start-up, Akamai Technologies.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston writer and a contributing editor at Wired, Fast Company, and Boston Magazine.