@LARGEDead Sites, Dirt Cheap
By Scott KirsnerBargain hunters have been finding great deals on Aeron chairs, Sun servers, and Cisco routers at dot-com bankruptcy auctions for several months now. But one thing that rarely appears in the auction catalog is a defunct Internet company's biggest asset: the Web software they spent millions creating.
The Web Site Recycling Company, launched last month, wants to match orphaned code with good homes. The idea came from Gage Andrews, a managing director at Gordon Brothers, a Boston liquidation specialist, and Paul Twitchell, a co-founder of Web development firm Screen House.
"We saw how easy it was for companies to sell their hardware and their furniture," Twitchell explains, "but when it came to the millions of dollars they spent developing their site, appraisers would mark that as zero."
The Web Site Recycling Company will take code on a contingency basis, host it on its own servers, and try to find a buyer. "The process isn't quick," Andrews says. "We anticipate that the selling timeframe will be measured in months, rather than in weeks."
Right now, Webreco.com lists software from three dot-coms, including Clippen.com, a Web page clipping service that's now out of business, and OutletZoo, a Filene's Basement-style discount site that's still slogging along. (Andrews and Twitchell say that licensing software can be a useful source of revenue for cash-strapped dot-coms.)
The biggest barrier to the Web Site Recycling Company will be buyers' wariness to invest in software -- no matter how cheap -- without technical support behind it. Buyers will also worry that it could prove more expensive to adapt secondhand software than it is to write new software from scratch.
The three-week-old company has yet to ring up any sales, but Andrews says, "we have had the first nibble. And we're starting to get people calling us, asking, `You guys can really sell Web sites?' Well, we think so." Andrews says the company has a dozen deals to sell sites under negotiation.
Pakistani Plans
The Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs of North America (OPEN) kicks off its first-ever business plan competition today.
Are people still actually entering business plan competitions?
Perhaps the $50,000 in prize money -- equal to MIT's venerable $50K competition ? will attract contestants, who must have at least one person of Pakistani heritage on their team. Unlike MIT's contest, though, all the prize money for this one will go to a single winner.
OPEN board member Bilal Said, the CEO of Cybersoft N.A., says he's not worried about a dearth of viable plans, given today's slower rate of company formation. "A true entrepreneur has a passion to build a company whether the market is at its high or its low," Said asserts. "Our intention as an organization is to encourage Pakistani-American entrepreneurs to be more successful, and we felt a business plan competition was a way to get that done." The deadline for business plan overviews is July 31st. More information at www.open-us.org.
Diminishing the Divide
The United Nations Association of Greater Boston presents a one-day conference next Thursday called "Reaching Across the Digital Divide: Opportunities and Challenges in Emerging Markets for IT Companies."
Speakers will include Rick Burnes of Charles River Ventures; Dick Sabot of eZiba; Jose Maria Figueres-Olsen, the former president of Costa Rica; John Cullinane of the Cullinane Group; John Gage, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems; and Carlos Braga of the World Bank.
I attended a similar conference last October in Seattle, Digital Dividends, which featured some of the same speakers, including Gage and Figueres-Olsen. The high point of that event, after several days of hand-wringing and ambitious proposals about bringing PCs and cell phones to the developing world, was a prickly address from Bill Gates, who observed that literacy, shelter, food, and disease-prevention were more pressing concerns for most of the world's poor ?more pressing even than selling them a copy of Windows ME.
"Ninety-nine percent of the [PC's] benefits come when you've provided reasonable health and literacy to the person who is going to sit down and use it," Gates said. The full text of that speech -- one of the best I've seen him deliver -- is at www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2000.asp.
Let's hope Boston's Digital Divide conference benefits from a splash of contrarian thinking like that. Information at www.unagb.org.
Orlando-bound
Tod Loofbourrow, CEO of Authoria, isn't going to hesitate: he's celebrating a deal with PeopleSoft by going directly to Disney World.
The Waltham company makes software that provides customized answers to all sorts of human resources-related questions, like, "I'm having a baby. What's covered under my health plan?" Today, they're announcing that PeopleSoft 8, a popular application used by human resources groups at large companies, is now compatible with Authoria HR.
"That means that we've now got more than 300 PeopleSoft sales reps out there demonstrating Authoria," says Loofbourrow. "That's more sales reps than Authoria has total employees."
The PeopleSoft announcement just happens to coincide with this week's third annual Authoria User Conference at Disney World. Special events include a golf tournament, a behind-the-scenes tour of the theme parks, and a private dinner at Epcot's American Adventure pavilion followed by fireworks.
Authoria raised a hefty $75 million last summer, and Loofbourrow is a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award on June 21st.
Where Are They Now?
Some updates on companies and people who have appeared in this column previously...
Two of the three co-founders of Cambridge's 3Plex.com, a Web logistics firm, have departed. Benjamin Gordon, the company's original CEO, began to pull back from day-to-day operations once Greg Pope, a former Open Market exec, took over as CEO in December. Gordon remains a board member at 3Plex, but he's now contemplating starting another company. Misha Katz, 3Plex's original CTO, left more recently to finish his Bachelor's degree in computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He'd originally dropped out of WPI to help Steven Rothschild launch Furniture.com. Still at 3Plex is co-founder Tania Yannas, who now heads up marketing and human resources.
Paul Adams has resigned as CEO and co-chairman of Broadband2Wireless, which markets the Airora "airborne Internet access" service in Boston and a handful of other cities. The company has also slashed staff substantially in recent weeks after it was unable to secure additional funding for an ambitious national roll-out. (Founder Ric Fulop said the company would need to raise $80 million this year, on top of $30 million raised in 2000.) Suzanne Oakley, the company's one-time VP of finance, is temporarily at the reins.
Meryl Bralower, who last year helped introduce the Boston edition of Craigslist.org, is now working with the Boston Foundation to develop a local chapter of Social Venture Partners (SVP). Originally started in Seattle by Aldus Corporation founder and desktop publishing pioneer Paul Brainerd, SVP is a hands-on venture philanthropy program which now has affiliates in places like Austin, Phoenix, Calgary, San Diego, and Denver. SVP members put money into a pool and jointly decide how to best "invest" it in local non-profits, working closely with the organizations they support.
Last year, attorney Terry Philip Segal and PR guru Larry Weber were contemplating starting two different philanthropic organizations to encourage start-up companies to put pre-IPO shares of stock into a kitty that would then be distributed to various non-profits, ideally after a successful public offering. The two wound up joining forces to create the Entrepreneurs Foundation of New England, with an office in Lexington and Segal serving as executive director. Rick Burnes of Charles River Ventures chairs the board, and Weber is vice chair. Other board members include Peter Bell of Storage Networks and Howard Anderson of YankeeTek Ventures.
Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.