@LARGE

The sounds of silence

By Scott Kirsner

An Internet company founder who wishes to remain anonymous writes, "I think the real story [for you] is how absolutely, positively, stunningly quiet it is out here.

"In the seven years we've been in the `Web' biz, I've never experienced such silence. The number of e-mails I get every week has plummeted like CMGI's stock. I get 95 percent less e-mail and voicemail than I did last year. And everyone I talk to says the same thing...

"It's like God (Greenspan, whomever) pushed the `Pause' button. It's strange."

That kind of quietude is normal for August. But it's not normal for May, June, and July. Technology companies can't be sure whether the vacuum they're trapped in is the result of an especially slow summer, frozen IT spending, a stalled economy, or because their own business is failing. And the not-knowing is unnerving.

No one wants to talk explicitly about how the quietude is affecting them. They will talk, though, about how it's affecting others. "The venture community has been on vacation this summer," says eRoom CEO Jeffrey Beir. "And on the investment banker side, they don't have much to do - no IPOs, not a lot of mergers and acquisitions."

Last November, eRoom, which makes software to enable online collaboration, filed for an initial offering of its stock. Now, it must seem as if that filing is sitting in the same dusty warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"Everyone has lots of deals in the pipeline, and they're waiting to see what happens in the third and fourth quarters," says Dan Housman, a founder of ChannelWave, a Cambridge software company. "There's a lot of uncertainty about when the deals will start closing, when the machine will get going again."

Companies are anxious to make some noise, if only to prove that they're still alive. The PR people who have my number have never been so desperate to set up conference calls and meetings with their clients.

The only genuine buzz I've been hearing lately surrounds a Cambridge start-up called Ember Corporation, founded by Media Lab researcher Rob Poor. Poor's work at the Lab, which Ember will commercialize, focused on creating self-organizing, decentralized networks of devices using low-power radio links. The network might connect all the light fixtures in a store, or all of the air-conditioning units in an office complex, for monitoring and control purposes and to conserve electricity.

Poor has worked for Jean Louis-Gasse'e at Be Inc., Steve Jobs at NeXT, and George Lucas at Lucasfilm. Polaris Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson's New England Fund should have a financing announcement soon.

Two other companies focusing on wireless, Newbury Networks and BlueSocket, are also attracting some attention as they build their management teams and staffs at a time when the world seems to be at a standstill. Newbury Networks is an Idealab start-up that will focus on development tools for companies that want to create mobile applications capable of understanding who their users are and where they're located. That company recently lured Yonald Chery and Matthew Gray away from Virtual Ink. Chery will be Newbury's chief technology officer and Gray will be the company's chief software architect.

"This was an interesting new thing to try," says Chery, explaining why he left Virtual Ink, which makes smart whiteboards that can capture and broadcast what is being written on them. "With Newbury, we think companies will be able to improve efficiency in all kinds of ways by delivering content from enterprise applications based on who the person is, where they are, and what they want."

At BlueSocket, Eric Janszen has stepped in as CEO, leaving a position as managing director at Osborn Capital, one of the venture firms that initially backed BlueSocket. BlueSocket makes a secure wireless bridge for mobile users in corporate environments.

Osborn Capital founder Jeff Osborn has also decided to peel off to work with a portfolio company, which means that the firm won't be doing any more venture investing any time soon. "In this environment, it's difficult to get liquidity out of an investment at the end of the pipe," Janszen says. "There are lots of things to put money into, and not a lot of ways to get it out." Janszen says the firm may "occasionally" make a new investment, though.

BlueSocket itself has grown from four employees in January to 45 today.

At Needham's TripAdvisor, chief executive Steve Kaufer argues that "amidst all the woes of the dot-coms, online travel is a bright spot. The leaders [Expedia and Travelocity] are profitable, and consumers will spend $20 billion plus on online travel in 2002."

TripAdvisor provides rigorously-organized information about lodging and activities at thousands of destinations. This week, the company will announce a partnership with Lycos that will make TripAdvisor's content available through Lycos's travel section.

And eRoom announces this week that 1,000 employees of BIC Corp. are using its collaborative technology.

But is anyone out there listening?

We can thank Janszen for creating an excellent diversion to carry us through the summer of quietude. In 1998, he launched the parody site iTulip.com. In addition to developing a revolutionary spinning-head technology (displayed on the site), iTulip.com sold bogus iTulip stock certificates and T-shirts that read, "I lost $100,000 on Internet stocks and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt."

iTulip.com was also one of the first sites to warn, in 1998, that Internet stocks represented a market bubble and, in 1999, that the average Internet stock would lose 87 percent of its value.

These days, iTulip.com offers this bit of insight: "When will the market finally bottom? A bear market hits bottom after everyone gives up looking for the bottom."

Digging deeper

Thanks to reader Kevin Kirwin for writing in after last week's column about technology and the Big Dig to ask whether the Turnpike Authority has any plans to Webcast video from its 400 traffic cameras. "I was hoping to see feeds ... to judge traffic flows," Kirwin wrote.

There actually is a plan to stream live video from the new central artery and tunnels onto the Web. There just isn't the money to fund it.

"It's peanuts compared to the whole project, and it's peanuts compared to the consumer benefit," Sergiu Luchian of the Turnpike Authority told me. "[But] we operate in a healthy, fiscally-conscious environment, where need-to-have takes precedence over nice-to-have." Luchian estimates that it would cost $150,000 for the hardware to handle the Webcasts and about $40,000 a year for the Internet connectivity.

Live video could help drivers decide whether to take the Tobin Bridge versus the Ted Williams Tunnel or the Sumner Tunnel on a particular day.

"If I find the money to do it, the decision will be made tomorrow. Nobody is against it," Luchian says, before quipping: "If the Globe decides to do Globe Santa for this, we'd gladly take the money."

Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.