@LARGE
Monitor's next big thingBy Scott Kirsner
Globe Contributor, 07/31/2000It takes a lot of chutzpah to promote your Web site as ''the next big thing.'' It takes even more to actually name it ''the next big thing,'' but that's what Josh Clark has done with tnbt.com, the first product of the Monitor Co.'s stealthy MarketSpace Center.
The name, Clark says, ''is sort of tongue-in-cheek. Every day, you're hearing about the latest next big thing. One of our big missions is to filter out the noise and the hype, and just [give users] the distillation of what they need to know.''
The official launch is Aug. 7, but Clark says that visitors will be able to get a glimpse of the beta site starting today, at tnbt.com. It's a compendium of e-commerce news, profiles, and advice - the tagline is ''Your survival guide for the new economy.''
The editorial mission seems to be carefully triangulated between Business 2.0, Fast Company, and Fortune's eCompany Now. Clark knows there's no such thing as competitors in the new economy, only partners. ''We want to partner with folks like eCompany Now, license their content, and put it through our filter of what people need to know,'' he says. ''We're trying to lessen people's information overload. Our goal is to be the single resource.''
Even if the name is tongue-in-cheek, that's an ambitious goal, given that many Web users' surfing habits are already set in stone. But Clark is an ambitious guy. He has a team of nine, which he says will double by the fall, and he's already working on print and television companions to the tnbt.com site.
How does tnbt.com fit into the overall MarketSpace Center effort, which is being led by Jeffrey Rayport, an on-leave Harvard Business School professor?
Rayport says that MarketSpace will be a combination of intelligence services (read: publishing) and advisory services for established businesses and start-ups that are entering new digital markets. The former will include things like a textbook on the new economy and a learning site called MarketSpaceU
.com. In addition to filtering content from other sources, tnbt.com will serve as a display case for ''intelligence'' MarketSpace produces itself.
The advisory side of MarketSpace already serves about two dozen clients. It doesn't fix existing businesses, it builds new ones, Rayport says. My guess is that the division between MarketSpace - which gets to do the fun, blue-sky stuff - and the rest of Monitor could make for some interesting office politics.
MarketSpace already employs 100 people and will be formally unveiled in September.
Geeks can model, too
Ask newly minted Dewar's poster boy Ethan Zuckerman whether he actually drinks the stuff, and he has a savvy answer at the ready: ''I do now.''
Zuckerman, founder of the North Adams-based nonprofit Geekcorps, which sends American technology experts abroad to help wire developing countries, will start appearing in issues of Fortune, Playboy, GQ, and Business 2.0 in the next few weeks, as part of the whiskey maker's ''Profiles'' ad campaign.
The ads focus on how Geekcorps, started by technologist Zuckerman after he left Lycos, is ''using the Internet not to make money, but to improve lives.'' They picture Geekcorps' founding quartet in explorers' garb, posed in front of a vintage seaplane, gripping Powerbooks and Palm Pilots and staring idealistically into the distance.
''They shot them at MacArthur Airport on Long Island,'' Zuckerman reports. ''The photo shoot probably cost about one-third of our first year's budget.'' Thankfully, Dewar's footed the bill. Up next: Coverage on CNN and CBS's ''60 Minutes.''
Training for Geekcorps' first foray overseas starts in North Adams Sept. 12, and the first six volunteers head to Accra, Ghana, later that month. ''We look at this as an alpha test, to figure out what works well and what doesn't,'' Zuckerman says.
The volunteers will be working with a consulting company to develop free software for Ghana's rural banks. They'll also be helping Ghanaian artists figure out how to market their design services to American companies.
Zuckerman says that Geekcorps plans to build a database that will help other nonprofits tap into volunteers who want to work on digital-divide issues in the developing world.
Agent Maes: On leave
Pattie Maes, the MIT Media Lab's pioneer of intelligent agent software, is taking an indefinite leave of absence to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors and spend more time with her family.
Although the Media Lab allows professors to dedicate one day a week to for-profit projects, that's apparently not enough for Maes, who is a director and founder of Open Ratings and a director and adviser at Frictionless Commerce. Earlier, she helped students start Firefly, the recommendations service that was bought by Microsoft in 1998. All three companies sprang from student projects that Maes supervised in the Lab's Software Agents Group.
''I won't join any of my start-ups on a full-time basis,'' she writes in an e-mail, ''but hopefully will have some more time for them. In the longer term, I see myself doing a nonprofit start-up - something with the spirit, speed, and excitement of a start-up, but which focuses on some `good cause.'''
Should Maes's leave become permanent - and it sounds like it will - it would be a big loss for the Media Lab, where her Software Agents Group consistently generates heavy interest among the Lab's corporate sponsors.
Never miss
`Annie Hall' again
Alan Blount might be a wee bit obsessive. He wanted to see every Christopher Walken movie ever made, so he built TVminder.com, a site that can send out e-mail notifications whenever a movie or show that Walken is in airs. It works for any other actor, too.
''I love the notion of an `always on' service that's looking out for my interests, letting me know when important things are going to happen,'' Blount writes in an e-mail. ''It appeals to my basic sense of laziness.''
Blount, a Media Lab alum currently working at MetraTech, a Waltham billing software company, created TVminder in his free time with a group of friends, using only open source software. He says they have no plans to commercialize TVminder, but that the group has received unsolicited offers to invest in the site.
Must be a lot of other Christopher Walken fans out there.
A brokerage
bets on bricks
Chicago's Web Street Securities, an online financial services company, will open a bricks-and-mortar office at 60 State St. in Boston next month. It's a space that, until recently, was occupied by Dreyfus, the mutual fund company.
E-brokerages open these real-world offices for a few key reasons: to encourage prospective customers who may be wary about trading stocks online to open an account in person; to stimulate existing customers to add more money to their accounts; and to educate users about how the Web Street site works and about investing in general.
Boston will be Web Street's second bricks-and-mortar Financial Service Center. The company already has an office in Beverly Hills, and has plans to open offices in San Francisco and Denver this fall.
Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.