@LARGE
Welcome to the jungle

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Staff, 9/18/2000

Mention the word Vindigo to Giang Lam and you get the same kind of reaction you would if you shouted ''Yanks Rule'' in the face of a diehard Sox fan. In fact, the nascent rivalry between Lam's Boston company, JungleSoft, and New York-based Vindigo could soon become intense enough to be regarded as the Internet's version of Yanks vs. Sox.

Unfortunately, Lam finds himself playing the role of underdog. Vindigo launched its city guide for hand-held computers in March and announced $9 million worth of financing in April. JungleSoft released its JunglePort software for hand-helds just last Friday, and the company has raised only a bit more than $1 million.

Out of the gate, JunglePort covers more ground than Vindigo does: 39 cities, compared to Vindigo's 11. JunglePort is more configurable - you don't have to download listings for French restaurants if you never eat French food - and it includes graphical street maps and yellow pages info, which Vindigo doesn't have. The maps are especially cool. You can pan around and zoom in and even insert virtual pushpins to mark locations you want to remember. You can also see maps for locations in your personal address book.

Still, I missed the movie times and capsule reviews that Vindigo offers. Vindigo's restaurant write-ups, provided by Zagat's, are also of better quality. My bet: JungleSoft will be snapped up by a bigger player (maybe CitySearch?) looking to build a killer city guide for hand-helds - with great maps. Then, it would be a more formidable competitor.

All you, all the time

Next month, music lovers will get their first chance to listen to MediaUnbound.com's music personalization service. Unfortunately, the company's debut will be in Los Angelese, at the Interactive Music Expo. But CEO Michael Papish says the service will be available on MediaUnbound's site later this year.

MediaUnbound builds a profile of your musical tastes by asking you about favorite artists, genres, and types of sound - such as acoustic guitar versus grungy guitar. It will even play brief song clips to see if they're to your liking.

Papish predicts the Cambridge company's technology will be an important part of a new generation of music subscription services that will let you listen to an unlimited amount of digital music from a particular label or group of labels. The problem MediaUnbound solves? How to broaden your tastes beyond the artists you already know, to keep you tuned in to the subscription service over the long haul.

As an undergrad at Harvard, Papish helped WHRB-FM, the student station, start Webcasting. Papish left Harvard in January, along with his roommate Gabe Dorfman and friend Clifford Chen, to start MediaUnbound. Since then, theyb have brought on 20 employees and raised about $500,000.

They're part of the Aktivate Ventures portfolio, and Aktivate's chief operating officer, James Herriman, has moved over to MediaUnbound.

A swan song

From the Ether

After eight years and roughly 400 columns, Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe will stop writing his weekly ''From the Ether'' column for InfoWorld after next week's installment.

Metcalfe, who splits his time between Boston and midcoast Maine, says he's also cutting back on his executive duties at International Data Group, InfoWorld's publisher, to spend more time with his family and to dabble in venture capital.

Keep on trucking

Ben Gordon's 3PLex.com, a hot start-up out of Harvard Business School, launches its first product this week. Truckload 1.0 helps third-party logistics providers manage their operations.

''It's a business that's rife with manual processes - people using whiteboards, phones, and faxes to track shipments,'' says Gordon, the latest in a long line of transportation entrepreneurs in his family. Gordon's grandfather started AMI Leasing of Worcester, which grew into the largest truck leasing and logistics company in New England before being sold to Ford.

Gordon says 3PLex's first customer is Romar Transportation Industries, but that his sales team is working to turn 30 letters of intent into contracts.

The company has 66 employees, and Gordon is in the process of raising $8 million from strategic partners.

Thinning out attachments

Jordan Pollack, formerly chief scientist at Abuzz, reports that he's working on a new company, called Thinmail.com.

Thinmail's service improves the delivery of e-mail with attachments to devices like cell phones, Blackberries, and Palm Pilots that don't handle attachments well. Thinmail replaces attached files with Web links, so that recipients can easily go to the Web to read the documents later. Pollack is fresh from some front page press in The New York Times for creating a robot that designs other robots at Brandeis University, where Pollack is a professor of computer science.

Bootcamp is back

Garage.com's ''Bootcamp for Start-Ups'' event returns to Boston Wednesday and Thursday. It's an immersion course in becoming an Internet entrepreneur, with one 60-minute session dedicated to explaining ''capital structure, valuation, dilution, options, classes of stock, bridge loans, and due diligence'' and another hour focused on hiring employees.

Admission costs $1,100.

The speakers include a number of Boston-area company-builders and investors, such as Michael Frank of Advanced Technology Ventures, Howard Anderson of YankeeTek Ventures, Steve Kane of Gamesville.com, and Patricia Pomerleau of CEOExpress.

A Harvard Business School professor, Clay Christensen, is delivering the keynote speech, and Dan Roach, managing director of Garage.com's Waltham office, will moderate a session titled ''Touched by an Angel.''

Though Garage.com is styled as an online matchmaking service that helps to connect start-ups with investors, the firm is becoming better known for its conference business, which runs boot camps in Silicon Valley, New York, Austin, Seattle, and Europe.

Roach says Garage typically takes 5 or 6 percent of equity in a company when it helps to arrange funding, and that the Boston office has sealed deals for five Net start-ups since it opened in summer 1999. The company, based in Palo Alto, filed for an IPO in February but has yet to go out. Given Nasdaq's current Net dyspepsia, I'm not holding my breath.

Movin' right along

The Dot.Commonwealth, a coalition of coalitions that promote high-tech in Massachusetts, hits the road again this week. On Friday, they'll be in North Adams and Pittfield for the ''Dot.Commonwealth Road Show: Take Stock in Massachusetts.''

There will be presentations from Village Ventures, StreetMail, geekcorps, Mindbranch, and Dick Sabot's eZiba, all designed to foster high-tech economic development out west. (All those companies have connections to Bo Peabody's Tripod, which was located in Williamstown before moving to Waltham after it was bought by Lycos.)

Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift will speak, and the high-end production house Kleiser-Walczak, which created effects for this summer's ''X-Men'' movie, will put on a sound and light show. The event is at Mass MoCA in North Adams, followed by a lunch in Pittsfield at which George Gilder, the feisty techno-futurist, will speak. The road show is free; lunch will cost you $20.

Memo to the Dot.Commonwealth: Update your Web site! It contained no mention, as of late last week, about this Friday's road show. ''State of things to come,'' my foot.

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